Post by Admin on Mar 23, 2023 0:21:27 GMT
Hello Teitho followers!
We wanted to touch base with you all and ask for your input or thoughts. In our capacity as mods, we have seen a slow but steady decline in engagement on the Teitho challenge site over recent months. We haven't had any submissions for the last four challenges.
We saw a bit of a resurgence in activity when we transferred to the ProBoards website initially, but over the past few challenges we have seen few, if any, submissions.
Our last two challenges have had no submissions at all.
Teitho is one of the very few surviving independent sites of Tolkien fanfiction. The once robust community of such sites has—much like the Elves of Middle-earth—dwindled.
This puts us at a bit of a crossroads. We’ve worked hard to keep Teitho going, to put out interesting challenges for our readers/writers, and to keep the fandom lights on for this archive. But with engagement tapering off and plateauing, the question arises: do we keep trying to revive it/reinvigorate it (and how?) or do we quietly turn the lights off?
Our preference, of course, would be to keep it going. But this is where we need some input from you.
We did a survey a few years ago, when Teitho had originally started to founder a bit, and utilized that feedback to expand the scope of the challenge: from being focused on LOTR/Legolas and Aragorn-based fic to fic inclusive of the entire legendarium; making the time frame for challenges longer to allow for more writing time; expanding the time for voting if there were numerous fics submitted. Those changes resulted in a temporary period of increased engagement but it has not been sustained.
We are very happy to take any and all feedback you are willing to give us. We can create another survey and post a link for it or you can email us your thoughts directly on this thread. You can also eamil us at teitho.contest@gmail.com (or through Facebook messenger, Twitter or Tumblr DMs.)
Our greatest wish is for Teitho to thrive. But we also don’t want to keep something going that perhaps is past it’s prime and on an unsustainable downward trajectory. The demise of many fandom archives has saddened us. We had hoped Teitho would not meet a similar fate.
We value your thoughts. We are more than willing to keep going, but truth be told it is quite disheartening to have an empty submission box month after month.
(Should the consensus be that Teitho is not as relevant to the fandom as it once was, we would plan to continue to keep the ProBoards site live indefinitely so readers could continue to access the archive and would also attempt to partner with Archive of Our Own/Organization for Transformative Works to import the Teitho archives to their site on a permanent basis.)
With thanks
Your Teitho mods,
Carawyn, Lotrfan, and Sian22
We wanted to touch base with you all and ask for your input or thoughts. In our capacity as mods, we have seen a slow but steady decline in engagement on the Teitho challenge site over recent months. We haven't had any submissions for the last four challenges.
We saw a bit of a resurgence in activity when we transferred to the ProBoards website initially, but over the past few challenges we have seen few, if any, submissions.
Our last two challenges have had no submissions at all.
Teitho is one of the very few surviving independent sites of Tolkien fanfiction. The once robust community of such sites has—much like the Elves of Middle-earth—dwindled.
This puts us at a bit of a crossroads. We’ve worked hard to keep Teitho going, to put out interesting challenges for our readers/writers, and to keep the fandom lights on for this archive. But with engagement tapering off and plateauing, the question arises: do we keep trying to revive it/reinvigorate it (and how?) or do we quietly turn the lights off?
Our preference, of course, would be to keep it going. But this is where we need some input from you.
We did a survey a few years ago, when Teitho had originally started to founder a bit, and utilized that feedback to expand the scope of the challenge: from being focused on LOTR/Legolas and Aragorn-based fic to fic inclusive of the entire legendarium; making the time frame for challenges longer to allow for more writing time; expanding the time for voting if there were numerous fics submitted. Those changes resulted in a temporary period of increased engagement but it has not been sustained.
We are very happy to take any and all feedback you are willing to give us. We can create another survey and post a link for it or you can email us your thoughts directly on this thread. You can also eamil us at teitho.contest@gmail.com (or through Facebook messenger, Twitter or Tumblr DMs.)
Our greatest wish is for Teitho to thrive. But we also don’t want to keep something going that perhaps is past it’s prime and on an unsustainable downward trajectory. The demise of many fandom archives has saddened us. We had hoped Teitho would not meet a similar fate.
We value your thoughts. We are more than willing to keep going, but truth be told it is quite disheartening to have an empty submission box month after month.
(Should the consensus be that Teitho is not as relevant to the fandom as it once was, we would plan to continue to keep the ProBoards site live indefinitely so readers could continue to access the archive and would also attempt to partner with Archive of Our Own/Organization for Transformative Works to import the Teitho archives to their site on a permanent basis.)
With thanks
Your Teitho mods,
Carawyn, Lotrfan, and Sian22
