"The episodes will launch at the same time around the world, so that all fans can experience them simultaneously.”

Yeah right - I wonder how many UK/Europeans are going to be so keen to see this that they stay up/get up at 2/3am?

Really the only way is to have episode threads, and let people weigh in as they can. Discussion leaders will not work, as this is new content being released once a week.

Yes, I think the main benefit is to have one offical discussion thread for each episode, as otherwie users and admins will have to work with an unnavigatable mess of overlapping episode discussions. This is not to say that there shouldn't be a lot of other discussions - of course there should. It is just that it will be easier for everyone if there is an obvious focus.

It follows (as Stranger Wings has just said) that the priority is to get the official thread going as soon as possible after the episode airs, and before multiple threads start up anyway.


And I agree that probably means a standard welcome text* each time, rather than the person starting the thread having time for any analysis. (They can of course join in the discussion again later, having had time to think).

The question would then be: how to make those posts appear? Will there be a rota of registered users so that someone is responsible for posting each one? In that case, who is going to volunteer? If the task has become entirely administrative, does this board want to ask the Admins to do it? (This is of course yet another task that our volunteer admins would have to do for us all, and so not something to ask lightly. But I do think it might ultimately be a time-saver for them because if it works it would save the task of monitoring many overlapping discussions, & locking duplicates).



Visibility (on what may be a very busy board when the show starts): Elsewere in this thread Arannir has said: "Pinned threads for each episode would be a good thing in any case. That way you can go back and discuss individual episodes weeks after they were released." Visibility is important: how to do it?

I think it would be a good idea to pin "this week's episode" and maybe a few more. I don't think it would work to pin each one until the whole series is up there - that would soon take up so much space it would drive all other discussions off the 'front page'. In any case it could be valuable to find these discussions later; maybe much later. (For example, people might want to review good discussions of Series 1 when they are watching Series 2). And so pinning cannot be the permanent solution.

Reading Room experience may help again here. We normally ask people to use a standard formatting for the title of any post that is part of a Readthrough or other project. (For example "*** The Hobbit Readthrough [chapter number, title]...." That way the collection can always be found by searching on post title.

The other way is to do what the TORn Amateur Symposium did. This was an online symposium in which Reading Room folks wrote symposium papers & then we discussed them online. The group of users running it set up a user account (TORn Amateur Symposium) for the sole purpose of posting people's seminar papers, making announcements about the online symposiums etc. The people sharing this account then reverted to their own usual user accounts when they wanted to join in with discussion of the papers. That worked well for visibility while each symposium ws going on, and to this day you can find all the seminar papers and discussion by searching for posts by the User TORn Amateur Symposium. I think that approach would work best here, if the starter post is a standard text, rather than a personalised introduction ot the episode by a certain user.



That may be all I can do to help? I feel very much the visitor here (as I have said, I'm not sure whether I will watch the show, but I am absolutely sure I don't want to administer official discussions of a show that I might not watch! ). My aim is just to suggest ideas that come from past Reading Room projects, to see if they can be adapted for use here. It is of course right that enthusiasts for the show decides what this board wants as a community, and leads on getting it done.

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* The standard text might be something like this (for example!)
Welcome to the official discussion thread for [Episode details: number, title, release date].
This discussion is for people who have seen all of this episode, and now want to discuss it. Nothing that happened in this episode or in previous ones is considered 'a spolier'.
It is the policy of all our boards to welcome all points of view. In practice this means you are welcome to disagree with other posters as much as you like. But you must do it courteously and respectfully, tollerate other points of view, and know when to 'agree to disagree'. Please see our Terms of Service for more detail of behaviours and content that aren't allowed.

So, over to you! What do you want to say (or to ask) about the episode?

...regarding episode threads for Star Wars TV shows, the best start is to post the thread the day before the episode airs. That way people can start speculating and getting excited about what's to come (and if there are some online previews, they can discuss those), and then the episode drops, and the thread is already ready and waiting. In between episodes, this is also helpful, as in a new episode thread, people can speculate about it before it airs by continuing to discuss elements of the previous thread.

Someone here suggested posting the opening thread the day before the episode (this also helps the AU/NZ timezone participants).

In Reply To

Excellent point! If the starter post isn't up the day before (US time) then we're likely to get someone from an earlier time zone posting anyway.