Rhapsody's ode to life

I am born and raised with the principle of noaberschap which in a nutshell means that in the neighbourhood or community one looks after another. The cynical person inside me has observed that such a principle has nearly diminished over time now that the survival of the fittest and the 'me me me'-culture has taken hold in many countries, including my own.

The past week has been quite interesting for the Tolkien fandom when Keith Mander who suddenly popped up at LotrFF.com as the new site owner while he was working on new upgrades. The site was offline for about 24 hours, probably due to that the site moved server. After that things escalated, thanks to esteliel allerting the fandom and fen in this entry, from there things snowballed. The past days many have reacted, laughed, giggled, stressed, tried to offer some advice (including yours truly) to this corporate-once-Google-and-Facebook-employee-newbie-to-the-fandom named Keith Mander. I doubt he has an idea about how a community works and how they look after another. Having worked at a social media site does not mean that you understand users and know what drives them. This oh so clearly shows and oh thank you Capt. Obvious for that!

I cannot help to think that while he follows the steps of his own social media hierarchy model, all he can think of what business this can generate. If you wish to read more elf has an excellent round-up post with links.

I have arrived at this conclusion because most of his reactions are all about him, what a good guy he is and that he needs to survive:
As I talked about in interviews and on my blog, I do seek out sites created out of passion, truth be told there's just more that I can do with these sites; more improvements to be made and so my time and effort is more leveraged (ie. more comes out of it). There's more opportunity to make some money from these sites so that I can survive. I am not rich. My business accounts are on public record.

Of course, I need to survive as well. Together with my spouse I have mouths to feed, kids to be clothed and put through school. My fannish friends face the challenges alike mine, and their friends ect. However, I work with two site owners who also struggle to survive, but of who I also know would show Mr Mander the door the moment you would come with such a business proposal. Why? Because they understand the value that cannot be reflected in a price. Yes, they pay out of pocket and will never break even. But that isn't so bad, since they are not running a business like Mr Mander does.

This being said: I am not judging Adora here. I know how high hosting fees are, I do own websites of my own and I gulp every year when I have to chalk up the money. Still the pleasure I get from the site outweighs the hosting fees. I can imagine that over time you want to pay back loaned money to others. I can imagine how she tried to find a solution, but most likely did not broaden her scope beyond Mr Mander. That is fine, everyone make mistakes. She just might not have known that someone knows somebody who could help or that one of her devoted mods gladly would have taken over from her. She had loans to repay, someone came with cash.

What we need on a personally level does not compare to what a community needs and what a community can provide to an individual. caras_galadhon has posted a love letter to the Tolkien fandom and within it she gives a solid piece of advice to Keith Mander. In this love letter you can read how this community works and how noaberschap kicks in when the community is threatened.

As I typed my comment there, I realised that Mr Mander cannot grasp why someone would invest so much time into a community and not earn a decent return of investment on it. Some archives manage to cover hosting fees, some do not. I can attest that many people have worked here in the fandom to create homes for fans, not out of self-interest, but simply because they knew how to do it, that they have the expertise to provide a service towards fans to share the love of the work. With that knowledge or that money to spare, we enable others to share their works, to seek out and connect with other fans. Maybe we do it for pure altruistic reasons. Maybe we do it because we want repay the help we got from fellow fans as we improved as writers. Maybe we do it because designing and running a site is a hobby of its own. Admins and moderators have their own very solid reasons why they run or help out as they do.

This all is done with blood, sweat and tears. No, this is not about that we do not feel appreciated or want the pat on our backs for doing so. We just do, no praise or compliments needed. How often have I not encountered a piece of coding that threw a wobbly and I had to dig in the software where to find and change it. Or that an upgrade should go smoothly and *poof* fatal SQL errors pop up, followed by curses slung at a monitor.

I have been working with efiction for many years and as much as it sometimes annoys the heck out of me when something should work as it should, but for whatever reason fails to do so. Or that I have to wait very patiently at the forum for any help, you also come to love the beast. And this beast has taught me a lot that same experience enables me to help my noabers who run their archive next door. It doesn’t matter if their archive gives a home to a different group of Tolkien fans. You just do and reach out to another so that the community can benefit from it.

Yes, surely a better platform can be made ( I know that there is an interest for it) or he could bring in his whiz kids and help efiction become better for the whole of the fandom, as a kind of thank you note for the current designer Tammy. Just the fact that he ditched it as bad software with his bruhahaha and I can throw in more money to come up with better stuff, that alone got me pissed and made me realise that he's clueless how much time, blood, sweat & tears these devoted coders have put into a piece of software without asking a price for it. It is open source software; they have spent years in improving a piece of software that caters to the specific needs of archive owners and its members. It is still evolving, just as technology does. Will Mr Mander understand that? I wonder if he does because it doesn’t show and his comments are quite telling.