Iv said for a while that our biggest hurdle to realizing the full potential of this ship on the fan fic side of things is a lack of community, virtually all the other big ship groups have skype groups where they trade ideas, recruit pre-readers and editors and just generally chat about things, it helps build bonds and encourage writing. There's really no reason why we SHOULDN'T have one.

As one of the primary mods of the TwiDash group's skype for the past three years or so, I'd say that the main utility of those chat rooms isn't so much encouraging writing, sharing ideas, or finding editing help, but more about complaining about Game Grumps and trading pornography.

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Not Skype.

Yes Discord.

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Hey, you know that sounds fun too. Im mostly just suggesting it as a way to build up some real community here, we kind of suffer from a terminal lack of that for such a big ship with a fairly large group.

i'd be down for that for sure!

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I'll level with you, fimfic is a lot of really good things, but a 'group community encourager' it is not. Groups that have a thriving community presence are exceptions, not the rule, and the vast majority of them operate identically to this one. I'd go as far as saying that groups that are known to have more active forums—by which I mean ones with actual communities, not ones like Shipping or Clopfics that are 'active' insofar as they are 'choked with spam threads'—have largely dropped off over the past...let's say two years, compared to the state of things back during season 3 and earlier, and if I was forced to hazard a guess as to why, I'd say raw enthusiasm managed to offset the built in difficulties of trying to foster and maintain a community here. This site has a ton going for it as a fiction-sharing platform, but the community tools are not robust and the majority of people using the site are neither involved nor interested in being involved in this sort of fringe feature.

I mentioned the TwiDash skype group I mod, which has been active for three years now, but the TwiDash group here on the site? Let me put it this way: it has about three times the membership but less activity in the forum compared to the RariJack group. And that isn't because everybody uses the skype chat or anything (that chat is relatively large for a skype chat but...that translates to a membership of roughly 1% the size of the group itself), it's just the natural trend that groups on the site take. The primary utility of groups on fimfic is to conveniently find fics that match a set of criteria one is interested in, and 99% of the members of a given group aren't ever going to look at the forum. Most people turn thread notifications off and don't ever go to the dashboard.

Which isn't to say 'no, no skype or discord group, myeh,' or to discourage an attempt to get some activity going, or anything. Just being a realist about it.

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To be fair, I'm not really sure that long-term activity around a ship is all that sustainable simply because it is a fairly limited amount of content. The Shipping and Writing groups are broad and diverse enough to really survive forever, but there's only so much most people want to say about their pet ships. Actual writing activities and suchlike seem to be more of a driver than anything else, though sheer enthusiasm can close the gap.

5330469 He's right. Also inappropriate humor.