We Are Running Out of Integers And That’s Okay
This is an essay by 
poltatherian aiming to express my and many others' grievances regarding recent policy discussions sparked by the "Slot Crisis". As well as giving a counterproposal that will hopefully improve the site.
What am I talking about?
On May 12th 2026, 19:43, user 
wackdog posted this thread to the staff policy discussion forum. While similar discussions had begun to spark at the time. Said post was the culmination of various author sentiment and discussion surrounding the rapidly filling-up mainlist of SCP's. At the time of writing, there are around 400 slots left. Safe to say that this would lead to panic among the site, as the 10k contest wasn't scheduled for another year and nobody really knew what to do.
Wackdog's post proposes a solution to this issue, which some call the "Kalinin Threshold". This threshold would serve as a secondary curation standard for SCP's, possibly leading to the deletion of even positively rated articles not up to a specific standard.
All options below will utilise full automation by the tech team to pick out articles that fall under the threshold automatically.
Each option has two sub-options:
- Unlisting Instead: Unlist the articles instead of deleting them.
- Unlist then Delete: Unlisting the article for an extra brief period (perhaps one month) after the initial one-year period for any potential rewrites, and then deleting them after a short period.
Option A: Under +20 After One Year
Mainlist articles would be expected to reach +20 within one year of posting.
After discussing with community members, I believe this is a realistic and achievable benchmark for new articles and new authors alike.
Articles that fall below +20 after one year would still prompt the deletions timer.
With information from data analysis, this method would free up 333 slots immediately.1
Option A2: Option A with unlisting instead of deletion.
Option A3: Option A but with a short unlisting period prior to deletion.
Option B: Under +10 After One Year
This option would function the same way as Option A, but with a more lenient threshold.
Mainlist articles would be expected to reach at least +10 within one year of posting.
Articles that fall below +10 after the one year would still prompt the deletions timer.
With information from data analysis, this method would free up 71 slots immediately.
Option B2: Option B with unlisting instead of deletion.
Option B3: Option B but with a short unlisting period prior to deletion.
Benefits/Concerns
Implementing one of these options would immediately free up a large number of mainlist slots, reducing the pressure on currently planned events. It would also provide a more sustainable long-term framework for curating the mainlist, preserving slots for higher-quality content, and reducing pressure on both the contest team and participating authors.
-Wackdog
This proposal was and still is rather controversial to say the least, most of the discussion would be split between people supporting A1 or opposing the proposal in its entirety. As you might've guessed, I am of the latter camp. I shall now explain why.
Why is this proposal bad?
To be blunt, I do not support implementing any sort of additional threshold or cap for deletions. Frankly, I feel that deleting positively-rated articles at all goes against a lot of this site's values. But there’s a lot more wrong with this proposal than an anti-art sentiment. So I'll list and explain all of my issues.
Kicking the can down the road.
Regardless of being a bad proposal in itself, the Kalinin Threshold doesn't really fix anything. It would be a permanent stain on the site while also being a temporary solution, kicking the proverbial can down the road for a couple months. Also, this proposal assumes that the time gained by its application will be enough to stall until 10kcon. And even if it is, it does not address the possibility of slots just filling up again at a later point. What happens in that scenario? Do we just increase the threshold more every time this happens? I shouldn't need to tell you why this isn't sustainable.
The value of ratings.
An article's rating is most of the time, not an accurate measure of its quality. I've heard my fair share of stories about ratings changing at the drop of a hat. Either due to reviewers' spotlights, controversy, off-site attention whatever. Hell, one of my own articles used to be at -8 for a good while before slowly creeping up to +11.
Many of the factors that influence an article's rating, as accurately said by user 
Tsercele are:
- Quality of writing.
- Age/date of its posting.
- Popularity of its author.
- Its existence in an event/contest.
- On & off-site promotional activity.
- Random chance.
Due to the sheer variance of what is stated above, the ecosystem of the site that favors established authors, and the general discoverability issues of the site, an article's rating simply cannot be properly used in this kind of secondary curation system.
Growing the community
It's rather obvious how bad this proposal would be for the overall community. New authors are more than anxious enough while posting, and I have talked with one too many authors who've claimed that they will leave the site if this Threshold is actually implemented. It's also no secret how demoralizing it is to see an article you've given your all on deleted not because it reached -10, but because of an arbitrary new standard that just got introduced. And while there's something to be said about rethinking the way people talk and feel about deletions on this site, that's not too relevant to such an absurd proposal as this.
The Kalinin Threshold simply does not incentivize prospective authors to join or new authors to get better at their craft.
I would also like to quote user 
S D Locke here, who put it in a way I couldn't myself.
Even if +10 or +20 after a year was one hundred percent beautiful and perfect and absolutely wiped away nothing but uninteresting and poorly-written work, and it would objectively one hundred percent undeniably improve the quality of the entire site, and everyone comes by to gawk at our ruthless cutthroat approach to maintaining rigid standards, it would still have a nagging, festering issue:
It is straight up not healthy for the community. Undeniably so.
Read through the responses here. The visceral hurt and disgust. The stress and worry. Look past the arguments and just think about how this feels.
I am all for caring about quality on this site. It’s something I hold myself to in both my own contributions and in putting others to the grindstone. But I also care about the people here, and this would inarguably piss a bunch of people off for no good reason.
We’re doing ourselves a disservice in taking the coward's way out, instead of the hard work needed to course-correct.
It’d be a victory, but an empty, unearned one.
Non-existent problem and an unnecessary solution.
The entirety of this proposal hinges on the intrinsic value of kcon's over a substantial amount of articles on the site, and that no compromise can be made between the two. This is not a crisis of article quality or lack of slots. It is a crisis of resource management. I will get more into this when I present my solutions, but this proposal not only doesn't solve the problem it wants to, it doesn't even solve a real problem at all. In essence, it is completely unnecessary in every single way.
Counter arguments
This section will attempt to dissect various sentiments from people who support the Kalinin Threshold's implementation collected from the forum.
Argument 1: "The wiki doesn't need to keep everything for archiving, let alone middling articles."
I agree with this, at some level anyway. In this case, I'm not claiming that every sub +7 article is some hidden masterpiece, however I have also already discussed how unreliable ratings are in this situation.
At its crux, this argument fails to consider a good 99% of series-1 & 2 SCP's. Which I think we can all agree don't deserve every single upvote they get. The amount of nostalgic necroposting in 173 alone is probably longer than this essay.
Argument 2: "This proposal increases quality standards on the site."
This is an odd one. On the one hand, quality standards are good. On the other hand, this whole debacle has never been about article quality. People should be encouraged to delete their own works that they think they can revisit, however that can only happen if the author improves. Which is not easy or fast to do, especially considering the discoverability issue that on-site resources have. If we want better articles, a purge isn't the way to go about it. This also leads back into ratings not being viable measures of quality.
Argument 3: "The alternative solutions are worse."
Other than what I will be proposing soon, there are a couple of other alternatives to the Kalinin Threshold that must be considered. These being either freezing posts to the mainlist or moving up 10kcon. I would agree that both of these are bad solutions, if a little better than the threshold. Freezing the mainlist would cause an uproar and drop in readership that I don't think the site will recover from easily. Additionally, putting more and more pressure on the contest team would also end badly simply because the wiki cannot reasonably have kcon's annually.
Nevertheless, none of these bad solutions warrant the Order 66-level purge that is the Threshold. I feel like some people are more focused on having the Threshold itself exist than consider why it was even brought up in the first place.
What's your solution?
Regarding the slots
Now for the big stuff. I’ve spent enough time bashing this threshold, and now it's time for me to propose my own actionable changes. I have listed my solutions below for brevity.
- Limit kcon's to proper milestones such as 15k and 20k.
- Open multiple series simultaneously.
- Reserve desirable slots in these contests.
- Promote other types of articles.
- Encourage long-form articles.
- Add a monthly posting cooldown until 10kcon.
- Restructure Kcon's overall.
Misc changes
The following is a list of proposed changes that while aren't specifically addressing the slot crisis, will aim to increase overall site quality and readership along with the solutions I've posed for that crisis.
- Make posting to the main site impossible without saving at least one sandbox page.
- Advertise the guide for newcomers more aggressively, either with a change to the main page or required reading for site applications.
- Hold contests entirely around reading/voting.
- Hold fewer contests in general.
- Give more incentive for readers to give critical feedback and vote.
- Retroactively delete any article -5 and below.
Closing Thoughts
If you have anything to add or dispute regarding what I have said during this essay, then please feel free to share your thoughts. I tend to believe that people get too heated in these discussions and forget a very simple fact:
Nobody wants to burn the site down.
I'm not writing this for drama or call-outs. Despite my grievances with the Kalinin threshold I don't think anyone wants to implement it due to some deficiency in their intelligence or character. At the end of the day, the people debating this issue in forums or Discord aren't doing it out of apathy towards the site's future. And I think realizing that fact can allow these discussions to move more smoothly.
Overall, I am not sure what results this discussion and proposal will bring as of writing. However, I can hope that, as a community. We can find what's best for the site as a whole.
