Newbie Guide Admin Post
This is long overdue, and I apologize for my negligence for the past mumbledy-mumbledy years, but I'm finally putting on my big girl pants and admitting that my days of running the newbieguide community are behind me.
I'm not deleting the community, and all the (mostly outdated) information here will remain forever and ever or until LJ finally implodes completely, but unless someone wants to take over as admin, it will be closed to new updates going forward.
I'm not sure it really needs to continue, to be honest. LJ activity has slowed down for many segments of fandom over the last several years, and now we're ever more splintered between LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Tumblr, and AO3, which makes the job of creating an overview--a task with an already low rate of completion--even more difficult.
If you are considering taking it over, you should know that long before fandom started withering away here on LJ, I was growing ever more frustrated with the Newbie Guide, because the ratio of people who volunteer to do an overview to people who actually post an overview is depressingly small, and of the people who do post an overview, almost none of them update it after that. (Which is understandable, because people leave fandoms all the time! I am guilty of this WRT my own overview! It's simply the nature of the beast, but one that can be a hassle to deal with as the admin for this community.) But the Sisyphean task of updating the master list, updating my spreadsheets that tracked who was doing what, granting access, tracking how much time had passed, and then undoing it all when people invariably did not come through became increasingly unbearable as the years passed. Eventually, I just gave up.
If that sounds fun to you, more power to you. I'm done. ;p
I'm not deleting the community, and all the (mostly outdated) information here will remain forever and ever or until LJ finally implodes completely, but unless someone wants to take over as admin, it will be closed to new updates going forward.
I'm not sure it really needs to continue, to be honest. LJ activity has slowed down for many segments of fandom over the last several years, and now we're ever more splintered between LiveJournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Tumblr, and AO3, which makes the job of creating an overview--a task with an already low rate of completion--even more difficult.
If you are considering taking it over, you should know that long before fandom started withering away here on LJ, I was growing ever more frustrated with the Newbie Guide, because the ratio of people who volunteer to do an overview to people who actually post an overview is depressingly small, and of the people who do post an overview, almost none of them update it after that. (Which is understandable, because people leave fandoms all the time! I am guilty of this WRT my own overview! It's simply the nature of the beast, but one that can be a hassle to deal with as the admin for this community.) But the Sisyphean task of updating the master list, updating my spreadsheets that tracked who was doing what, granting access, tracking how much time had passed, and then undoing it all when people invariably did not come through became increasingly unbearable as the years passed. Eventually, I just gave up.
If that sounds fun to you, more power to you. I'm done. ;p