Background

In December 2015, the Commons launched the first version of Social Paper (Beta), an exciting networked writing environment that enabled students to compose and share all forms of their written work across across courses, disciplines, institutions and academic terms. It was designed to solicit peer feedback, on both a paragraph by paragraph level, and on the paper as a whole.

It was challenging project to develop, and our development team did a great job to get it up and running.

But Social Paper did not gain the popularity we’d hoped for, and in April 2020 we removed it from our top level navigation. It was still functional, but we no longer surfaced it on our home page or encouraged its use. We still wanted to provide access to members with existing Social Papers.

Deprecation

In October 2022, the Commons officially deprecated Social Paper. Even though the functionality had been obfuscated for a couple years, logged in users could still create Social Papers via the “Create new” option on the WP Dashboard. We have now turned this option off, and will not allow papers to be created, annotated, or corrected. We do not have the bandwidth to maintain Social Paper, and it has proved to be a target for unwanted spam.

What Does This Mean To Old Social Papers?

Social Papers can still be viewed on a read-only basis. They can be accessed via a member’s profile or via a group’s library. Each Social Paper has a unique URL that can be shared.

If you want to make changes to a paper, please contact us at commonshelpsite@gmail.com and we will discuss your options.