Thoughts on co-maintaining a report comm
May. 27th, 2007 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiriseAs no doubt many are aware, I am one of the maintainers of the comm ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
finalauraburst, which covers Tokusatsu fandom, mostly on LJ. I am fortunate not to be the only maintainer, as it's not an easy job.
How I do my update post:
I've counted about 40-odd journals, communities, and websites that we keep an eye on, and all of them have to be checked to see if they've had anything updated in the time period we are covering in a particular post, and then get them all together in a certain format. This takes about a half hour to two hours, depending on the amount of updates that have been posted and how many days we're covering. I, for example, usually handle Thursday and Friday, but I've been known to update five days' worth.
Since my browser hiccups at tons and tons of tabs, I grab my first bunch of journals and communities, and close any that haven't had an update. Then I do the same through all the journals and communities that we update until I have a good idea of which ones I need to put in. I then check the three torrent providers that we know cover tokusatsu, as well as fanfiction.net. (No way in heck am I covering fanlib, which at this point is academic anyway.)
All that being done, I grab my template, paste it into my word processor, and start plugging the entries in, trying to link to as many as possible. (One journal doesn't provide links to the entries and so I generally just link to the journal.) Usually, unless it's been a busy update day on livejournal, my biggest pain to update is the trackers.
I post it into a new post onfinalauraburst, previewing to make sure I haven't screwed up any links or tags, and then post it. With luck, I didn't miss anything.
My thoughts about maintaining:
It's hard. (Did I mention that it's hard?) Anybody who thinks this is easy, getting all the updates in, should try to do it some time. On the other hand, I'm pretty up to date on a lot of aspects of fandom that I wouldn't be. I'm a Kamen Rider fan, primarily, but this way I'm catching up/familiarizing myself with a lot of the fandom, especially the kaijin/Godzilla section, which I have to admit that I didn't know much about before I started doing this.
Do I enjoy it? Most of the time. It's rewarding, as I said, to keep people up to date on what's going on. As our watch list expands, there's more and more fandom to discover, and I think that's great. Doing this is like making icons and writing fanfic; it's something you do because it's a good thing to do.
Is there anything else I wish people would know about maintaining it? Well, that we maintainers are human, not to mention volunteers. If we didn't include anything, it's likely because we missed it. (Heck, I think I've missed my own stuff when updating....) We're also a fairly easygoing bunch; to us, if we miss things, it's not a big deal. I mean, we try our hardest not to, but accept that it happens sometimes, and ask our readers to do the same.
finalauraburst, which covers Tokusatsu fandom, mostly on LJ. I am fortunate not to be the only maintainer, as it's not an easy job.How I do my update post:
I've counted about 40-odd journals, communities, and websites that we keep an eye on, and all of them have to be checked to see if they've had anything updated in the time period we are covering in a particular post, and then get them all together in a certain format. This takes about a half hour to two hours, depending on the amount of updates that have been posted and how many days we're covering. I, for example, usually handle Thursday and Friday, but I've been known to update five days' worth.
Since my browser hiccups at tons and tons of tabs, I grab my first bunch of journals and communities, and close any that haven't had an update. Then I do the same through all the journals and communities that we update until I have a good idea of which ones I need to put in. I then check the three torrent providers that we know cover tokusatsu, as well as fanfiction.net. (No way in heck am I covering fanlib, which at this point is academic anyway.)
All that being done, I grab my template, paste it into my word processor, and start plugging the entries in, trying to link to as many as possible. (One journal doesn't provide links to the entries and so I generally just link to the journal.) Usually, unless it's been a busy update day on livejournal, my biggest pain to update is the trackers.
I post it into a new post on
finalauraburst, previewing to make sure I haven't screwed up any links or tags, and then post it. With luck, I didn't miss anything.My thoughts about maintaining:
It's hard. (Did I mention that it's hard?) Anybody who thinks this is easy, getting all the updates in, should try to do it some time. On the other hand, I'm pretty up to date on a lot of aspects of fandom that I wouldn't be. I'm a Kamen Rider fan, primarily, but this way I'm catching up/familiarizing myself with a lot of the fandom, especially the kaijin/Godzilla section, which I have to admit that I didn't know much about before I started doing this.
Do I enjoy it? Most of the time. It's rewarding, as I said, to keep people up to date on what's going on. As our watch list expands, there's more and more fandom to discover, and I think that's great. Doing this is like making icons and writing fanfic; it's something you do because it's a good thing to do.
Is there anything else I wish people would know about maintaining it? Well, that we maintainers are human, not to mention volunteers. If we didn't include anything, it's likely because we missed it. (Heck, I think I've missed my own stuff when updating....) We're also a fairly easygoing bunch; to us, if we miss things, it's not a big deal. I mean, we try our hardest not to, but accept that it happens sometimes, and ask our readers to do the same.
