Mod Post: You have GOT to be kidding me

[medie]

I'm not sure you guys realize this, but, um, I don't have time to be doing three and four passes through the rec categories every month, scooping up late volunteers and adding them to the list. We're hitting the busiest time of year at work, I am doing NaNoWriMo, I have a dozen other fannish commitments as well.

I am in the process of doing this month's list. I just finished the character prompts. We have, at any point, 17 character categories.

Do you know how many have volunteers for November?

3

I'm hoping things will look better when I hit the pairing categories, but I'm not holding my breath.

Whatever I find in those categories for November is it.

I will make NO second, third, and fourth passes through the categories. Any late volunteers we get will be put off until December.

This should not be a stressful process for me, people, but it is. It's frustrating. I look at the number of people watching this comm versus the number of people actually participating and I want to throw up my hands.

As it stands, we will NOT be adding any Stargate Universe categories. We may even start deleting categories out. Some of them haven't had volunteers in a year or more. The numbers just aren't there to keep them going or to add any SGU ones. Why should we? So I can comb through ten or fifteen more categories with no volunteers in them?

Communities like this run on the backs of its participants. Without your participation, there is no comm.

I like to pretend I can do everything myself, but really? I just don't have that much in me.

So, as they say, ball's in your court. What you choose to do with it is up to you.

Comments

[cyren-2132.livejournal.com]

I know you've got an established procedure, but it would seem to me to be a lot easier to do something more like a monthly rec sign-up post. (Admin post goes up, listing categories or not, and first commenter for a given category gets it — that sort of thing.)

I agree with this so much. I'm still only sort of sure I get how the volunteering works, and if I understand correctly (based on this line in the FAQ: "Pick the category you'd like to rec and leave a comment. When your month comes up, [info]medie will respond to your comment, letting you know that your month is coming."
), you volunteer for a category but the month you get it isn't necessarily certain. That seems almost as inconvenient for the reccers as it does the organizers.

Also, I think there's a link problem with the FAQ (or I'm just colossally stupid today) but the "Click here to volunteer to rec" link goes to the Memorable Entries page.

[cyren-2132.livejournal.com]

Nevermind on the broken link, further reading shows I WAS just being colossally stupid.

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm in with you, if it's any comfort — that's just one of the several points at which my brain decided to take a walk the first several times I tried to figure the process out, because it just didn't fit what I expected to find. ::shrug::

[medie]

That rule pretty much exists for one reason.

When it didn't? We had people turning up in January wanting to volunteer in July,or showing up in April trying to book December which meant I spent time reading through all the comments trying to find whoever wanted that particular month.

It was maddening.

Saying no people can't do that pretty much was a sanity-saving decision.

Which isn't to say we're complete ogres about it. Take this month for example. It's NaNoWriMo. So if there's a line up of volunteers in, say, Jack/Daniel, and I come to a person who says "oh shit, I'd like to volunteer this month, but I've got NaNo, so I really can't!" it's fine.

We'd just come back to them in December and see if their schedule was any better.