Events

Starfall Faire is kicking off starting today!

Read more about everything happening in our group journal here!

You may have been wondering why things have been a bit slower on the moderation front this past month. As usual, we were working on event things in the background.

This year, we're trying something different for Starfall Faire. Rather than our usual 20-40ish adult elnin designs, we wanted to bring back more artists, so we leaned towards doing a kittom-based Starfall Faire this year. All designs will be kittoms and there are over 85 kittoms that will be finding homes this August/September across several sales as well as a free raffle!

A monthly prompt raffle comes with an oddly familiar prompt...

Check out this month's prompt! If you've been around the group for a while, some may recall storms brewing a few years back. This year though, things are a bit different! We've got a raffle that ties into the related happenings...so come September, just a few pomu might be experiencing some side effects of the storms!

Starfall Faire Card Frames are back in the Card Frame Shop!

So pick them up while you can! They only come around once a year. ^^b

Wrapping up...

We've been very excited preparing this event for everyone, but it's definitely slowed us down on other fronts that we didn't want to completely close, like our regular approvals and resonance quests. Which leads us to our next topic, this month and next month!

August and September Pacing

Throughout August, we'll be having a kittom flaffle every Saturday from August 6th to August 27th, followed by a free raffle on September 3rd! It's been a very busy July preparing and we expect August to still be a bit slow in areas. We'll work on catching up with approvals and questing, but given we just approved almost 90 kittoms in a month and were still carrying through with regular duties, we'll be taking a slower-paced approach to August and September.

We typically plan events/activities/sales several months in advance, so even when things are quiet on the surface, the moderator team is generally hustling. There's also been a few personal things that have cropped up here and there that haven't helped. To try to give the team a bit of a break, we're expecting the next two months to be a little slower.

The first and last weeks of September (9/5/22-9/11/22 and 9/26/22-10/2/22) will be considered weeks "off" for staff.

We're putting it out there publicly now because everyone could use a well-defined break. Those dates are still roughly a month away and there's quite a bit to be done in between! Some mods will occasionally work during designated break periods, but we do not ask them to during these times. Once the raffle is done in September, please be patient during the weeks we've marked as staff having off and not to ask for status updates on things. Some of us are workaholics and find it difficult not to want to respond. ^^;; We really want to continue to help the community, but it takes a lot of energy too!

Written Prompts and Questing Acts

Moving forward, we'll be implementing a cap of 2000 words max per prompt/questing act unless specified otherwise. This is due to staffing constraints and a goal to respect everyone's time. This will also keep approval queues moving smoothly.

Community members are still welcome to write longer stories on their own time and share them in non-official contexts, but even with the moderator additions to prompts and questing, we're still working with limited free time to volunteer. We encourage sticking close to around the required minimum word counts or a bit over if you're inspired. The group originally didn't allow any written prompts. This was something moderators advocated for given we had individuals on staff that were willing to read prompts and enjoy writing! That said, written prompts still take significantly longer to approve compared to their visual counterparts. We do enjoy learning more about everyone's characters. It can be quite fun, but there are limits to our time and energy, which is why we're implementing a word count limit now.