Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 20 most recent ones recorded in Fan History wiki updates' InsaneJournal:

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Thursday, August 27th, 2009
12:09 pm [purplepopple]	Report: Wiki adminning: Different strategies to deal with conflicts This was originally posted on Fan History's blog. We've been busy watching our recent changes on Fan History. An incident recently came up and we had a fair amount of behind the scenes discussion on how to handle it. After exploring our possible actions, we analyzed where our desires to take these actions came from. They can best be summarized as follows: Desire to thoroughly document a topic, be completely truthful, provide multiple perspectives and be as unbiased as possible. Desire to behave ethically, enforce our policies in an ethical and consistent way, and to adhere to the norms of the community of which we are a member. Desire to avoid drama, possible negative publicity for the wiki, and personal attacks aimed at our admin staff. This situation is one that many other wikis are likely to deal with. The problem with these motivations is that plan of action for each requires a different response. The plan of actions will have different outcomes when implemented. The desire for the first will almost certainly run afoul of the third one. The desire for the second one could likely piss off both sides who will see you as negating the first one and resulting in the third one not being met. It is a messy situation to be in. When you're faced with a similar situation, our advice is to write down the pros and cons of implementing a strategy based on each desire. Examine those pros and cons and then implement the solution that will allow you to sleep at night. There is no right answer. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 13th, 2009
7:27 am [purplepopple]	Fan History: July 5 to July 11 This entry includes information on popular articles, and popular blog entries for the week of July 5 to July 11. It also includes information on top referrers and search keywords. Fan History's Most Popular Articles 11,152 pages were viewed a total of 44,564 times Draco/Hermione - 1,013 AdultFanFiction.Net - 905 views Cassandra_Claire - 488 views Naruto - 339 views FanDomination.Net - 324 views Sakura Lemon_Fan-Fiction Archive - 298 views Merlin - 249 visits Digimon - 234 visits FanFiction.Net - 234 visits James Nicoll - 223 visits Fan History's Most Popular Blog Entries 124 pages were viewed a total of 939 times Michael Jackson fanfiction: is it out there? - 477 views. Entry by Sidewinder. The high cost of conventions – when will it become TOO high? - 66 views. Entry by Sidewinder. Panic at the Disco break up - 48 views. Entry by sidewinder. Update: Permabanned users policy change - 48 views. Entry by Laura. Does familiarity breed contempt (and breakups?) - 29 views. Entry by Sidewinder. Laura’s link building philosophy - 22 views. Entry by Laura. Not a parody? Then not fair use. Precedent is bad news for argument that fan fiction is legal! - 16 views. Entry by Laura. Torchwood post-Children of Earth - 12 views. Entry by Sidewinder. Pictures from Chicago’s Pride Parade - 10 views. Entry by Laura. Why Australian fansites – and fans – need to be careful with Shotacon - 10 views. Entry by Sidewinder. Fan History's Keyword Traffic Search sent 13,821 total visits via 9,244 keywords adultfanfiction - 333 visits adult fanfiction - 176 visits fandomination - 105 visits michael jackson fanfiction - 90 visits naruto wiki - 79 visits bandflesh - 77 visits michael jackson fan fiction - 75 visits restricted section - 71 visits adult fan fiction - 63 visits draco hermione - 58 visits Fan History's Referrer Traffic Referring sites sent 2,519 visits via 500 sources animenewsnetwork.com mademan.com - Replaced Chickipedia community.livejournal.com james-nicoll.livejournal.com fanfiction.net fanpop.com tvtropes.org journalfen.net - fandom_wank traffic began to taper off. 47 visits. sidewinder.livejournal.com - 47 visits. Links to her blog entries on her LiveJournal. facebook.com (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
12:24 pm [purplepopple]	Should Fan History add more story pages? This is a crosspost from Fan History's blog. We would prefer if you commented over there just so things are kept on wiki (or on the wiki's official blog). :) Recently, we added a number of articles about specific stories on Fan History. Many of these stories were hosted on Geocities. We wanted a record that these stories existed because they are likely to disappear. It gave an idea as to what was happening in smaller fandoms not hosted on FanFiction.Net, in real person fic communities and elsewhere. Many of the fandoms on Geocities more closely paralelled what was happening on Yahoo!Groups than FanFiction.Net or LiveJournal. It was important to get that out there. But we've opened Pandora's Box. We've got all these story pages that we didn't have before. After we did that, we added a bunch of stories about Inuyasha. We had the database. It was an interesting experiment to try to add those articles. We were showing some love towards another archive. (We love to do that. If you're in fandom and are looking for a way to promote yourself on Fan History, let us know.) The articles represented another perspective outside of FanFiction.Net and LiveJournal. It seemed all good. It would be really easy to add articles about a lot of other stories on other archives. We could e-mail fan fiction archivists and ask them if they would be interested in having articles about the stories they have hosted on Fan History. We could ask individual authors if they could put together an excel file that lists all their stories. If we wanted to work towards our goal of getting to a million articles, this would be one way to get there a lot faster. Except, you know, over thinking happens. Do those pages have value? (Maybe.) Are most stories able to help people get an idea of possible trends in fandom? (You'd need to look at 10 to 100 articles to really know. Maybe. Hard to tell.) Would this be useful for smaller fandoms where it isn't as centralized and readers may not be as aware of other places to find stories? (Yes. Definitely.) Would this be useful to larger fandoms in the same way? (Not really, no.) Wouldn't this duplicate what we already have started with FanworksFinder? (Kind of. But FanworksFinder doesn't work. And what about stories that no longer exist? Where is the dating?) Could it almost become like Yahoo!Answers or fic finding mailing lists where people can easily hunt for stories? (Yes. If done right. Likely not though until Fan History's audience reached a critical mass.) Wouldn't it remove some of the neutrality issues of the wiki if we did this and allowed reviews of stories on the wiki? (Yes. Hugely scary issue.) Would we piss off a lot of people in fandom by linking and discussing their stories with out permission? (Probably. Maybe. Somewhat. Bound to happen. Scary to think about.) Would people find this useful in terms of promoting their own work? (Yes. If person articles are any indication, lots of people would find them useful.) There are just so many good arguments both ways. We'd love feedback from the community regarding this issue as we go forward. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
3:41 pm [purplepopple]	Juanuary 2009 to June 2009: Most Popular Fandom Articles on Fan History This is a cross post from Fan History's blog. Lists that do not past 10 did not have 10 fandoms in the top 450 articles. Half the year has passed so it is time to do an update as to the most popular fandoms on Fan History for January to June 2009. Items on this list list tend to appear for three reasons: 1) Interest in the fandom, 2) Quality content, 3) Good SEO. Because of the latter two, I don't think that you can draw any conclusion about what is going on in fandom as a result. Hopefully, one day, we'll be there where you can. Top Fandoms Digimon Naruto Twilight Harry Potter Gundam Wing Supernatural The Fast and the Furious Mortal Instruments Dragon Ball Z Prince of Tennis Top Actor Fandoms Jorja Fox Allison Stokke Russel Crowe Sara Varone Megan Fox Top Anime Fandoms Digimon Naruto Gundam Wing Dragon Ball Z Prince of Tennis Sailor Moon Bleach D.Gray-Man Yu-Gi-Oh Ouran High School Host Club Top Book Fandoms Twilight Harry Potter Mortal Instruments Pride and Prejudice Outsiders The Death Gate Cycle Lord of the Rings Sherlock Holmes Gor Alex Rider Top Cartoons Fandoms Avatar: The Last Airbender Transformers Kim Possible X-men Rescue Rangers Ben 10 Sonic: The Hedgehog Hey Arnold! Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series Top Comics Fandoms X-men Batman Watchmen Top Movies Fandoms The Fast and the Furious Star Trek Transformers Outsiders X-men Batman Star Wars X-Files Watchmen Highlander Top Music Fandoms Metallica Panic! At the Disco American Idol Radiohead Fall Out Boy Nine Inch Nails My Chemical Romance X-Japan The Beatles Savage Garden Top Television Fandoms Supernatural Roswell Merlin Jon and Kate Plus 8 Star Trek Gilmore Girls Beauty and the Beast Batman CSI Doctor Who Top Video Games Fandoms Pokemon Final Fantasy VII Silent Hill Final Fantasy Sonic: The Hedgehog Zelda Kingdom Hearts (Comment on this)
9:02 am [purplepopple]	What's hot on Fan History for June 2009 What was hot for June 2009? Drama, fan fiction and ships. A lot of this data is really interesting but digging down, what we don't post, is actually a bit more interesting. (Michael Jackson's death gave us some visits for people looking for fan fiction.) It will be interesting to see if the trends are similar next month. Most Popular Articles 33,144 pages were viewed a total of 185,876 times Draco/Hermione - 3,766 visits Cassandra Claire - 1,699 visits : Back near the top after having been knocked off last month Race Fail 2009 - 1,415 visits Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction Archive - 1,412 visits AdultFanFiction.Net - 1,377 visits Naruto - 1,026 visits FanFiction.Net - 961 visits Digimon - 953 visits Russet Noon - 898 visits Update: Permabanned users policy change - 839 visits : blog entry. Featured on fandom_wank because of comment by LadySybilla Most Popular Searches Leading to Fan History galbadia hotel adultfanfiction naruto wiki adult fanfiction restricted section gosselins without pity emo porn cassandra claire draco hermione greatestjournal Most Popular Referrers to Fan History Referring sites sent 10,761 visits via 965 sources journalfen.net - 1,289 visits AnimeNewsNetwork - 1,163 visits chickipedia - 820 visits: Midway through the month, the site moved to MadeMen.Com and it looks like their traffic dropped off community.livejournal.com - 661 visits fanfiction.net - 335 visits twitter.com - 306 visits fanpop - 297 visits tvtropes.org - 255 visits deviantart.com - 185 visits mademan.com - 173 visits Most Popular Internal Searches There were 3,832 unique searches via 3,619 search terms sasuke - 8 searches keva - 7 searches astolat - 6 searches maderr - 6 searches racefail - 6 searches st astryr of the uncool - 5 searches Likos64 - 4 searches aggybird - 4 searches angstgoddess003 - 4 searches asylum 2009 - 4 searches Most Popular Fandoms Naruto Digimon Twilight Supernatural Harry Potter Transformers Mortal Instruments Prince of Tennis Jon and Kate Plus 8 Gundam Wing Most Popular Fans Cassandra Claire LadySybilla Maya Laura Msscribe Peter Chimaera Maygra Bhaalspawn Charlie Prince Ithilien22 Most Popular Ships Draco/Hermione Sesshoumaru/Kagome Harry/Draco Harry/Hermione Michael/Maria Draco/Ginny Harry/Ginny Spock/Uhura - Movie and kerfluffle related bump Janeway/Chakotay Bumblebee/Sam Most Popular Kerfluffles Cassandra Claire Race Fail 2009 Russet Noon Update: Permabanned users policy change - blog entry. Featured on fandom_wank because of comment by LadySybilla First there was Torchsong Chicago. Now there is TwiCon… - blog entry. Linked on fandom_wank in the comments. Mortal Instruments Race Fail 2009 by Author LadySybilla Cassandra Claire's Plagiarism J&N: A Love Story Most Popular Fan Fiction Archives Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction Archive AdultFanFiction.Net FanFiction.Net FanFiction.net : capitalization difference would make it number one RestrictedSection FanWorks.Org GreatestJournal FanLib FanDomination.Net God Awful Fan Fiction (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
7:53 am [purplepopple]	Crosspost: Deletion policy update The following is a crosspost from Fan History's blog. Please comment on the blog. Fan History recently clarified our deletion policies in response to on wiki deletion requests related to fanzine covers. The following is the current version that is subject to change as we continue to evaluate and refine our policies. If we make any major changes to this, we will make a new post. Fan art and fanzine covers Fan art, including fanzine covers, presents an issue of specific concern at Fan History. We believe that fan artists should have control over where their work is hosted, yet wiki contributors may feel that the inclusion of a piece of fan art is important in an article when documenting fannish history. ("Fan art" as Fan History defines it for these purposes includes but is not necessarily limited to photomanipulations and original hand-drawn or digitally-created artwork of fannish content. Please note that simple screencaptures, magazine/article scans, and other images which have not been significantly altered from another copyright holder's image, video, or other property is not considered "fan art".) Likewise, Fan History believes that we can complete our mission of documenting the history of fanzines in fandom without copies of fanzine covers. We also believe that, in general, we comply with fair use when we upload copies of covers. These covers can illustrate the contents of a fanzine, artist styles during certain time periods, help people understand who fan artists were that were active in fandom. Because of this, we allow users to submit fanzine covers. We will honor requests that fanzine cover art and other types of fan art be deleted. If you are the creator of a piece of fan art to be deleted (or the publisher of a 'zine which included a piece of fan art) you should complete the following steps to have any uploaded images removed: E-mail delete@fanhistory.com. The e-mail should include: Links to all cover/fan art that you wish to be deleted. Some proof that you are the artist (or publisher for the fanzine including the piece of fan art). After you have made this request including the necessary information, please allow up to two weeks for an administrator to respond. The administrator will delete the images. If an article includes the image, it will either be replaced with an image saying the cover art has been deleted at the artist's request or the image link will be removed from the article. After the administrator has completed these steps, you will receive an e-mail confirming this. (You can also monitor the wiki to check for these changes.) Please note that, as with article deletion requests, it is up to the creator of the removed image to monitor the wiki to see that the image is not re-uploaded at a later time, and to submit a new deletion request if it is. Fanzine article deletion request If you are the publisher of a fanzine, you may request an article about your fanzines be deleted. The process is similar to that of people article deletion requests. This is done as a courtesy to the fan community. Requests will be honored depending on the availability of Fan History's staff and the rationale behind the reason for requesting deletion. Please allow up to two weeks for a response from the administrators upon submitting a request. The publisher of the fanzine featured in the the article in question sends an e-mail to delete@fanhistory.com. The e-mail should include the following: The url of the article(s) that the person is seeking to have be deleted. Without this information the administrators may not be able to find your entry. Proof that the person is the publisher of those fanzines. A rationale for deleting of the article(s). An acknowledgment that the publisher understands that Fan History is a wiki that anyone can edit, and that it is their job to monitor the wiki to make certain no one creates a new article on the same subject, as it is not the administrators' job to do so. After having e-mailed the deletion request, the deletion requestor must add the following text to the talk page (see the "talk" tab) of the article to be deleted: {{Fanzine ADR}} This will add a text box that looks like: The publisher of this fanzine requests that wiki contributors not recreate the article. The publisher that made this request understands that Fan History is a wiki and that anyone can recreate the article using a different title. They ask that you do not. Please respect their wishes or contact them for additional details. . After you have done that, type (or copy and paste) the following message: I am the publisher of this fanzine and I have requested that this article be deleted from Fan History. I ask that other contributors to the wiki please respect my wishes to not be included. I understand that this is a wiki and that other contributors may choose to create another article about me or reference this fanzine elsewhere in the wiki. Because of that, I understand it is my job to regularly check that no one has created a similar article against my wishes. --~~~~ After both of those steps have been completed, the rationale for deletion and importance of the fanzine in fandom history will be reviewed. Depending on the rationale involved, the article will most likely be deleted. If the rationale is deemed insufficient or the fanzine has been determined to be too important to the history of fandom, the article will not be deleted. If that happens, the following template will be placed on the article page: This article is not eligible for deletion because it does not meet ADR requirements. Please see the talk page for this article for additional information detailing what made this article notable. If this article is about you and you have questions, please see your talk page or e-mail support[@]fanhistory[.]com. The ADR request will be removed from the talk page and there will be additional comment on the talk page explaining why. Can you explain notability some more? Fan History has a policy not to delete articles about fans who are determined to be notable. The definition of notable is up to the discretion of the administrator dealing with the deletion request. In most cases, administrators consult with others before determining if a person is notable. General guidelines: Not notable A fan is not notable if the article is was created by a bot and has had no edits to it since, A fan is not notable if they are not mentioned on other articles on Fan History, A fan is not notable if they have very little google exposure, and A fan is not notable if they have fewer than 20 fans, "followers" or "friends" on services like Twitter or LiveJournal. General guidelines: Notable A fan is notable if they have been featured on fandom wank, A fan is notable if they have been mentioned by mainstream media, and A fan is notable if they have more than 1000 followers on a social media service like Twitter or LiveJournal. A fanzine is notable if there was a major kerfluffle around it. A fanzine may be notable if it won an award like a FanQ. A fanzine may be notable if it is represents a trend in fanzine production, content or because of the contributors. A fanzine may be notable if it has been cited and/or mentioned in a professionally published book or academic article on fandom. When there is a question regarding notability, the practice is to error on the side of non-notable. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 11th, 2009
8:53 am [purplepopple]	First there was Torchsong Chicago. Now there is TwiCon... This is a crosspost of a blog entry on Fan History's blog. What is it with conventions and problems with their guests of honor lately? Guests haven't not been able to attend. Expectations for attendance by the masses regarding the guests of honor have been off the mark. High prices for tickets lead to expectations that concoms don't seem to be able to meet or convey effectively to avoid disappointment. Two conventions have dealt with this recently. First there was Torchsong Chicago. Then there was TwiCon. Below are extracts from both articles on Fan History to convey the problems both conventions are suffering: Torchsong Chicago: There was also mixed reaction from the risque antics which John Barrowman apparently got up to during his satellite-link appearances in both the Q&A session and the Cabaret.[21],[22],[23] There were later requests from John not to post/share some of the more raunchy aspects of what went down publicly, for fear of negative backlash from the British press, and again, some fans reacted negatively, feeling they were being manipulated.[24],[25] It was also pointed out that the video feed was copyrighted and the con management did not want photos of the feed posted due to copyright concerns.[26] Accusations of jealousy were made over some of these issues of requested silence and non-posting of photos.[27] TwiCon: In 2009, the cost of membership was listed as $255/person.[1] On June 9, 2009, it was announced that only one "free" autograph would be included with the membership, and attendees had to reserve their free autograph of choice in advance (beginning June 19). There would be a limit of 2 autographs and one photo-op per attendee, and each guest would only do 65 photo-ops. Many fans were upset by this announcement, feeling they had been mislead on how the autographs and photos would be handled and given the cost of membership to the convention.[2] What is going on with conventions these days? Have people become used to the idea of megaconventions like DragonCon and ComiCon in San Diego? Do high costs of running these events drive up the expectations to the point where they are not managable? Did the connectivity of the Internet just make the drama involving conventions easier to access? Whatever the reasons, this sort of convention drama is not going to go away any time soon. If you're attending a convention, look at issues that attendees at other conventions have dealt with. Be prepared and have some sort of plan in case of a worst case scenario. Know your rights and understand refund policies before you purchase a ticket so that you don't get any surprises like the people attended Torchsong Chicago and those who will attend TwiCon. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
9:32 pm [purplepopple]	J&N: A Love Story by Rachel Plotkin This is a cross post from Fan History's blog post of the same name. J&N: A Love Story by Rachel Plotkin is a Twilight story that the author self published and listed on Amazon.com. This would be notable in and of itself but this is the second time in less than two month that the Twilight fandom has wanked this issue hard. Unlike the situation with Russet Noon, this one looks like it will end a lot faster. Less than 24 hours after the story made fandom wank (and was removed when f_w learned a minor was involved), the story was gone from Amazon.com. Why is this happening again and again? Technology has made publishing material like this so much easier. There are fewer barriers to entry. Fandom has fewer gatekeepers and mentors that can help socialize and help new fen learn social norms. We're going to see a lot more of this in the coming years because of those issues. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 8th, 2009
8:00 am [purplepopple]	Top referrers for the first week of June: Fan History Wiki This is a crosspost from Fan History's June 8th blog entry. It's been a while since we looked at our referrers so here is a list of our top referrers for the period between June 1, 2009 and June 6, 2009. There are a few more referrers not on this list that provided less traffic. These are just our major ones. Referrer Visits livejournal.com 302 animenewsnetwork.com 213 chickipedia.com 211 bing 125 journalfen 121 twitter 73 fanfiction.net 67 tvtropes.org 54 deviantart 51 wikipedia 45 fanpop 38 wikia 30 inuyasha-fanfiction.com 28 jumptags.com 25 answers.yahoo.com 18 boards.endoftheinter.net 16 hogwartsnet.ru 15 imdb.com 11 therethere.net 10 wiki.fandomwank.com 10 dearauthor.com 9 savekp.proboards.com 9 cassandraclaire.com 8 encyclopediadramatica.com 8 i-newswire.com 8 identi.ca 8 russet-noon.com 7 wishluv.blogspot.com 7 insanejournal 2 answers.com 1 cwanswers.com 1 There are sites that don't appear there where we've done a fair amount of link building including Mahalo. If you're looking at them for link building and getting referrers? It probably isn't worth the time. orkut, bebo, Quizilla, MySpace, Facebook aren't on there. We haven't really done any link building on those sites. We do have a fair amount of links on FriendFeed but as we are not actively engaged on there, we just don't get traffic as a result. Our Yahoo!Answers traffic are from past questions we've answered: We're still getting traffic from them months later. DeviantART links are all organic and weren't us engaged in link building activities. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
10:55 am [purplepopple]	Top articles on Fan History for May 2009 This is a cross post from Fan History's official blog. Another month ends and it is time for another list of some of the most popular, most viewed articles for May 2009. Articles Draco/Hermione Russet Noon Race Fail 2009 Cassandra Claire Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction_Archive Twilight AdultFanFiction.Net Digimon FanFiction.Net Naruto Fandoms Cassandra Claire Twilight Digimon Naruto Supernatural Star Trek Jon and Kate Plus 8 Gundam Wing Harry Potter Sailor Moon Ships Draco/Hermione Sesshoumaru/Kagome Snape/Hermione Kirk/Spock Michael/Maria Harry/Draco Harry/Hermione Max/Liz Takari Draco/Ginny Kerfluffles Russet Noon Race Fail 2009 Cassandra Claire Dreamwidth Studios Race wank LiveJournal GreatestJournal Cassandra Claire's Plagiarism Fandom Wank Fans Cassandra Claire LadySybilla Maya Caito Msscribe Bhaalspawn Heidi8 Ithilien22 Dot-chan Minisinoo Fan Fiction Archives and Blogging Services Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction_Archive AdultFanFiction.Net FanFiction.Net Dreamwidth Studios LiveJournal GreatestJournal FanWorks.Org RestrictedSection FanLib FanDomination.Net (Comment on this)
Monday, May 25th, 2009
10:28 am [purplepopple]	Kirk/Spock history Over on Fan History Wiki, we're trying to improve Kirk/Spock article and would really appreciate any help you could provide by improving it. There was a list of influential fanzines posted at kirkspock_recs and we'd love to see that expanded upon with editorial comment as to why they were influential influential fanzines section. The timeline could also use some help being improved. For a number of years, the story of the Ring of Shoshern possibly being the first Kirk/Spock story published and circulated as drawerfic. There doesn't seem to be much confirmation regarding this story out there. It would be great to get more dates on that, especially if it can be proven that it predated A Fragment Out of Time. It would also be great to see any of the the 27 articles about Kirk/Spock fanzines improved because they really help with developing a picture of the fandom's early history in which those two stories were launched. It would also be great to get more information about the pairing's current situation given the movie release. Apparently, there has been some drama involving accusations of racism for people who write Kirk/Spock instead of Spock/Uhura. It would be great to see that documented and how it is impacting writers who are just starting to write in the space or who have been writing in the space for years. Thanks for any assistance you can provide in improving the article. :) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
12:25 pm [purplepopple]	Race Fail 2009/Mammoth Fail 2009 This is a crosspost from Fan History's blog. We've largely been watching Race Fail and Mammoth Fail from the sidelines, trying to document what is going on and provide a good resource for people who want information about the topic in as neutrally as possible. We've occasionally been checking our search referrer keywords to know where to focus on adding links and out of curiosity as to what people interested in the situation were really interested in. We were intrigued and thought that our blog readers might be too. The chart below includes keyterms related to Race Fail and Mammoth Fail for the period between April 19 and May 18, 2009. Things that kind of surprised me: People were looking for information on Cassandra Claire's involvement in race fail. (I don't think she's participated.) Interest is still high regarding Elizabeth Bear's involvement in race fail, despite the precipitating event being several months old. Interest is not higher in regards to Patricia Wrede and Lois McMaster Bujold. People are still interested in Will Shetterly's involvement in race fail. There is interest in finding out more about a boycott of Tor as a result race fail. People don't seem as interested in what members of the fan community like vee-ecks are saying so much as they are about the professional authors. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
7:20 pm [purplepopple]	Jon and Kate Plus 8 fandom This article is mirrored from Fan History's blog. With Jon and Kate Plus 8 back in the news, I figured now was a great time to beg for help with our Jon and Kate Plus 8 articles. They all have a pretty good start but it would awesome to see them improved. How is the media obsession with the couple impacting the fan community? Are people being burned off the fandom because it has turned very celebrity gossip? What's the current history of the fandom? Jon and Kate Plus 8 Jon Gosselin Gosselin Do Not Need Our Pity Gosselins Without Pity Jon and Kate Plus 8 -- A Balanced View Kate Is A Shrew The Anti-Gosselins Without Pity The top two articles are where we'd like to see the most work but we'd also appreciate getting a better history of the major blogs and the folks who run them and comment on them. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
7:01 pm [purplepopple]	Dreamwidth Studios growth This blog entry was originally post to Fan History's blog. One of our admins has been updating the totals related to Dreamwidth Studios for a couple of days. The chart below is a copy and paste from the Dreamwidth Studios article. There really isn't enough data to draw any conclusions but short term conclusions are still fun to make anyway. It looks like between May 2 and May 5, a lot of new people joined and then set about importing the comments from their old LiveJournal posts. It is the three day period recorded with the most new OpenID accounts appearing. Caught in that net, to date, includes over 334,000 different LiveJournal users. Wow. Over on my LiveJournal, there has been some speculation that comment importing has largely been a move similar to that of FanLib, where users were allowed to easily move their content over in order to provide the new site with lots of additional content in order to attract new users. Comment importing is one form of quick content creation. (Though FanLib didn't allow you to import your FanFiction.Net reviews. They just allowed you to import your stories.) It looks like the number of active accounts peaked on May 5/6. Since then, the volume of posting by new members has been lower in terms of actives in the past 7 days and past 24 hours. To me, this suggests that people surged in to join, to name squat and to see where the service will go. As we're talking four days in a row below the high with about 1,000 fewer people updating daily, I'm not quite ready to buy the rational that this is a weekend trend and that the numbers will pick up. The idea that people appear to be name squatting and not utilizing the service is confirmed for me because less than half of the people who have been active in some way have ever posted an entry. The total accounts that have been active in some way seems pretty close to the number of people who were members of fandom_counts, a community with roughly around 34,000 people. I'm really curious to know how much crossover there is between the two that their numbers are so close. Dreamwidth Studios Historical Data Date Total Accounts That are active in some way That have ever posted an entry That have posted an entry in last 30 days That have posted an entry in the last 7 days That have posted an entry in the last 24 hours May 2, 2009 228878 27252 10359 10324 8841 4120 May 5, 2009 286805 34106 14117 14080 12592 5034 May 6, 2009 301085 36333 15603 15564 14077 4845 May 7, 2009 314431 38106 16871 16819 15294 3882 May 9, 2009 321405 38879 17564 17493 13172 2824 May 10, 2009 323769 39087 17786 17710 12115 2912 May 11, 2009 328542 39514 18157 18054 11055 3420 May 12, 2009 334359 39948 18576 18450 10352 3561 (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
4:34 pm [purplepopple]	From the keyword vault... 2 I really loved doing the last post. We got a few more visits with interesting keywords to our blog. (The wiki is much better optimized. We get few hits based on these sort of keywords.) what to do after wank When I first read these, I thought that these were related to wank, the fannish term. I had a mental block and didn't realize that people were visiting the blog looking for masturbation advice. Given that, on with the question! If we are talking actual masturbation, when you're done, you clean yourself up. Then, if you like Fan History, you visit pages like fandom_wank and slash. If you're talking about wanking of the fandom sort, when you're done, you take a fandom break for a couple of days. wanking is frequently high stress. When you're done, you need time to think, to cool down to re-evaluate, to assess what steps you need to take after that to protect yourself in fandom. neil patrick harris icons livejournal We've got information about a couple of Neil Patrick Harris LiveJournal communities. We don't have any icons on the wiki. You could probably upload a few if you wanted to illustrate information relevant articles. You're probably better off searching on LiveJournal for that, rather than using Google. dreamwidth greatestjournal Dreamwidth Studios and GreatestJournal have nothing to do with each other, other than both having core fandom audiences, being run by one or two volunteers, being run with the intention of living off the money earned from the sites and using modified versions of LiveJournal's open source code. The people who run it are not the same. They have different cultures. GreatestJournal was populated early by role players. Dreamwidth Studios was populated by metafans. wanking race Seriously? Do people actually have races where two or three people get together to see who can get it off first? I don't have advice for that. I haven't seen any sort of race to wank to make fandom_wank or metafandom. If people know of any bets to see who could make one or the other in a wankfest, let me know as it would be enlightening and educational. livejournal stats If you're looking for LiveJournal statistics, check out LiveJournal community size. Sadly, these numbers haven't been updated in a while because of a problem with our bot but there are three month months worth of data that still make it useful and interesting. There are a couple more that I really would like to do. They require a bit more extensive answers like "why twilight is so big?" and "how do you communicate if service users are upset" so I'm putting that off for a bit. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
3:36 pm [purplepopple]	From the keyword vault... This is mirrored from Fan History's blog. Sometimes, we get some interesting keyword searches on out blog that look like people need answers that we haven't answered. In that spirit, I'm going to address some of those. what rating did the fans give the twilight movie and why Ratings can best be found on Yahoo!Movies and on IMDB. Yahoo!Movies fans really liked the movie more than IMDB users. If there was a large amount of wank about the movie being awful, it never hit the radar of the people contributing to our Twilight article. nicole p. and bonnaroo / nicole p. 104.5 / 104.5 bonnaroo contest Looking for info on Nicole P? And why she's been getting votes in that contest? That's because we've been heavily plugging it in several places, including Fan History's main page. Go vote please. We would really love for her to be able to go so she could report on music fandom for Fan History. :D star trek fan total members How many members are there in the Star Trek fandom? I can't really answer that easily. There are at least 5,500 fans on LiveJournal. We can guess that there are over 3,000 on FanFiction.Net for Star Trek in its various forms. We know there are at least 45 on InsaneJournal. We also know there at least 43 on JournalFen. There are probably other places to get numbers but those are the ones we have on the wiki. the most obscure fandom ever What is the most obscure fandom ever? That's almost impossible to answer. There are a huge number of small fandoms with very few fan communities. Some of them could be really old, with very little that got translated online. A good example probably includes Road to Morocco. You also can have local sports team for sports that don't have big international audiences. An example of that includes the Storhamar Dragons based out of Norway. Most people probably haven't heard of them. So in this case, we really need the term obscure better defined. fanfiction net - meme's stargate I don't have a clue. It might appear in our Stargate article, but skimming it? I'm not seeing an answer. Some one please educate me! trace the ip address who visited my community on orkut I've got nothing. If you can put images in your profile or community, I highly suggest getting a paid account and using LJToys. I just don't know orkut well enough to provide better information. anime fan art history A history of fanart can be found on Fan History's fanart article. It really needs more work, and only generally touches on anime so the anime article might be a better source. can wanking be beneficial to growth We talked about this a lot in this blog entry about generating positive metrics. Wanking can help provide short term traffic spikes but don't provide long term traffic stability unless you can do that again and again and again on a consistent basis. Depending on your content? That may not be desirable. So ends this edition of "From the keyword vault..." I kind of liked writing this so I may do another edition soon. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 1st, 2009
10:54 am [purplepopple]	April 2009: Most popular fandoms This is a cross post from Fan History's blog. April has ended and I'm feeling in the mood to blog. So in celebration of April ending and rain letting up and May flowers coming, a list of the most popular fandom articles (based the number of article views) on Fan History for the month of March and a break down of the most popular articles on Fan History for year to date. April 2009: Most popular fandoms Cassandra Claire The Fast and the Furious - Movie interest Digimon Naruto Harry Potter Roswell Gundam Wing Twilight Supernatural Prince of Tennis April 2009: Most popular articles Draco/Hermione Russet Noon - Referenced on Fandom Wank and elsewhere Cassandra Claire - Page views down from last month Sakura Lemon Fan-Fiction Archive The Fast and the Furious User talk:Artistic Revolution - Related to being mentioned on fandom wank. AdultFanFiction.Net Caito - Person who posted the wank report on fandom wank FanFiction.Net Digimon January to April 2009: Most popular fandoms Cassandra Claire Naruto Digimon Twilight Gundam Wing The Fast and the Furious Harry Potter Dragon Ball Z Supernatural Pride and Prejudice (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
11:31 am [purplepopple]	Fanzines galore: 1,600+ fanzines added to Fan History This is a cross post from Fan History's blog. ROFLCOPTER (purpose) flew on in an created roughly 1,600 articles about fanzines on Fan History. These fanzines represent a number of different communities including soccer, rugby, Rat Patrol, Star Wars, science fiction, Bon Jovi and punk. This brings the total number of articles we have about fanzines on Fan History to over 2,000. This makes Fan History one of the largest sources of information about Fanzines on the Internet. We're very excited about that because we love fanzines. Heck, a lot of our early information on the wiki was about fanzines. Why do we love fanzines? Because fanzines give us a peek into fandom's past, before the Internet was around. They were part of a subculture, an underground culture which helped people connect to part of a larger community that might otherwise not be as accessible. Fanzines provide a record of our history that we can touch. And they are a tradition that continues even now... When we created these articles, we tried to have some basic information. This included title, fandom, the year the fanzine was published, who the publisher was and the source for this information. As a result, our articles aren't very comprehensive. That's really where we need your help. If you know these fandoms and fanzines, please help edit to improve that information to improve on our fanzine stubs. What awards did these zines win? What was their impact on the fan community? Was the zine the first one that appeared in that fan community? Where was it published? What was the size and what was the content? What happened to the fans who produced the zine? Do you have a copy of the zine? Any information you can add would be appreciated. And if you know of a fanzine that isn't represented but want to put it on the wiki, copy and paste our fanzine template to your new article, add your information and save the page. If you need any help formatting or creating a new article, let me or another admin know as we'll happily help you with that. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
6:19 pm [purplepopple]	Geocities is closing! Geocities is closing. Considering how important Geocities was to fan fiction communities circa 1998 to 2004, I really want a list of and history of sites on Geocities. I have an excel file that you can slot information into. (This information can then be wikified.) If you might be interested in helping to create a list of Geocities sites, their names, fandoms and dates related to the site, please comment with contact information so I can send you the file that you can use to add information. And then send it back to me when you've added what you can to it. Please feel free to pass this information along. I really, really do NOT want to lose this history. Additional information can be found here. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
6:03 pm [purplepopple]	Fan fiction culture does not encourage wiki contributions This is a cross post from Fan History's blog. A few days ago, I published a blog entry titled The problems FanLore faces are not unique: Learning from Fan History’s experience. In the course of editing it, we removed some bits that weren't relevant to what we were responding to. One bit I thought was still pretty interesting so, lo! The bit reappears here! Fan History's admins all been in fandom a long time, and sometimes this whole issue of doing crosstalk in an collaborative way that anyone can contribute can be intimidating. In fandom, this just is not done. With a piece of fan fiction, the process is solitary in creation and when the story is finished, there is no real questioning the process, questioning the organization, suggesting ways to improve the story. It just isn't something that is fundamental to our cultural practices. People don't ask "Why did you have Harry Potter doing that particular spell in that scene? Could you use this spell instead?" If they do that, it tends to be viewed as antagonistic, or questioning the author's writing ability. And on the off chance the author and their supporters do agree that something could have been done differently, most of the time the author doesn't go back and change it. And if they do? The audience doesn't generally go back and read it. Our cultural practices from the fan community just don't lend themselves to crosstalk as equals. (Comment on this)