Community purge, and planning to preserve content
Yes, I have caught up with the current news, which says that LJ will not delete communities with content ... but what about next time? At this point, I'm fairly sure there will be a next time.
I think this might be a good time for moderators of fic communities (especially fests, which generate so much content), to create collections on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Currently, if you go to Collections and filter on "Harry Potter -- Rowling" you'll find a bunch of all-fandom collections and only THREE exclusively HP collections. That's absurd.
If we can get our collective act together, it might also be a good time to consolidate community content. Not fests -- if I find a rec for something that was in merry_smutmas in 2004, I'd like to know where to look. On the other hand, do we need both harrydraco and harrylovesdraco as collections? I'm not sure; they have a lot of duplication, but multiple collections might make sense, because it's such a big ship. There should be clearer ways to divide them, though. For example, hp_remarry (Harry/Remus) is pretty small, and so is my HP/MWPP (Harry/any Marauder) comm on IJ. Maybe a single Harry/Remus collection would do, regardless of what other comms may exist, but we might want two, divided by whether there is chan or not, because that is the clearest, most meaningful content division for that pairing.
Is there someplace where people are discussing this? I don't keep up on LJ closely enough to know, but if there's an effort underway, I'd like to help.
ETA: Trinity_clare, in this thread, contributed this:
The function that you're trying to get out of collections can actually be done with freeform tags, and it looks like a lot of HP authors are already using them. For example, anyone can upload a fic and tag it "community: merry_smutmas" and people can filter stories by that tag
I think this might be a good time for moderators of fic communities (especially fests, which generate so much content), to create collections on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Currently, if you go to Collections and filter on "Harry Potter -- Rowling" you'll find a bunch of all-fandom collections and only THREE exclusively HP collections. That's absurd.
If we can get our collective act together, it might also be a good time to consolidate community content. Not fests -- if I find a rec for something that was in merry_smutmas in 2004, I'd like to know where to look. On the other hand, do we need both harrydraco and harrylovesdraco as collections? I'm not sure; they have a lot of duplication, but multiple collections might make sense, because it's such a big ship. There should be clearer ways to divide them, though. For example, hp_remarry (Harry/Remus) is pretty small, and so is my HP/MWPP (Harry/any Marauder) comm on IJ. Maybe a single Harry/Remus collection would do, regardless of what other comms may exist, but we might want two, divided by whether there is chan or not, because that is the clearest, most meaningful content division for that pairing.
Is there someplace where people are discussing this? I don't keep up on LJ closely enough to know, but if there's an effort underway, I'd like to help.
ETA: Trinity_clare, in this thread, contributed this:
The function that you're trying to get out of collections can actually be done with freeform tags, and it looks like a lot of HP authors are already using them. For example, anyone can upload a fic and tag it "community: merry_smutmas" and people can filter stories by that tag