So, fictional_fans is a community I have been mentioning a lot lately. Possibly to the point of being annoying and I should stop, but my co-mod jjhunter suggested this, so here is the (possibly slightly misremembered) story of

fictional_fans was created by staranise because she wanted a Perfectly Generic Fandom Community to use as an example in a Dreamwdith tutorial she was working on. (She has in fact just posted Basic Dreamwidth For Tumblr Users, which is a very good short overview, and doesn't reference the comm at all, which was probably a very wise decision.)

She asked people to make model fannish posts of any variety there, and to start comment threads on, so she'd have lots of examples of different kinds to use in her tutorial.

I had actually been wishing for a Perfectly Generic Fannish Community on Dreamwidth for awhile, for reasons we will explore later in this post, and there were already quite a few people who had added fictional_fans, so it seemed like a good start, and I asked staranise if we could actually make real fannish posts there, and maybe even turn it into a real community, and she responded by making me a mod, and I abused my new power to add the next poor mook who showed an interest as a co-mod, and I put exactly two perfectly generic content guidelines in the profile, and here we are now.

Why I want a Perfectly Generic Fannish Community to exist on Dreamwidth has a lot to do with my general feelings about Dreamwidth comms, which are based on my observation of multiple cycles of what I'm seeing again currently, and started way back in closed beta: a) there's a rush of new people or activity on DW for some reason; b) people want their fandom/hobby or whatever to have a bigger presence on DW, so they start a very specific community for that specific hobby, and often put a lot of thought into making rules to make it exactly the community they want for their fandom; c) it gets maybe a small burst of activity but not much, and then dies; d) the creator gets discouraged and fades away.

( Reasons we are exploring now that it is later in this post )

Now that I finally got yesterday's post up, though, I am sort of thinking about - maybe for early next year - doing a comm-wide challenge where people sign up for a day in which they will post a pan-fandom-interesting discussion post to fictional_fans. I think it might be fun, and a good way to let people play with how to host discussion posts? Maybe, we'll see. I'm only about 1/4 of a committed mod.

I was originally planning to use this post to talk about difference between Dreamwidth and newer-style social media sites, but a lot of pixels have been lit on that topic in the last few days, and honestly I think between staranise’s post I linked yesterday and this tumblr post I was tagged on, they covered everything I would have said, only much more concisely!

Instead, here are two important Dreamwidth tips I haven’t seen in many of the posts going around:

1. Yes, Dreamwidth does have a full-text site search! IIRC it was, in the best tradition of the LJ codebase, something that mark threw up over a weekend because he wanted it, and it was rolled out with very little fanfare and isn’t well documented. But it’s there! You get there by going to the “Explore” menu and then “Site and Journal Search” (this is not the same as the “Site and Account Search” in the main search box, confusingly, or any of the options that come up under “Search Dreamwidth”.)

It’s somewhat limited (individual users can opt their content out), and some parts are limited to paid accounts, but free accounts can still use the basic sitewide “public entries” search (despite the message you may get that says it’s disabled - try it, it’ll still work.)

It’s not as developed as AO3’s search, and I don’t know if there’s any secret advanced syntax you can use (does anyone else?), but I believe it is running on the same basic code as AO3’s main site search box, so you will get the same kinds of results for a simple query. It is, however, worlds better than Tumblr’s search, in that it actually brings up the stuff you are looking for in a logical order!

2) If you have a paid account and you want people to be able to leave kudos on your entries, you can use the poll system to do it by copy-pasting this code at the end of every entry (if you're using the html or beta entry pages):
<poll name='' isanon='no' whovote='all' whoview='all'><poll-question type='radio'>Kudos poll<poll-item>I would like to leave kudos here.</poll-item></poll-question></poll>

And it will look like this:

Or you can go to the Poll Creator and make your own. Unfortunately there’s not much to be done about the formatting (unless somebody knows a CSS trick I don’t?) but you can do things like change the wording, add more options, restrict the people who can vote, or limit who can see the list of voters.

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And now, I am going to bring out the magic 8-ball and make some predictions about where fandom will be after everything shakes out in 3-5 years!( 8 ball 8 ball what do you see )

Dunno though. Maybe we'll just all end up on Reddit instead. Someone come up with a more convincing scenario.