I’ve a little something that just frosts my cookies! For the past several years I have hosted a couple of LARP community oriented projects which I started in order to provide a venue for an aspect of the community that I felt was lacking. Those projects are the academic based mailing lists and the US LARP Wiki.
Why is it that only when I recently shared with the people that participate on each that I was looking to shut both down from non-use, that folks finally spoke up and shared that they valued the contributions and were sad to see things shut down.
If you really like something that someone is doing, particularly if you don’t have to pay a red cent to access, benefit from, utilize all the features of, etc., let the person or people running that site/mailing list/etc. know that. Use the resource and encourage others to. We wiki/mailing list/web site admins don’t always see (or hear) about the benefit something is. This is doubly important when we look at usage statistics and really don’t show the particular web property being utilized other than by spammers or indexing spiders (if that in some cases).
At the end of the day a lot of this really small stuff is done as a labor of love for a group or hobby that a person is a part of. Static articles are one thing, a dynamic web 2.0 site (like a wiki) is a whole other thing. If value can’t be seen to justify keeping something live on the admin’s end then don’t be surprised if it suddenly disappears.
As for the projects, in one case enough people spoke up that I decided to keep them up. That was the mailing lists. The second project, the LARP wiki, is still under debate at this time.
DISCLAIMER: This entry is the opinion of the author, Amber E. This is by no means endorsed by any other party be it an organization or individual. Some people may find the following remarks and/or generalizations offending. Proceed at your own risk. By reading this work you agree not to hold the author responsible for any anger, angst, drama, or any other bitter, angry, and rash feelings or actions that may follow after reading said opinion. By reading this entry you agree to this statement. (Kudos if you know what I originally wrote that disclaimer for.)