admin note: rectember brainstorming?

[snickfic]

Hey, folks! I've been thinking about doing an event in September to encourage reccing and maybe even draw some people out of the woodwork who haven't recced anything here yet. I was thinking of some kind of daily or mostly-daily themes, so for example:

Sep 1 - rec a work you've read many times
Sep 2 - rec a work rated explicit/NC-17
etc

Would folks here enjoy doing participating in an event like this? I'm envisioning coming up with the themes in the next day and a half, publishing them all in a list on Sep 1, and then posting weekly reminders.

It would be zero-pressure - people could post for days that inspired them and skip the days that didn't. You would be posting your recs each day directly to the comm (both to increase posting at the comm and because it means less tagging work for me). You could also post several days in one post if you wanted.

Yay? Nay? Suggestions on daily themes? Suggestions for improvement?

Comments

[doranwen]

Mmm, then I really would wish it would be one theme for a whole week, not just three times a week. I tend to check my reading page once a day at the most and anything with too tight of a response schedule feels a bit stressful. Then we'd have time to *find* the fics in question that would match the theme. (I created a database to help me with that but I don't have quite 1000 fics in there yet and only most of my tiny fandoms, so it's only a little helpful so far.)

I guess I have a different perspective than a lot of people! If it's a post of a theme I like, I *would* check the comments multiple times or use Ctrl+F to find fandoms I know are in there. And I'm far more likely to post comments to a post than I am to post a post all on its own. If I only have one or two recs for the theme, I won't post a post for it. It's just too few for me. Even if you say it's fine, it won't feel right to me. I *would* post the same recs in comments to a theme post. The reason I haven't posted a post on its own yet is I haven't had the time to properly curate to put together a post (I put comments in the recs post of just the best of whatever I read in the past week that I've rec'd to friends - I have a few friends who've asked me to rec all the Leverage fic I read that I liked), and I'm not likely to any time soon. So if it's a case of I'd have to post a set of recs to the comm directly in order to participate in the themed recs, I probably wouldn't end up participating at all, or at least VERY little.

…Just had an idea then - what if you had an introductory post for the theme where people could post just one or two recs if they didn't want to make a separate post? Won't help your goal of getting people to make separate posts, but hey, those take time, and they can feel more stressful to people. That's precisely why I haven't.

I do recognize that the tagging is proving a lot of work (I noticed the last couple community recs posts weren't tagged with the fandoms), so I understand why you don't want to encourage more of that.

[snickfic]

No, I think you misunderstood. There'd be three themes a week, but they'd be announced at the beginning of the week, and you could respond to any or all of them at any point during the week. For example, you could make one post with all of your recs for the week, if you wanted.

If you prefer to post recs in the comments to a post, then the community recs posts are still there for you to use! Outside of that, this event may just not be for you. But I think that's okay! What we already have seems to be working really well for you (and I always really appreciate your Leverage recs <3).

Part of the goal here is to encourage other people to post who aren't already posting, and also, like I said, to post where there's more visibility, for the people who don't tend to check the comments.

As far as tagging the community recs posts, it's not that it takes all that long, I just have to remember to go and do it. So now that you've reminded me, hopefully I will get around to doing that today. :)

[doranwen]

Ah! Yeah, I did not catch that you meant multiple themes at one time. I was assuming one theme at a time. That might help, actually. Like if I can only think of one or two per theme, I might actually be able to come up with five or six recs that way, if I can post for multiple themes in the one post. We'll see, it really depends on the themes.

I actually *want* to post actual posts at some point (that's one of the major bonus features of the database I built, how easy it makes that to do based on themes and stuff), I just have had projects weighing me down and I haven't felt like I had a lot of free time for even writing, but I'm hoping to wrap some of that up in the next month.

Hee, yeah, I don't find tagging takes that long, but I didn't know if you found it just mentally exhausting or what. :)

I should repost one of the recs posts I did in the past on my own DW, maybe - or link to it or something. I had a super extensive recs post I did a couple years ago for Rookie Blue (180+ fics, organized by episode and to some extent, by ship), and I've got a general multifandom recs post on my DW by theme (romantic friendship, hurt/comfort, friendship, missing scene, AU, etc.) that would be really easy to share, but I didn't know whether I should link to it from here, whether I should just copy the text from the post, or what…