We have ended our beta period and officially launched the site. We are now going to focus more of our efforts on spreading the word about our writing group. We are going to advertise at trade shows and in magazines. Where do you as a writer hang out? Do you have any thoughts on where/ways we could spread the word about our services? We are currently adding hundreds of writers each month, we would like to be adding thousands.
steve
We are pleased to announce the beta version of private writing groups. You can now create or join writing groups to share your work with a subset of the Review Fuse Community that is focused on a specific topic. You can also move your face-to-face writing groups online for those weeks you just can’t find the time to get together. You can create groups that are publicly accessible or private groups that require an invitation and a password to join. All groups also have the option for the moderator to approve all members who wish to join. You will be able to make sure the group remains true to what you need it to be.
We appreciate all the suggestions we received on how to implement the writing groups and welcome any additional feedback while using this new feature. Our goal for these writing groups is to help you:
Join Review Fuse to take advantage of our new writing groups and to help us improve services available to writers.
I am excited to announce a feature that a number of you have asked for. A summarized printable view of the reviews you have received, click on the image to see an example. We appreciate all of your suggestions for this feature that we did not think of on our own. Without your input we might not have created this feature which has proved so useful to Review Fuse authors. If you have not yet, signup to receive peer critiques like this one.
Private writing groups is getting really close to being released as well. There are a few tricky things to work out with it, but we are well on our way and excited for this too. I will let everyone know when it is released. Thank you all again for the suggestions on what we can improve. Please continue to let us know what you need, we will definitely do our best to get it for you.
Steve
Recently we have had questions and comments about our clean content policy that I would like to address. Please note that this policy is only enforced in the general Review Fuse community. Private groups are allowed to form and enforce their own content polices. Review Fuse does prohibit pornographic and illegal material in public and private groups.
When we started working on Review Fuse we had to make a decision of what material we wanted to allow to appear on our website. Some choices were cut and dry, such as the following statement from our terms and conditions that prohibits anything that is “unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, pornographic, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, or harms minors in any way; that harasses, degrades, intimidates or is hateful toward an individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or disability.”
Other decisions, such as what is considered inappropriate language, were much more difficult to decide on. The overall deciding factor was that we wanted people age 13 and up to be comfortable using our site. In accordance, each member is given the right to filter out profanity when they are reading the story. This will replace profane words with replacement strings such as “*****”. While we do not wish to censor the work of our members, we do however, have to make sure we censor what appears on Review Fuse so our members will feel comfortable using the site.
Also, with that in mind, we adopted a clean content policy that we compare to PG-13 rating for movies. This is an overall guiding principle in that we do not provide a list of aspects that may or may not appear in the submitted work. The decision of whether or not a community flagged work is appropriate is left to the sole discretion of Review Fuse and it’s employees.
Do you have any questions about our clean content policy? What are your thoughts on letting the member choose to review/read an edited version of your work?
steve
Review Fuse is building a community active writers who have the ability and desire to teach each other how to improve their writing. For centuries writers have found the best way to improve their writing is by participating in peer reviewed writing groups, like Review Fuse.
Review Fuse is a perfect fit for active writers because you can submit an unlimited number of stories for review an unlimited number of times. Everything you submit for review is guaranteed to get three peer reviews, generally within a week. You will improve your writing the most by submitting your stories for review then incorporating the feedback several times for each story.
For each peer review you receive, you are required to perform a peer review of another authors work. Teaching others how to improve their works by providing thorough peer reviews, will enable you to improve your work just as much as getting it reviewed. This may seem a bit strange at first, but most of our members find just as many ways to improve their stories by copiously providing peer reviews as they do by getting reviewed. This should not be surprising. A good teacher often learns more by planning and presenting a lesson than the students learn from the lesson. As you carefully review other members’ work, you will discover many ways to improve your own stories because it is easier to see your own writing weaknesses in others works than it is to see them in your creations.
If you are an active writer, with the ability and desire to teach others how to improve their writing please join our community by signing up, uploading your work and performing your assigned reviews. Please feel free to post on questions or suggestions about Review Fuse on this blog.
Jacob
Thank you for participating in the beta release of ReviewFuse. We are very excited to bring you the best writer-to-writer critique site that exists; however we know we can’t do that without your help and feedback. The value of an honest and constructive review is immeasurable in helping a writer turn a lack-luster unimpressive story into a compelling drama. The value of your support and feedback is just as important to us in creating a community that can have such a profound impact on the work of it’s members.
We welcome your feedback on what we have so far, but this is by no means the end of the features we will be releasing. This blog is our means of informing you of new features that will soon be released, as well as for you to inform us how the community can help with your goals in writing. We encourage you to submit your remarks/comments on any post you see here. We will read and use these comments to guide the direction of this community.
Enjoy what we have so far, but be prepared for more.
ReviewFuse Team
