Lessons from FA (was Fanfic vs. TBAY)

[heidilist at heiditandy.yahoo.invalid]

Sorry it took a few days to get back to this... 

--- In HPFGU-Feedback at yahoogroups.com, "davewitley" 
<dfrankiswork at n...> wrote:

> 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).

Actually, we've hosted canon discussion for almost two and a half 
years now - we launched the boards about ten days after the fanfic 
sections of the site went live. 
> 
> 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?  

At the moment, using the system we use, yes it is incompatable. We 
know there is a way to do the posting via email but the software 
developers haven't released it to the public yet. 

> 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?

Well, you can get a notification now, whenever anyone posts a reply 
on a thread you're interested in, or in a forum you're interested 
in. But in terms of replying, you'd have to go to the site to do so, 
so it's similar to the webview setup on Yahoogroups. Plus, we can 
send emails or "private owls" to people in a special announcements 
sort of way, although it takes about 6 hours to send emails at this 
point, if we send them to everyone, simply because we have so many 
users. 
> 
> What about workforce implications?  Does this type of arrangement 
> noticeably change the admin workload?

We have about 50 ementors, who are similar to the elves, and about 
30 moderators for the message boards, but as things are divided up 
by category, character or concept, mods don't have any obligation to 
read everything. 
> 
> 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?

It's not seamless at all, mostly because a lot of the LJ stuff is 
user-generated. If people want to create a guild or a team, 
their "selection of roles" and such happens on the LJ they've 
created, and put links to on their signatures and/or on discussion 
threads. But then again, it's not seamless to jump between the Main 
List and OTC, if you're using webview. It's easy to make the jump, 
and jump back, though. 

But, then again, ever since we started, we've always had things 
located "off" FA - we were originally an EZBoard for messages & 
reviews, an html system for fics, and shortly added google for fic 
searches - within a month of launch, we were using LiveJournal for 
status updates and our fic update lists are replicated from the site 
to a Yahoogroup to LJ, all more or less in tandem. There's a lot of 
ways in... and a lot of ways out.

heidi