Most of my communities have an XMAS themed icon...but I've got a lot of communities. Just went through that entire list on my profile and changed the XMAS ones to default.

I need more, though I can't imagine how I'd find them given some of the communities have themes that are not conducive to such a thing.

Was surprised I'd forgotten the one for bondage_a_gogo.

A good source for holiday themed iconnage:
http://community.livejournal.com/weirdfolks/1860843.html

So, my question for you lovely and very helpful people is this: how do I keep activity high?

I run a community for a crossover pairing, which I knew wasn't going to have the same amount of activity as a normal pairing community, and for awhile there updates were slow but decently steady. Now though it seems as if I am the only one posting. I have started issusing community writing/art prompts and for awhile that worked, but lately it hasn't been helping.

What else can I do to get my 48 members to contribute more actively?

I have considered maybe taming up with another crossover community which mine is affiliated with to do so kind of competition thing but I have no idea what I would propose. Any suggestions?

10:02 AM 10/15/09 · A big thing with making communities is to get people to actually join them. This is not always so easy and most people seem to give up on it, as though just making the community itself is enough to attract members. If you've ever done an interests search and seen the bucketload of communities that show up at the end that're all listed as 'never updated' you can see what I'm talking about.

A couple weeks back I found a bizarre case. Usually when I make a new a community, while it's still in mind, I look to see if there's already an existing one. Either to see if I want to go there or if I think I can do better. Anyway, I found one under a keyword search for 'animated gifs' that had no posts at all. It was themed animation with accompanying video. Seemed like a cool idea so I popped over to the moderator to see why it had never gotten beyond the comm's creation...and found he posted the stuff that would've been in the community in his own journal.

Advertising had never occured to him.

Ideally you want to get members, posting ones, so that not only is your community popular but if you lag off on posts yourself there are others that are posting to take up the slack. More often than not this won't happen if you don't advertise.

Basic advertising works better if you've got more than just a link and blurb. Some comms have a graphic restriction, generally images under 500x300. I've recently got a basic format I use since most place allow for multi·community advertising per post.


Name: Community·Mods
Random: We who run them must vent!
Theme: A moderators place to share with others about the comms we run
Bio: I run a lot of communities as do a number of my friends...seemed like a good idea to have a place to bitch & moan about that.
Typical Posts: rants, raves, questions, & other stuff about community managemrnt

HTML for this:
<img src="image link" align="right"> <b>Name: </b> <b>Random: </b> <b>Theme: </b> <b>Bio: </b> <b>Typical Posts: </b>

Used to advertise from my own journal but I recently setup an entirely separate account only for advertising. Seemed simpler than having to skip around all the other comms listed when I'm xposting. A ways back someone recommended a utility, that I sadly lost the link to, where you could select all the communities you wanted to post to and it would do them all in one stroke...

...that would've been so useful.

Where I currently advertise: Clicky!

How many communities do you moderate/maintain?

We could all of us be fucked...
...not in the good way.

http://www.journalfen.net/community/random_lounge/127589.html

Link ganked from de lunatic_cafe

Click here, here, here, & here!

A few of these might not be work safe.

12:12 PM 12/24/08 · I have, for the most part, stopped creating random communities. Given I moderate over 100 of the bloody things, which is easier to manage than you might think, I've discovered a recent fondness in making celebrity communities...

...both mainstream actors and porn stars.

It's just I've been toying with the criteria for making them

If you've got a celebrity you like and you're going to go this route you might first want to size up the competition. A simple interests search, using the name of whoever you have in mind, and you can pretty much see who's got what. I'd recommend using an actual search (Clicky!) insread of clicking the name if you've got it listed in your own interests because the current LJ setup displays these different.

A standard search will not only display differently but it will show you communities first and in what order, most recent to mostly dead, already exist of the person you so admire. If they exist and they're mostly dead or have never been updated at all, which I continually find weird, you're good to go. On the other hand, if you find there are currently active versions your best bet is to either just join one of those.

If you're determined to make it anyway you should size up what's out there and see if you can offer anything better or different than the ones you'll be competing against.

My celebrity comms run the gambit of being listed as having adult contenct or explicitly sexual content. You can actually set your community to this under "account settings" which has the added benefit that you don't need to police your members. Either one will automatically prevent people who don't have their birthday info entered into their profile from joining...

...the downside of this is that you'll find a lot of people will either shy away upon discovering this or those that do join won't post as much for a whole host of reasons.

It's the risk you run but you gotta so what you've gotta do.

Those're the basics anyway, as far as I see it.

Should communities be allowed to have racist terms allowed in their tags?

If you've ever glanced at our rather short community links list you'll note there's one for Comment Settings. This manages the comments for your own journal or, in this case, whatever communities you moderate. There's 3 settings, basically: who can comment to your comm, who will be automatically screened, who's IP addresses will it log.

I just went through all of my comms (I run about 96 so that was a fun 25 minutes) in order to negate anonymous comenting because frankly it bugs the hell outta me. While some people do it automatically, there are many that do so in order to be snarky and cowardly cheap shot bastards. Now, no one can do this in any of my comms.

LJ has gone through extensive variations over it's time. I've some comms that were created back in 2001 at the very earliest. Not mine initially, a few of my comms were passed onto me by their former moderators that wanted to get as far from livejournal as possible...for whatever reason. The defaults for logging IP addresses vary from each era and since I've been making my own comms since 2003, it was interesting to note the default settings for each frame of time...

...because when LJ switches its defaults, it doesn't automatically change them for all the accounts that are a part of it.

Along with getting rid of the anonymous garbage, I had intended to get rid of all the IP logging. Suppose it's handy for people that know how to reace them down to whatever annoying little twerp that's making an ass of themselves...but I haven't a clue how to do it. Since I'm negating the anonymous stuff anyway, this particular feature seems redundant to me...and I'm not vengeful enough to track each person that tries to get under my skin in the first place.

As it happens, the switching of defaults from one year to another caused me to miss that fact at first. I probably only skipped over 10 comms or so but I just don't wanna go back and figure out which ones right now. I'll get back to it one of these days.

Okay, I've looked up "livejournal" on Wikipedia before but this is a whole different thing. Just as there are specialized sections, beyond just the simple entries, for Heroes & Star Trek...there's one for livejournal too.

Livejournal @ Wikipedia

I am stunned.

xposted to House·of·Skin & Ship·of·Fools

8:27 PM 1/13/08 · Several months back de House·of·Skin got a new member, which I only know due to the fact that I started to get an unusual number of complaints from said individual. The nature of these complaints were focused on how I was crediting the images posted from a particular website that this person claims to be affiliated with if only through the people that are in power there.

May or may not be, really a moot point.

A lot of the stuff I post there from them can be found by a particular tag: Clicky! Keep in mind, depending on where you are, that's a NWS community so you may wanna wait till later before checking it out. Before I started posting from that site to this comm I did just a teeny bit of research and asked the people that run it if it was okay: Amelia·G & Forrest·Black. They said yes if I mentioned where I got it from...which I've been doing.

Apparently this wasn't sufficient crediting to the complainee: electrocat6.

What?

You thought with all the rest of this I wasn't going to mention that too?

This person, didn't check the account enough to determine a gender, eased off after about a couple weeks. Further comment exchanges with Amelia·G and I became just a tad more thorough in what crediting I do with their posts.

Originally I just put: images ganked from BlueBlood.net

After the complaining assault I added: If you've taken the time to read this then surely you would've noticed the much more obvious names of the photographers on the image.

Yeah, very annoying unless you copy the text elsewhere or have a magnifying glass handy. To spare you the effort...what it says is this: If you've taken the time to read this then surely you would've noticed the much more obvious names of the photographers on the image. Because that's the fact, it seems a little monotonous to credit them again when there names are in the upper left of every photograph.

Maybe that's just me.

The reason I'm posting this is because out of the blue today (rather sporadic as to when I actually get to check my email) I got two identical comments from electrocat6 bitching about me not crediting them properly. Once was enough but the exact same comment to two different posts??

Word for word?!?

I deleted one of them, comment not the post, just on general principle.

They are credited but apparently not in the proper format.

Telling this person that I have in fact discussed the matter with them and they know how I do this, fairly sure at least one if not both of them are members, and seem cool with it.

Which brings me back to the question in the subject line...

Community and Journal setups have had a number of things in common, not surprising given that they use the same system, but some differences. However, one thing they all currently seem to have in common is that in the new setups the background or images to be placed with them are no longer options.

I just setup a new community and I had a few ideas for how I wanted it to look. Themes I've used for a number of other comms and basic setup stuff. I knew the interface for customization had changed but I wasn't aware that a lot of the basic options are no longer there. Not just backgrounds either. Some allow you to place a small image between the comment links.

Not anymore.

I'm looking at one of my comms that has these options that is already setup and then I look into its settings and they're not there anymore. It still works as it was previously setup that way but if I alter anything therein then what I setup previously will disappear without having the option to fix it.

This really sucks.

Not that this comm really needed one, I was more than content with the Frank the Goat one, but I finally caved and put one of my specialty mood themes on here. It just got to me how I've got something of my own on each of my comms except for this one.

Enjoy!

xposted to Beyond·Wrong, Community·Crack, LJ·Addicts·Anonymous, Ship·of·Fools, & Weirdfolks

10:20 PM 12/3/07 · So, last Friday I made a rather disturbing discovery and I gotta say...I'm not happy about it. Apparently there was a memo in the LJ Updates about it but it was such a minor footnote that it didn't quite register.

Don't know the exact date this went down but there is currently a restriction on all accounts, journals and communities alike, that you can have no more than 1000 tags total. Last Friday I noticed that the newer posts I had weren't showing tags, I've been fairly obsessive in using them with this account, and that in one of my communities (Multi·Genre·Fandom) the same thing was going down.

A little research revealed why this was.

Since this I've noticed a few other people noticing this same problem, most notably the folks over at scans_daily.

I've started using the Tags Manager to edit out what tags I deem unnecessary. That and viewing my comms tag list; just add /tag to the url of your journal to view your basic list. First few were pretty easy, I deleted the tags that were attributed to deleted posts. Strangely, even if they're not on other posts, they're still counted unless you actually remove the tags themselves. Also ones that I later corrected because they were mispellings. To follow will be ones that not necessary...which will take hours to work out.

Not even touching my communities yet...but I'll get there.

This option, skipping fancy html, is quite handy for those of us that run adult or sexually explicit comms:

http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/

Bottom section specifically.

( Why I'm asking what I'm about to ask )

• How many communities do you run?


• Are they as active as you like?


• How often do you keep up on them?


• Do you update them from time to time or leave them as you originally set them up?


• Do you keep trying to kick some life into them?

I found something interesting regarding the Heroes based communities. The 'Godsend' thing wasn't named when the series started, though the symbol was all over the place throughout each episode. This may've changed, as I posted to a number of them about this, but about 2 months ago I did an interests search and found out that none of the most popular communities based on this series had it listed in their interests lists.

...of all of my communities I've done the least with this one.

Might wanna work with that.

12:13 PM 11/10/07 · I was kinda amused recently to learn, after having received an invite, that one of the members here made another community with virtually an identical theme. I suppose I could blame myself, the fruitless hope that getting members here would mean they'd post too, but it's so much simpler to blame him...

...or her; not like I can actually see any of you.

So, to that particular you...I shall have blood vengeance! You will know my horrible fury!! There shall be no escape!!!!

However, this is the holiday season so I suppose a brief reprieve is in order.

In the meantime I suppose I could actually start doing stuff with this place.

11:04 PM 10/26/07 · While this may vary depending on subject matter, it can be ever soo annoying to try and setup a community based around a pornstar, or porn star as the case may be, and your only real source of information, at the time anyway, are the magazines with the appearances in them. In the rare case of an actual interview, if you can find one, you don't get a lot of useful information for the interests list. Most of the content is stuff to stimulate and arouse the reader, if reading should even be involved, and is not that informative.

Sometimes I wonder if they just have a limited number of intro/description boxes for photo spreads and they just switch some of the names and the font.

Just did the setup for two such communities, which I'll add to when I pop to Wikipedia tomorrow, and was about to start a 3rd when I figured my brain was fried enough for the night.