Mod Post: Checking In
Hi, everyone!
First off, I want to let everyone know that we've put in some time recently to get Delicious up to date, so as of this minute all the recs we've got are entered into Delicious and (as soon as it populates) Pinboard. I'll add the last couple of Pinboard links into the LJ Master List of Themes next weekend (it should have received the data from Delicious by then).
Meanwhile, check out our MASTER LIST OF THEMES-there are 43 of them! And according to the Delicious count, there are over 1560 fanworks bookmarked -- that's 1560 individual fanworks recced to/by the hpthemes community, many of which have been recommended for multiple themes. Go, us! What a haul so far!
We also have themes scheduled through 2012, with even more in reserve!
I am, however, concerned about the "health" of hpthemes as a resource for the Harry Potter fandom.
When hpthemes first began, there was a LOT of interest and enthusiasm from fandom. In the first few months, there were dozens of recs for most of the themes. I, for one, got spoiled.
After jaime27 had to leave us, modding got a bit spotty. There were several volunteers, but coordination was difficult, and we took time off to regroup and were never really able to get the rhythm back to the level of energy jaime27 had led us with.
I think that since we regrouped a second time (when dwarfandelf came on board in January of this year), we've been more consistent with getting the themes posted. But we've been less consistent about putting up the theme's totals regularly. We also stopped posting "reminder posts" because we believed that they were merely crowding folks' Friends Lists and just annoying y'all. And we committed to halving the number of themes per year because, honestly, we weren't keeping up with the recs that had come in during hpthemes's first year.
But we're only receiving a few recs a week at this point, and there are only four or five people who rec more than once every couple of months. These reccers provide almost all of the recs. dwarfandelf has worked really hard at various points to extend invitations to a diverse group of communities in hopes of drawing new reccers. We generally get one or two new people every time she does that, who are wonderful. I just wish we were meeting more new people.
We don't have a great diversity of pairings in our archives, and they tend towards slash. And let's face it, all the mods have had much, much deeper roots in the slash communities than in het ones. But our outreach to het ships has had pretty limited success.
So, I'm posting a poll. I'd like to know how best hpthemes can adapt to what may be our community's changing needs, and how folks think our outreach could improve. I suspect it means that we will need to call upon our members to pimp far and wide, but I expect that would work.
Poll How can we improve things at <lj user=hpthemes?
And if you have any further suggestions for how we can improve the hpthemes community, or how the community can better publicize itself so we can have a greater diversity of recs/pairings, please let us know in the comments!
songquake for hpthemes_mods
First off, I want to let everyone know that we've put in some time recently to get Delicious up to date, so as of this minute all the recs we've got are entered into Delicious and (as soon as it populates) Pinboard. I'll add the last couple of Pinboard links into the LJ Master List of Themes next weekend (it should have received the data from Delicious by then).
Meanwhile, check out our MASTER LIST OF THEMES-there are 43 of them! And according to the Delicious count, there are over 1560 fanworks bookmarked -- that's 1560 individual fanworks recced to/by the hpthemes community, many of which have been recommended for multiple themes. Go, us! What a haul so far!
We also have themes scheduled through 2012, with even more in reserve!
I am, however, concerned about the "health" of hpthemes as a resource for the Harry Potter fandom.
When hpthemes first began, there was a LOT of interest and enthusiasm from fandom. In the first few months, there were dozens of recs for most of the themes. I, for one, got spoiled.
After jaime27 had to leave us, modding got a bit spotty. There were several volunteers, but coordination was difficult, and we took time off to regroup and were never really able to get the rhythm back to the level of energy jaime27 had led us with.
I think that since we regrouped a second time (when dwarfandelf came on board in January of this year), we've been more consistent with getting the themes posted. But we've been less consistent about putting up the theme's totals regularly. We also stopped posting "reminder posts" because we believed that they were merely crowding folks' Friends Lists and just annoying y'all. And we committed to halving the number of themes per year because, honestly, we weren't keeping up with the recs that had come in during hpthemes's first year.
But we're only receiving a few recs a week at this point, and there are only four or five people who rec more than once every couple of months. These reccers provide almost all of the recs. dwarfandelf has worked really hard at various points to extend invitations to a diverse group of communities in hopes of drawing new reccers. We generally get one or two new people every time she does that, who are wonderful. I just wish we were meeting more new people.
We don't have a great diversity of pairings in our archives, and they tend towards slash. And let's face it, all the mods have had much, much deeper roots in the slash communities than in het ones. But our outreach to het ships has had pretty limited success.
So, I'm posting a poll. I'd like to know how best hpthemes can adapt to what may be our community's changing needs, and how folks think our outreach could improve. I suspect it means that we will need to call upon our members to pimp far and wide, but I expect that would work.
Poll How can we improve things at <lj user=hpthemes?
And if you have any further suggestions for how we can improve the hpthemes community, or how the community can better publicize itself so we can have a greater diversity of recs/pairings, please let us know in the comments!
songquake for hpthemes_mods