The word 'crowdsourced' scares creators for a good reason: it sounds like majority rule over your own story. If the loudest pitch wins, whose world is it? On The Board, the answer stays firmly with you, because the system is built so the audience informs your decisions without ever making them. This piece is a plain walkthrough of how control actually works, moment to moment, once a Board is open.
There are three levers, and you hold all of them: what becomes canon, what stays on the Board, and how wide the door is open in the first place. Understanding how they fit together is what turns 'crowdsourced' from a threat into what it actually is here — an audience helping you build a world that remains, unambiguously, yours. For the wider case, start with opening your world without losing it.
Votes and backing inform you — they never decide for you
On The Board, contributors can vote for pitches and put voluntary backing behind the ones they believe in. It's tempting to assume that's a ballot that binds you, but it isn't. Voting and backing do exactly one thing: they surface signal. A pitch that's climbing the queue is a pitch the audience is telling you they'd love — useful information, delivered clearly. What that signal never does is reach into your canon. The terms state it directly: a leading vote count is not a promise of canonization.
This separation is the heart of staying in control. You get the benefit of the crowd — a ranked read on what would land — without surrendering the decision to it. The most-backed pitch on your Board is still just a strongly-recommended suggestion, and you can pass on it because it's wrong for your story, and owe no one anything for doing so. The audience's job is to tell you what they want; your job, unchanged, is to decide what the world is.
Canonization is a deliberate act only you can take
Nothing becomes part of your world by momentum. A pitch does not 'graduate' into canon by hitting a vote threshold or a backing total; it becomes canon only when you, the creator, choose to canonize it. That's a deliberate, affirmative action reserved to you, and there's no back door around it. Until you act, every pitch — however popular — sits exactly where it is: in the queue, waiting on your judgment.
The terms also make clear there's no obligation attached to that judgment. You don't have to canonize anything, explain why you passed on something, or use ideas in any particular order. You can canonize one pitch, ignore a hundred, and reshape how a canonized idea fits your world as you integrate it. This is what keeps authorship intact under collaboration: the audience widens the field of ideas you're choosing from, and the choosing stays entirely with you. For what you owe when you do canonize — spoiler: credit, nothing more — see credit, not compensation.
Moderation, and the off switch you always have
Control also means being able to keep your Board clean and, if you ever want to, close it. Creators moderate their own Boards — you can hide or remove submissions and restrict access for contributors who break the rules, following the same standards as the rest of the Terms of Service. CanonBoard can also step in on serious violations, but the day-to-day authority to keep your space the way you want it is yours. Vote manipulation, spam, and sock-puppetry are prohibited by the terms, which gives you and the platform grounds to act.
And the biggest lever of all: you can make a project private again at any time. Opening a Board is never a one-way door. If a season of collaboration was great and you want to close the room to develop in private, you can; if you want to reopen later, you can do that too. Combined with controlling what's public in the first place — covered in keeping your world airtight on the Board — it means you're never locked into more openness than you want at any given moment. Control isn't a promise you're hoping holds; it's a set of switches you keep your hands on.
Frequently asked questions
- If a pitch gets the most votes, do I have to use it?
- No. The Board Participation Terms are explicit that a leading vote count is not a promise of canonization. Votes and backing move a pitch up your queue so it's easy to notice, but they never decide your canon. Canonization is an action only you can take, and you're free to pass on the most popular pitch on the Board with no obligation to use it or explain the decision.
- Can I remove a pitch or a contributor if I need to?
- Yes. Creators have final control over their Boards — what gets canonized, what gets ignored, and what gets removed. You can hide or remove submissions and restrict Board access for behavior that breaks the rules, consistent with the Terms of Service, and you can make a project private again at any time. Moderation authority stays with the creator.
CanonBoard scans your whole world and tells you where it disagrees with itself.
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