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I had a really wonderful dream that turned into a really craptastic nightmare this morning. Woke up at 6:30 and went for a run-walk to get it out of my head (run-walk b/c I was still tired and running is dizzy-making.) Which has somewhat helped but I still feel like if I go back to bed, I'll dream about it again. So, my coherency level is perhaps not at an all-time high right now. (Not that it ever is, as y'all probably have figured out.)
People don't seem to understand how to interest tag their communities for LJ so that people can find their community (of course there are some communities that don't want to be found. *g*) Half the time when I'm trying to find a specific type of community, I'll just google livejournal + [whatever I'm looking for] because it's more efficient. The problem is that LJ's interest search function sucks. It's basically a tagging system, like del.icio.us, but unlike delicious, you can only search one interest at a time. There was a suggestion a while ago for multiple interest searching that is in the queue for implementation, but I don't know if it's at all close (possibly it was one of the options in the "vote for your favorite suggestions" poll recently?? Anyone have a link to that?)
But, in the meantime, if you want your community to be found what you need to do is list phrases instead of just keywords. Keywords are good too, but they're not going to help out someone who is specifically looking for a community like yours -- thus leading to hair-pulling and the creation of redundant communities and more hair-pulling (and eventual premature baldness.)
Let's take for example![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
femme_fic, a new community for "fic centered around and celebrating the females in fandom." They're hosting a multifandom ficathon (closed now) with stories coming out the end of March. Awesome.
Now, let's look at what interests the community lists:
Interests:10: celebrating women, fanfic, femmeslash, fic, ficathons, gen, girl power, girls, het, women.
While all of these are indeed interests of the community, they won't really help someone who is looking for a community for fic centered around/celebrating women to find this community. Because you can't search for more than one of these terms at once. The closest this person can get is to search for "fanfic" (assuming they don't only think to try "fanfiction") and then command-F search through the results page for "women" or "girls". And actually, what's really going to be displayed on that page of results?
femme_fic The Female Fic Community (Last updated 3 weeks ago)
To write fic centered around and celebrating the females in fandom
So, our hypothetical search for "women" or "girls" isn't actually going to turn up anything.
And there's another problem. If we do a search for fanfic,femme_fic doesn't even show up on the results page! I don't even know why this is because there's communities on there that have never updated, so something hinky is obviously going on with that. Argh.
What do I mean about using phrases? First of all, don't get rid of all your keywords. Some people only search by keywords and we don't want to cut them out. But for phrases, think of things that people looking for your community might put in. For example, "female-centered fanfiction" or "fanfiction celebrating women" or "fanfiction about women" and even "femme fic" or "feminist fic." Use multiple variations so that the person searching doesn't have to. Being specific is actually a point in your favor here, because it will narrow down the search results and allow the searcher to more easily find you.
The term "interests" that LJ uses is actually really misleading -- we shouldn't think of these as things that the person/community is necessarily "interested in" but as search terms to help other people find them. (Though of course because we think of them this way, they can influence decisions about whether to join a community or not.)
Note: You can just rely on fandom to spread the word -- something it does really, really well. But you're always going to lose a certain number of people who might be actively looking for your community. And if they're actively looking, it's likely that they'll want to participate. Also, sometimes you want to find a community you saw once but can't remember the name of. That's where putting the name and variations on the name of your community as interests can help. People are unlikely to remember whether or where there's an underscore in your name.
Note 2: Listing lots of interests in this way does run the risk having a lot more people notice your community's existence. You may not want this. You can try to fine tune by weighting your interests more heavily towards specific phrases (yeah, those again) and by clicking on your interests to see what else comes up in a search for that interest (and whether your comm actually does or not!) You might find that a certain phrase has some other meaning that you don't want to be confused with.
People don't seem to understand how to interest tag their communities for LJ so that people can find their community (of course there are some communities that don't want to be found. *g*) Half the time when I'm trying to find a specific type of community, I'll just google livejournal + [whatever I'm looking for] because it's more efficient. The problem is that LJ's interest search function sucks. It's basically a tagging system, like del.icio.us, but unlike delicious, you can only search one interest at a time. There was a suggestion a while ago for multiple interest searching that is in the queue for implementation, but I don't know if it's at all close (possibly it was one of the options in the "vote for your favorite suggestions" poll recently?? Anyone have a link to that?)
But, in the meantime, if you want your community to be found what you need to do is list phrases instead of just keywords. Keywords are good too, but they're not going to help out someone who is specifically looking for a community like yours -- thus leading to hair-pulling and the creation of redundant communities and more hair-pulling (and eventual premature baldness.)
Let's take for example
femme_fic, a new community for "fic centered around and celebrating the females in fandom." They're hosting a multifandom ficathon (closed now) with stories coming out the end of March. Awesome.Now, let's look at what interests the community lists:
Interests:10: celebrating women, fanfic, femmeslash, fic, ficathons, gen, girl power, girls, het, women.
While all of these are indeed interests of the community, they won't really help someone who is looking for a community for fic centered around/celebrating women to find this community. Because you can't search for more than one of these terms at once. The closest this person can get is to search for "fanfic" (assuming they don't only think to try "fanfiction") and then command-F search through the results page for "women" or "girls". And actually, what's really going to be displayed on that page of results?
femme_fic The Female Fic Community (Last updated 3 weeks ago)To write fic centered around and celebrating the females in fandom
So, our hypothetical search for "women" or "girls" isn't actually going to turn up anything.
And there's another problem. If we do a search for fanfic,
femme_fic doesn't even show up on the results page! I don't even know why this is because there's communities on there that have never updated, so something hinky is obviously going on with that. Argh.What do I mean about using phrases? First of all, don't get rid of all your keywords. Some people only search by keywords and we don't want to cut them out. But for phrases, think of things that people looking for your community might put in. For example, "female-centered fanfiction" or "fanfiction celebrating women" or "fanfiction about women" and even "femme fic" or "feminist fic." Use multiple variations so that the person searching doesn't have to. Being specific is actually a point in your favor here, because it will narrow down the search results and allow the searcher to more easily find you.
The term "interests" that LJ uses is actually really misleading -- we shouldn't think of these as things that the person/community is necessarily "interested in" but as search terms to help other people find them. (Though of course because we think of them this way, they can influence decisions about whether to join a community or not.)
Note: You can just rely on fandom to spread the word -- something it does really, really well. But you're always going to lose a certain number of people who might be actively looking for your community. And if they're actively looking, it's likely that they'll want to participate. Also, sometimes you want to find a community you saw once but can't remember the name of. That's where putting the name and variations on the name of your community as interests can help. People are unlikely to remember whether or where there's an underscore in your name.
Note 2: Listing lots of interests in this way does run the risk having a lot more people notice your community's existence. You may not want this. You can try to fine tune by weighting your interests more heavily towards specific phrases (yeah, those again) and by clicking on your interests to see what else comes up in a search for that interest (and whether your comm actually does or not!) You might find that a certain phrase has some other meaning that you don't want to be confused with.
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