So.
It's about halfway through the month now, and I still don't have a challenge up, so I might as well come clean here.
Once upon a time, this community was a lot of fun. There were only a handful of regular posters by the time I first showed up as a member, but there was enough enthusiasm to keep SimHaven going. People participated in challenges, commented on each other's work, held discussions, shared links. You know, the usual web community stuff.
But things change. For various reasons--some of which I know and some of which I don't, none of which are my business but all of which I can understand and none of which I hold against anyone--people left, and no one new showed up. By the time Goodbye_Sun passed the torch on to me, things had gone well downhill and it just kept going until it hit rock bottom.
As for me... eh, I didn't have the easiest 2013, especially in the fall, when writing was really the only thing keeping me from going off the deep end. I've more or less downsized to one story (my others are sort of hanging in the limbo; honestly, I don't know any better than anyone else when or if I'll ever get back to these) and I update on Tumblr and I'm also active at PBK. However, I almost never log into LiveJournal. I never cared for the user interface, and I like the new one even less than I liked the old one, so these days, I only log in here to comment on the occasional post and to post the challenges here.
But it has been a long time since I've felt like there was much of a point to posting the challenges, which is why they eventually went from monthly to every two months, and why it's the 17th and I still haven't been able to bring myself to post a new one. No one does the challenges, unless they do so without posting to the community. Hell, I don't even do the challenges, so I don't exactly blame anyone there. But if no one does them, then why post them? It just no longer makes sense.
I have a lot of fond memories of this community, and I don't want it to outright die, but having never been someone who was much good at the whole motivating other people thing, I don't really know how much I can do about that on my own. For all I know, no one's even reading this; even if I did come up with a lot of great new ideas for the community, they wouldn't change a thing without any participants.
While I acknowledge that I may be partially at fault for the fall of the community for not diversifying the community when the chance existed, I think the root cause is ultimately time: changing trends in the Sims community as a whole, new developments in people's lives and interests, work and school and families and everything else that has to come first. So, perhaps what I'll do for now is treat this post as a sort of diagnostic test, and based on the response (or lack of), I will move forward from there, with input from anyone who wants to offer it.
Thanks for listening. And sorry.
Once upon a time, this community was a lot of fun. There were only a handful of regular posters by the time I first showed up as a member, but there was enough enthusiasm to keep SimHaven going. People participated in challenges, commented on each other's work, held discussions, shared links. You know, the usual web community stuff.
But things change. For various reasons--some of which I know and some of which I don't, none of which are my business but all of which I can understand and none of which I hold against anyone--people left, and no one new showed up. By the time Goodbye_Sun passed the torch on to me, things had gone well downhill and it just kept going until it hit rock bottom.
As for me... eh, I didn't have the easiest 2013, especially in the fall, when writing was really the only thing keeping me from going off the deep end. I've more or less downsized to one story (my others are sort of hanging in the limbo; honestly, I don't know any better than anyone else when or if I'll ever get back to these) and I update on Tumblr and I'm also active at PBK. However, I almost never log into LiveJournal. I never cared for the user interface, and I like the new one even less than I liked the old one, so these days, I only log in here to comment on the occasional post and to post the challenges here.
But it has been a long time since I've felt like there was much of a point to posting the challenges, which is why they eventually went from monthly to every two months, and why it's the 17th and I still haven't been able to bring myself to post a new one. No one does the challenges, unless they do so without posting to the community. Hell, I don't even do the challenges, so I don't exactly blame anyone there. But if no one does them, then why post them? It just no longer makes sense.
I have a lot of fond memories of this community, and I don't want it to outright die, but having never been someone who was much good at the whole motivating other people thing, I don't really know how much I can do about that on my own. For all I know, no one's even reading this; even if I did come up with a lot of great new ideas for the community, they wouldn't change a thing without any participants.
While I acknowledge that I may be partially at fault for the fall of the community for not diversifying the community when the chance existed, I think the root cause is ultimately time: changing trends in the Sims community as a whole, new developments in people's lives and interests, work and school and families and everything else that has to come first. So, perhaps what I'll do for now is treat this post as a sort of diagnostic test, and based on the response (or lack of), I will move forward from there, with input from anyone who wants to offer it.
Thanks for listening. And sorry.