I am ENTITLED to hear your thoughts on this.

[tzikeh]

taraljc and I have decided that what the hell, we'll tilt at the windmills a bit. We're putting together a Centralized Fandom Primer website. Once it's up, we hope that people who run lists or have archives or build faqs or run cons or what-have-you will choose to point a link our way somewhere in their cyber-existence. Obviously, nobody *has* to link to it, and we're sure to get our fair share of "who are you to tell us blah blah!?" But between T and me, we have closing in on 50 years in fandom (geez), so we think we have a decent handle on where it's come from and where it's got to. BUT WE WANT EVERYONE'S HELP.

If you would be so kind, drop a comment here and let me know: What kind of things do you wish new folks had a handle on before they arrived in fandom? What do you wish someone had told you when you first got involved? If you could announce one thing to every fannish mailing list in existence, what would it be?

We don't want to preach. We don't want to direct. (Well, actually, I do want to direct, but that's a whole other thing.) All we want to do is lay it out in plain words - "Here's where fandom came from, here's how things generally are in fandom online; here's how we treat one another. You can choose to ignore this - that's your right. But it's easier to be part of a community when you live by the community's generally agreed-upon guidelines. Some of this is common sense. Some of it is common courtesy. You'd think it doesn't need to be said, but - well, fandom's a queer duck, and online life is a queer duck, and you put those two together and sometimes people do things they'd never do if they'd actually sat and thought about it for a minute."

Let me know, guys - and ask your friends.

ETA: There are some great ideas being posted here and I just wanted folks to know that we are reading them all - please don't think if I haven't responded directly that I didn't read / didn't care what you said. I just don't want to pad out the replies with "Thanks!" fifty times.

Comments

[lcsbanana.livejournal.com]

This would probably go under the section for fans who found the internet through fandom, but--a pointing out that others can only judge you based on what you show them, and in a textual medium, what you show them is your ability to compose a good English sentence. Of course everyone gives leeway to people who know English as a second or third language, but you should present yourself to the best of your ability--don't just toss it off as 'just a message board' or 'just the net'--because that's all we know about you, we don't know how well-spoken and witty you are in real life or what have you. What we know is that u wrtie liek tihs *lol lol*

*cough* except, um. not snarky. which is why I'M not writing it. *g*