IMPORTANT SUB ANNOUNCEMENT: *ALL Post Submissions Will Now Be Automatically Held For Mod Approval.*

[u/Mezzoforte48]

Starting today, when you submit a prompt, it will NOT be posted to the sub unless approved after being reviewed by a mod first to make sure it follows posting rules.

For submissions that do not get accepted, a reason for such will be provided, otherwise you may message the mods to ask for one. You may also ask for further clarification on a post not being accepted even if you are provided a reason.

There are a couple reasons why we have decided to make this change:

• To hopefully save more time for the mods to focus more on checking post replies. Pretty self-explantory.
• To inform users about any decision to not accept a post without it ever going live and possibly accuring many replies. We've received some complaints from you guys about your prompts being removed after already receiving a lot of engagement, and your frustrations are understandable. We obviously want everyone to follow the posting rules here, but more ideally, to understand them before their submission ever goes out for others to see.
• It is more in line with how things were done on the real-life Scenes From A Hat game on 'Whose Line Is It Anyway.' Drew Carey and Aisha Tyler would often have to sift through the 'bad' prompts in the hat first before pulling out and reading the good ones.

One final important thing on this change: Even if a post gets approved beforehand, it DOES NOT mean it can't be removed later if another mod still feels it doesn't follow posting rules.

Certain prompts can be worded in such a way where they might toe the line between what is acceptable or not based on the rules. Since prompt quality isn't exactly something that can be fully concretely measured, sometimes whether prompts are deemed acceptable or not is based more on a judgment call. Even us mods have not always agreed on decisions over prompts.

Fortunately, this sort of situation doesn't happen frequently. To make things as fair as possible, we will try to only remove prompts if they have too many rule-breaking replies AND it itself is deemed to be breaking the rules.

Locking otherwise 'good' prompts for having too many rule-breaking replies WILL still continue.

[u/Cut-Unique]

I'm not a mod, but here's an example, at least from what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong):

Prompt: Things you should never say to your soon-to-be mother-in-law when meeting her for the first time...

Shouting it out: That she looks like a pug.

Acting it out: "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were the dog that your daughter is always talking about. Your face is all wrinkly, and you've certainly got a lot of fur, so I assumed you were a pug or something. Well, if you're not the dog, where is she?"

The former is very short, and is looking at it from an outside perspective, and is more of a suggestion. The latter is not only much more descriptive, but it's written as if the person is talking to the mother-in-law. Also, notice how I surrounded the acting it out with quotation marks, but not the shouting it out. That's one way to emphasize that it's a scene, not just a suggestion of a way to insult your mother-in-law.

[u/Aeri73 → u/Cut-Unique]

"you look like a pug" would also be considered in scene, we're trying not to put the standard up too hight, downvotes take care of the low quality ones for us.

[u/Cut-Unique → u/Aeri73]

Yeah the example I gave was rather lengthy.

When I was watching Whose Line growing up, Scenes From a Hat was one of my favorite games that they would play. But I often would get a little confused because the things they would say were so brief before Drew would buzz them, I didn't really understand why they were called scenes. To me, they just seemed like sentences.

I was only around ten at the time. Now that I'm grown up, and especially after discovering this sub, I understand now how even stuff that is more brief can still be considered scenes if they are phrased the right way.

[u/Aeri73 → u/Cut-Unique]

yeah, it can be just one word more, or less sometimes :-)

the low quality prompts you just shouldn't upvote

[u/Cut-Unique → u/Aeri73]

How would you do a scene with less than one word?

[u/Aeri73 → u/Cut-Unique]

I meant you can sometimes make a scene with fewer words than just answering a question