BOOK CLUB: Final FINAL version of our guidelines.

[crispini]

MISSION: The DU nonfiction book club will discuss political and/or various nonfiction books. The aims of the group are to encourage reading of a variety of interesting books and to faciliiate friendly discussion.

GUIDELINES: We will discuss 1 book per month, more or less, with adjustments to the schedule for long or short books as requested by the membership.

We will maintain a running list of books which are nominated (and seconded) for consideration, and we will choose these books on a rolling basis. For example in December we will start the voting for the Febuary book. In January we will start the voting for the March book. And so on.

THREAD MANAGEMENT:
We will name our threads in this way.

BOOK CLUB: (month name) (abbreviated book name) (number)

So the first one would possibly be:

BOOK CLUB: Dec. "What's the Matter with Kansas" 1

The number would be, in case the thread gets really long and unmanageable, say a few hundred posts, for the sake of people on dial-up, that we would start a new thread and continue the discussion in that. So the next thread would be

BOOK CLUB: Dec. "What's the Matter with Kansas" 2

When we do this we should have the admins lock the old thread for neatness purposes.

SPOILER WARNINGS
Everyone, please use some discretion with posting things which come towards the end of the book, and knowing them that might spoil the enjoyment of the book for those who are just getting started. Especially towards the beginning of the month.

Not as big of an issue with most non fiction, but there ARE some types of nonfiction books that are just as suspenseful as fiction books -- I'm thinking of "The Informant," the one about the ADM bust -- so we may want go go ahead and put this guideline out there now.

So, iif you want to post something that seems spoiler-y, that you post it in white font. How you do this is, you replace the parentheses in the example with square brackets:

(font color="white")Spoiler text goes here(/font)

Then those who would like to read the white font can just highlight it with their mouse.

-----------------------
And that's all of our guidelines so far! If you have administrative suggetions, requests, other matters, please post in this thread!

[The Straight Story]

1. Sounds good to me!

Is there a way to alert someone to a post other than mail? Some boards I am on have a way to flag others to a thread. I will try to look for it but I am in and out a lot. While I have been reading here for a couple of years only been posting since this year and have not figured out all the nuances that may exist (like flagging).

Thanks and the guidelines are excellent.

[NMDemDist2]

2. there is a "mark" that will mark the whole group and turn the icon grey

the icons turn yellow when there is a new post

the "mark thread" looks like this

just make sure you have read all the posts in the group before you mark it as it marks the entire group of threads....

[crispini]

3. Wow, that's what that's for, eh?

I never knew. How useful! :D

[PallasAthena]

4. Great!

I started reading this a couple of days ago and am enjoying it quite a bit. I had been hesitant, as One Market Under G-d was beyond my understanding (probably because I know NOTHING about stock), but this is written in much more conversational style.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. oops

[Coexist]

6. I normally just lurk here - but I cannot live without being in

the middle of a good book - can anyone join in the bookclub?

[Fleurs du Mal]

7. Everyone is a member of the club by default

It's just a matter of whether they read and discuss the books or not ;) No security clearance required.

[crispini]

8. More Administrative Suggestions

I'm writing this down to put how (I think) it might work better.

First day of month:
- Start thread for new book.
- Start voting for book two months out.
- Start nominations for book three months out.

One week into the new month.
- Close voting for book for two months out. (Original poster asks for thread to be locked.)

End of month.
- Close nomination for book for three months out. (Original poster asks for thread to be locked.)

We'd have a lot of churn in the nominations, but I think it would work better than what we have now, which is complete and total stagnation -- too many books in the queue, I think it's choking off interest.

Also that we limit the number of nominations to ONE each. And encourage people to second others' books, because that will help determine what makes up the final 10.

Thoughts?

[CrispyQ]

9. My suggestion:

Instead of continually adding onto the nomination list, create a new nom list for each month. I agree about too many books in the queue.

[crispini]

10. I agree.

:kick:

Anyone else wanna comment? Yea, nay, etcetera?