Lessons from FA (was Fanfic vs. TBAY)

[davewitley]

Heidi wrote:

> We have over 750,000 
> discussion posts on FA; some of them discuss writing, or other 
> authors' books, or stuff that's 100% off topic, like Lord of the 
> Rings, but there's almost 1900 threads with over 45,000 posts 
about 
> Order of the Phoenix itself, plus over a hundred thousand 
character 
> discussion posts in the Characters section. Those are *discussion 
> posts*, not fanfic. 
> 
> However, FA doesn't allow role-playing to take place on the Park 
> forums themselves, because it was becoming a bandwith problem. 
We've 
> moved things of that style over to LiveJournal, and we're giving 
> away codes to registered users and authors, who then give us one 
> back, so they can have roleplaying in LJ format, which really 
seems 
> to work better than a threaded discussion for what it is. So yeah, 
> Assassin!Snape threads and the Crouch Novenna would be more than 
> welcome in the FA family of sites. Why wouldn't you think it would 
> be?

I had been meaning to ask about this.  

I had been dimly aware that FA now hosts canon discussion (I am a 
member but hardly ever visit and only have a rudimentary knowledge 
of what's there).

For the sake of HPFGU members who are not in FA, are there any 
lessons that can usefully be learnt?  (And it doesn't have to be 
Heidi who responds  - I would like to hear the user point of view 
too.)

For one thing, we have had a little discussion here of the pros and 
cons of stronger threading of the kind FA provides.  Is it, in fact, 
incompatible with email delivery of individual posts to members?  
Would people have to keep specifying which threads to receive posts 
from, or can they be categorised (for delivery/subscription 
purposes) in some way that broadly corresponds to our lists?

What about workforce implications?  Does this type of arrangement 
noticeably change the admin workload?

What about the use of LJ?  Is that practically seamless, so that 
people who want to role play can respond to non-role play and vice 
versa?  (I'm not thinking of facilities-managing TBAY from LJ here - 
just curious about the possibilities generally)  To what extent do 
people need their own LJ accounts to make use of this FA feature?  
In short, does the user feel like they have to leave FA and go into 
LJ or do they feel part of the same site?

Just a few questions: I'm sure some more will be along in a minute 
or two.

David