I have written portions of a few novella-length chain stories on bulletin boards. If you ran the whole board topic through a style filter and then edited it fo

I have written portions of a few novella-length chain stories on bulletin boards. If you ran the whole board topic through a style filter and then edited it for consistency and continuity, one or two might even be somewhat readable. My guess is that you need a number of editors proportional to the square root of the number of authors, and anything greater than two authors requires a style manual, character reference guides, and a story map. Otherwise it's kind of a disconnected mess, with dangling plot hooks everywhere. In order to not kill the topic, you have to write it sort of like comic pages, where there's a miniature cliffhanger in the last panel, to get you to turn the page. Except you're goading the next person to pick up the story and carry it for a few more paragraphs. If it goes on for long, you get a sense for which of the regular posters should be next. It's been a while since we had some expository dialogue, so everybody waits for X to post. Y likes to write thrilling action scenes. Z drops in romantic subplots. W inserts political intrigues. U throws in gratuitous plot twists. T is the troll that tries to kill all the characters and burn all the scene settings in every post. S explains, after every T post, about the recurring nightmares that one of the characters has every night. Mainly, the fun is that you get to see the story unfold without doing all the work to make it unfold.