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Do you know about how long it takes to be approved for Otherkin Alliance?  I registered but haven’t heard back yet.  I know they say that their spam filters are sensitive and you may need to email them about it, but I wasn’t sure how long the normal turnaround is.  Didn’t want to jump the gun on email them directly.

I’ve signed up for Otherkin Phenomena, but haven’t checked it out extensively yet.  It does seem rather active, at any rate.

In the past I haven’t much cared for Embracing Mystery, but it’s been ages since I’ve been over there and I may need to take another look; if there’s still signs of life there, they’re clearly doing *something* right.

As for signal to noise ratio and Realness, I’m still looking for that but at the moment I’m almost more concerned with signs of life.  You can’t get decent signal to noise ratios if there’s no one talking to make either.  

I went through almost the entire list of otherkin yahoogroups from otherkin.net earlier today, and about seven of the non-regional lists still seem to have traffic.  Maybe a couple more, since I didn’t want to check the sexuality themed ones from work.  “Traffic” being more than one post this year.  Even lists like Otherkin and Kin Frontiers are all but defunct.  It’s depressing.  I’ve been adding any active ones to the new links section I just created.  Maybe people will talk more if they can find each other again?  Otherkin.net is a great resource, but I’m not sure how much it’s being updated these days.  Certainly there are a lot of defunct lists still on its resource pages.

I need to poke around livejournal more and see what’s there…

 

 

Arethinn said:

I don’t think it should take very long, couple of days tops. Adnarel is sometimes busy with Real Life and kid, so if you can’t get a hold of him, you might try Qarael if you can find contact info (I don’t know).

Ok, it’s definitely been longer than that so I probably got stuck in the spam filters.  I’ll email them about it.  No biggie. 🙂

That’s a rather generous definition, heh. I’m on afootinbothworlds, anderen_vereinigte, ER, nor_cal_otherkin, OlderKin, otherkin-theology, sidhelist, SoCalKin, TuathadeDanaan, and WestKin and none of these aside from ER have had anything I’d call “discussion” in months if not longer, sometimes MUCH longer.

Well, I had to be generous, most lists are so slow.  From what I can see (not being a member any longer) ER seems to be one of the more heavily trafficked ones, averaging just under 12 posts a month for the past three months and was doing better than that earlier in the year.  Other lists, such as otherkinreiki, have literally had one post in all of 2010.  Then there are the lists that haven’t seen traffic since 2006… and there are a lot of those.

So far, all of the otherkin mailinglists I’ve linked to on the new Links page are showing signs of life, and I still have a few to add (though admittedly most of those are the sexuality themed ones and the regional lists).

There doesn’t even seem to be practical discussion on trying to get local meetups together or anything, which is a bit sad when you consider that was pretty much the raison d’etre for the regional ones.

I think at least some of that has been taken up by meetup.com and possibly tribe.net, though I haven’t explored heavily in either area.  Also, in some areas, local meetups aren’t as necessary since for the most part all of the local kin know each other already and just get together to hang out regularly without needing a list or a formal mini-gather.

Maybe, but I have a hard time believing people can’t find a list as obviously-titled as “otherkin”…  I think mailing lists have fallen out of style as a communications method, but things like Facebook and Twitter really don’t fill the group-discussion gap. I guess many people have stopped wanting it in the first place. :-/

*shrugs* It seems weird, but I’ve run into otherkin these days who have never heard of otherkin.net.  They’d also never heard of Lupa, nor knew anyone else who had, despite Lupa going out of her way to join as many otherkin forums as she could find when writing the Field Guide.  The community these days is a lot larger than I think we realize, and more spread out.  There are tons of little forums all over, and many of them haven’t found each other.  They may not even know there’s an otherkin presence on yahoogroups at this point.  Or, given the apparent ages of some of the people involved, even know what yahoogroups is.  There also seem to be more groups out there coining new terms that basically mean otherkin.  “Invisus” being one of the most recent that I’ve seen, with #OtherCreatures, though I know the people involved with that have been around for a while.

As for people not wanting the group-discussion?  Maybe.  I hope that’s not the case, personally, but it may well be.  I really miss the old days, though.  I was just re-reading the archives of the 2nd-gen TNO list over on Topica and even when folks were discussing the end of the community then, there just seemed to be so much more substance to it than you see onlist these days.  But it’s like K’Llayna said: “So the lists recycle the same conversations over and over, and occasionally it turns out to be worthwhile to stay on them because a shining new individual will turn up who is worth meeting.”  That’s what I’m looking for.  That’s what I’m always going to be looking for.

In terms of personal contacts, gathers, etc., obviously only as often as listing owners update their own entries. I’m good about updating my own, but I think I’m the exception. When I mass-mailed about MythiCalia in 2007 from contacts listed there, a got a lot of bounces, and a lot more “dead air”, which it’s hard to tell if it means someone got the email and deleted it without response, it was dropped undelivered, it went to a valid account but one that happens not to be checked anymore… very few live responses given the vastness of the database.

 

I can update my contact info via the dev site (the main site gives me the broken cookies bug), but I can’t seem to edit my mailing list info since it’s not implemented there yet.  The coding on the main site seems to be very messed up for anything you need to login to update.  (Possibly not gathers, I don’t run one so I don’t know how that section is working.)  I could probably email Malcolm to update it, but requiring everyone who runs a list to do that to update their info seems like it would quickly become a major hassle on both sides.  And the links section doesn’t seem to have any ability to update links or report bad links short of just emailing Malcolm, it just lets you add new ones.  My new links area has the same limitation, honestly, but it’s backed by a plugin that automatically checks my whole site for broken links and lets me know about them so I can keep things updated.

Last thing, I promise. Do you remember who used to run demonic_angels back in the day?  With my luck it was probably you and Cel and I’ll feel ridiculous for asking, but I can’t actually remember and you’re one of the few folks I still talk to who have been around long enough to possibly remember that list.

casteylan said:

Jarandhel Dreamsinger said:

Another forum site that seems fairly active is Otherkin.com

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I’ve lurked there on and off in the past few months but something about them puts me off posting there at all. There’s this attitude some members seem to have where themoderators decide who is “real” otherkin and who isn’t and ones they decide are roleplaying get banned. And yet there doesn’t seem to be any consistency or transparency of their policy, how they decide who is roleplaying and who isn’t. I’ve seen one or two hounded off or banned who I felt were genuine, and that is really off-putting.

I got involved a while back in order to correct a misunderstanding about the “memorial” page Tassadar created for Eyovah.  Never thought I would post much, but I’m trying to get more active in the community again.  So far, I haven’t seen the roleplaying bans, except for tireanavi and that one I’m fairly sure was a justified ban.

There are actual otherkin on tribe.net now. I’ve posted some tribes in the links list. Though I have to say, locating individual tribes through tribe.net’s interface is hard. It tries to send every search through google, which is so not helpful.

I may have to post the info about the local meetup on Otherkin.net, though possibly Raven should since it’s really her gather. I’m just her ride, and one of the attendees.

*nods* I’ve noticed the lack of steam, which is why I’ve been hesitant to email him pointing out problems. For the most part, I think they’re ones he’s already aware of… I mean, he’s had a notice about the cookie problem up there for quite a while now. I understand this, and sympathize with the lack of time and energy, but it does make it important (IMO) to create some redundant resources to fill some of the gaps. If I could find a good plugin to do it, I’d also be working on something similar to the otherkin directory for redundancy’s sake, but so far I haven’t found anything that would quite work except for one plugin that breaks the forums when I activate it.

I knew Shadowlore (and to a lesser extent HOKS) was alive, but I’ve heard some bad things about the former and both have that “otherkin organization organized into regional chapters” thing going on that squicks me out and instantly reminds me of HOPE. What do you think of them?

*grins* I thought Cel was a moderator, I just thought it had been with you. I don’t even remember Jezebel, to be perfectly honest. Cool. 🙂 Gods, there were so many different lists back then… and so much more activity on them…

If BBCODE would help, click on the profile button and go to the personal options tab. Under the Select Preferred Editor section, click the third checkbox down. I know there are no names next to them, it’s a bug with the board and I don’t know how to fix it. Hoping it gets fixed with the next version, which is just waiting on the rollout of WP 3.0

Arethinn said:

Ahhh, bbcode! thank you for the tip. I would never have figured out what thing to check without any labels on the options.

Yeah… I’d love to fix that, but I have no idea what’s causing it and I’m just hoping it gets fixed in the next forum upgrade when I switch over to Wordpress 3.0.  If not, I may have to tinker with the forum php, and I’m just SO looking forward to that.

No opinion yet other than “man, another thing really centered around vamps that claims to include everyone. Pfeh.”

Heh, yeah… that seems to happen a lot, doesn’t it?