How do you find comms on lj back in the day different from dw's comms now? I find them identical--lj and dw are forked from the same original code, after all, and dw has, uh ... never evolved much from that point, lol.
In this day and age, I think picking a style that's good for mobile is the most important factor. Someone on a thread on your journal suggested pillowfort to me and I went and checked it out. I get that lj and dw's code comes from a day long before mobile, so I can see how changing them to mobile retroactively might be prohibitively difficult, but pillowfort is new, and I saw that they have no intentions of making it more mobile-friendly! Like, wha ...? Mobile is where people generally can and want to be doing their social media these days.
Ah, believe me, I know wank! SPN fandom was horrifically rife with it. Even to this day, you could probably find dozens of battles going on on Twitter right now over which of the main characters is pure evil (yes, so many fans even hate one or more of the 2-3 main characters, like ... ??? Why are you watching, then??). (Needless to say, I stay out of all that nonsense.) Whatever works for your members in terms of rules is great! I think I just didn't have as much patience as you for modding, lol. I laid down a couple very solid rules and didn't mess around with specifics. My main rule regarding behavior was that "The only dick allowed in the bunker is [character who is canonically a dick]; all others will be kicked out." I liked that approach because it leaves no room for people to argue and try to push boundaries, all the "but I only said ____" and "I don't see anything in the rules that specifically forbids ____." It seemed like people who were boundary-pushers saw a hard-and-fast rule like that and went away, and people who weren't boundary-pushers were reassured by it. I wonder how it would work to say something friendly but unyielding like "No character bashing--we love all the characters here!" and leave it at that ... but you know your fandom better than I do.
I definitely see how daily events on dw would probably just overwhelm comm members! We talked before once about how on lj you could schedule posts ahead of time--I just did that. You could schedule weeks' worth of posts some night when you had time or inclination and just copy and paste--it made it much easier.
And yes, I did have help! My best friend, also a hardcore SPN fan, helped me promote the comm and get in there in the comments to get and keep conversation going--it made a huge difference. (Later, she took over posting the events, when I got super tired of it, lol. She'd always been eager to, and she ended up doing it until we closed the comm's doors.) I had a pretty good-sized group of lj friends by the time I started the comm who I knew would probably like it, and that was also a big part of starting it off with some good momentum. On the Bunker's final post, I saw that a member I never really got to know offered to take over the posting of the daily events (I saw again as I revisited it while writing this post)! People who like your comm will often like the idea of helping out; I'd recommend just making a post that requests whatever kind of help you're looking for. If you don't get a response the first time around, post it again! (And maybe one more time after that if necessary.) That'll help bring the shyer people out of the woodwork.
Thank you for your long and thoughtful response, and thank you for inspiring me to write this post!
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In this day and age, I think picking a style that's good for mobile is the most important factor. Someone on a thread on your journal suggested pillowfort to me and I went and checked it out. I get that lj and dw's code comes from a day long before mobile, so I can see how changing them to mobile retroactively might be prohibitively difficult, but pillowfort is new, and I saw that they have no intentions of making it more mobile-friendly! Like, wha ...? Mobile is where people generally can and want to be doing their social media these days.
Ah, believe me, I know wank! SPN fandom was horrifically rife with it. Even to this day, you could probably find dozens of battles going on on Twitter right now over which of the main characters is pure evil (yes, so many fans even hate one or more of the 2-3 main characters, like ... ??? Why are you watching, then??). (Needless to say, I stay out of all that nonsense.) Whatever works for your members in terms of rules is great! I think I just didn't have as much patience as you for modding, lol. I laid down a couple very solid rules and didn't mess around with specifics. My main rule regarding behavior was that "The only dick allowed in the bunker is [character who is canonically a dick]; all others will be kicked out." I liked that approach because it leaves no room for people to argue and try to push boundaries, all the "but I only said ____" and "I don't see anything in the rules that specifically forbids ____." It seemed like people who were boundary-pushers saw a hard-and-fast rule like that and went away, and people who weren't boundary-pushers were reassured by it. I wonder how it would work to say something friendly but unyielding like "No character bashing--we love all the characters here!" and leave it at that ... but you know your fandom better than I do.
I definitely see how daily events on dw would probably just overwhelm comm members! We talked before once about how on lj you could schedule posts ahead of time--I just did that. You could schedule weeks' worth of posts some night when you had time or inclination and just copy and paste--it made it much easier.
And yes, I did have help! My best friend, also a hardcore SPN fan, helped me promote the comm and get in there in the comments to get and keep conversation going--it made a huge difference. (Later, she took over posting the events, when I got super tired of it, lol. She'd always been eager to, and she ended up doing it until we closed the comm's doors.) I had a pretty good-sized group of lj friends by the time I started the comm who I knew would probably like it, and that was also a big part of starting it off with some good momentum. On the Bunker's final post, I saw that a member I never really got to know offered to take over the posting of the daily events (I saw again as I revisited it while writing this post)! People who like your comm will often like the idea of helping out; I'd recommend just making a post that requests whatever kind of help you're looking for. If you don't get a response the first time around, post it again! (And maybe one more time after that if necessary.) That'll help bring the shyer people out of the woodwork.
Thank you for your long and thoughtful response, and thank you for inspiring me to write this post!