Re: A New Buffy/Willow Site!! Please read!

["Quindo Ma" <quindo.ma@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hmmm.... ya know, I'm wondering why you actually created this list.
I've seen my fair share of creations and deaths of lists, some I found the
idea itself good, but in the end, most just didn't get enough posts, and
ended somewhere lost.
I do hope you don't have to bear that fate yourself, but I fear it won't be
much different with this list.

You see, I've been a member here for a good 2 1/2 years now, joined shortly
after it was created, around february 1999 I think. Since then, I've seen
authors come and go, some stayed, others created amazing fics, but over the
course of the past years, there haven't been many regulars that posted fic,
a dozen or two maybe, with the respective feedback to the lists. I have, and
I'm proud of that, saved up at least 80-90% of the mails from these two
lists, with small breakdowns here and there.

But, and this is just my own experience, there haven't been as many pure 'on
topic' posts as one might expect. This wasn't a bad thing overall, sure
there have been messages that were *so* off topic, that Kim stepped up and
told them to cease the thread, but in the end, it were OT posts that kept
the lists alive in times where fic was scarce and true Buffy loves and wants
Willow moments were even scarcer. If you look at the archive of the lists,
these past weeks haven't really had the spur of posts I know from other
lists, where I sometimes get 100 and more messages per day. And some of
those posts were OT.

In my humble opinion, your idea is good, but with there already being the
BuffylovesWillow and BuffywantsWillow lists, and the already small amount of
hardcore B/W fanatics, who don't want anything but Buffy and Willow in the
topic of their mails, you're going to have quite some problems keeping the
activity of the list up for long, if even at all.

Now don't get me wrong, I fully count myself as a fanatical Buffy/Willow
shipper, but that doesn't say that I don't enjoy other coupling either,
especially if they come from persons like Pat Kelly, who 'introduced' me to
this ship with one of his stories being the one I read first, but having a
list that already has a 'big brother', so to speak, it's going to be very
hard to maintain such a list.

In the end, what I'm saying is, there may be a lot of off topic posts on our
lists, but it are these posts that make much of the life in here. Without
them, we'd have a lot less members, a lot less posts, and would likely have
ended like the numerous other near dead lists by now, with a post every few
weeks, and maybe an answer or two. Trust me, I've seen such things, they
*do* exist ;-)

Regards and good luck

Quin