Betas! How can we help you find them? Especially for newbies? (also: tags)

[littlebutfierce]

The tiny thing in this post first: I've been messing around w/the tags, in an effort to make them nested & neat, & much easier to browse if you want WIP challenge stuff that isn't a check-in post, or info on writing sessions in your time zone, etc. I think there's a bug that still needs tweaking, but we'll see what Support says. BTW, if any of you have been interested in nested tags but couldn't find the info on how to use them, my support request has some useful explanations!

On to betas! There's been consistent interest in finding betas through the comm. How can we make this happen for you? I thought maybe a list of people volunteering to beta might be helpful, but I know that such lists go out of date almost immediately. There's even beta_masterlist, but that doesn't seem to be active either.

Looking at the other side of the equation, if you need a beta, feel free to post & ask! If we get to the point where we have a dozen beta-seeking posts a day, we'll have to rethink that, but for now it's absolutely fine.

But I'm still really stuck on wanting a way to keep a list of volunteer betas. Is there anyone else who would find this useful? I ask partly because of this comm's original focus on fic-writing newbies, & my experience as a newbie myself (which wasn't so long ago...). I was terrified of posting fic, & especially putting my username to it--this is why my AO3 name is different!--& certainly at first, I was too afraid to ask anyone I knew for a beta. None of my friends were in the fandom, & well, yes, I could've posted to the fandom's LJ comm. But it has over a thousand members. Way too intimidating for me at the time. Eventually I got my nerve up to ask a friend of mine to beta for me, & things got better from there.

But still, I agonized so much over daring to ask for a beta! I can't be the only person who went through that. Of course, even if we had a volunteer beta list, people would still have to approach a beta directly, but I think it would've felt less intimidating to me.

Also, I like betaing, & (time/energy permitting, fandoms matching if need be) would be happy to do more of it. It'd be nice to find a way to note that to people in this comm.

Any ideas on how to do this & keep it relevant & up-to-date without being too burdensome? Maybe it's impossible, but thoughts welcome!

Comments

[curuchamion]

I'm on the other side of things, usually - a beta reader who'd like to do more work but seldom gets asked. (Okay, that's partly because some RL issues last year caused me to quit beta-ing entirely for a while, and I've not managed to pick it back up yet.) And when I do need a beta myself, it's always fandom-specific, so I'm always hunting for new ones. (I'm a bit of a fandom-hopper, yeah.)

Sadly, I have no ideas on how to keep a comm-wide list of volunteer betas up to date...

[littlebutfierce]

Oh, I hear you on the fandom-hopping & thus needing new betas. If only my friends would let me drag them into new fandoms w/me, I'd have less of a problem, maybe. ;)

I like beta-ing too!