any ideas to promote this comm more and encourage reccing?

[ratcreature]

I'd love for this comm to become a bit livelier in this new year, and to broaden the reccer base.

While it is absolutely great that a handful of people rec so regularly, making sure the comm isn't (near-)dead, and there are also some new reccers every now and then, just reccing for a month, there often aren't enough reccers to average a rec per day, so fanart_recs definitely could be more active.

One way would be to make this comm more widely known and grow in numbers, some of whom then might rec eventually. I think for that having a banner to offer people prettier linking with some embedding code would be nice, but I suck at making attractive banners myself. So if anyone felt like making some we could offer, that would be great. Maybe if we had such pretties and a pre-made promotion they could just c&p more would spread the word than now. I could also use something like that to advertise again on dw_community_promo which I haven't done in a while.

The second way would be to encourage more current members and subscribers to make the jump to reccing, but I'm not sure what the barriers to that are there now. Is there anything that could be made easier and would make you consider reccing? Like, for example the comm could do occasional open posting periods outside the regular structure, allowing every member to rec a fanart they wanted to, without having to commit to a whole set but still dip their toes in. (though really, it's only four! *puppy dog eyes*)

Comments

[ratcreature]

I didn't think fandomcalendar would take comm promotions. I thought it was only for events.

I like the medium field because it gives information whether it's even worth clicking (or whether it's a medium you loathe) in the absence of preview images (which are not in the template because of the particular issues that arise from having images on a rec comm, e.g. the NSFW issue, problems of having to either hotlink or copy the image, the different attitudes artists have about displaying their art in shrunk/cropped format anywhere, and different ideas about needed permissions and so on, so that seemed far more trouble than I'd want to put on reccers or the comm). But FWIW, it's perfectly fine if you just say simply "drawing" there if the artist doesn't say and you can't tell any more.

As for the gallery link, that is true for some sites, but I find it very hard to navigate some other sites, especially ones in different languages I don't speak, and the artist name is often different from the user name if the name is not in Latin characters. So in those cases it is not redundant, but may be a real help for the casual rec browser to explore more of the artist, even though they are in a very different corner of fandom on an unfamiliar site.

Like I explained above, I'm completely opposed to any kind of reccing in comments, because it is either soon a complete mess where you don't find anything, or takes an enormous effort for someone (likely me) to go through and build a parallel structure (like on pinboard) to tag like kink memes do, or repost recs posted in comments to utilize the tags here, and since I'm lazy too, my willingness to take over work for others to allow them to rec only goes so far. I mean, I want to make it easy and convenient for others to participate, but I want the result be a neatly organized repository of recs without having to redo every rec in some way or another.

[turlough]

Do you ever promote the comm in dw_community_promo? I try to remember and promote mine there at least once a year. There is also lj_refugees where I know I've seen people post comm promos.

[ratcreature]

I have promoted in dw_community_promo twice so far. Once when the comm started, and once in 2011 when it was established for a while, but not recently. I intend to post there again once any tweaks arising from this discussion have been sorted out (and maybe someone will have felt inspired to make a pretty banner).

[busaikko]

I didn't mean to collect recs in comments for the comm, but for the reccers, who might be looking for art to rec. So the mod would not have to do anything with recs left in comments, but if I saw something that looked cool there I could add it to my rec-set and post it to the comm. (I'm pretty sure Delicious had the feature where you could send a link to someone, not sure if Pinboard has that; I know Twitter was kind of made for that.)