- Joined
- Feb 8, 2006
- Messages
- 65,043
Hey everyone! We're holding an open call for volunteers to mod/organize this subforum! Now, TR doesn't get a whole lot of traffic. We're working on outreach to increase traffic, but more importantly, there is a lot of important administrative/curating work to do in Trip Reports. As we work to position Bluelight as a leader in harm reduction and research hosting, it has become more important than ever to fully utilize the incredible resource we've had here all along, our repository of trip reports that reaches all the way back to the dawn of the millennium. Truly, we have more content in written reports on all manner of drugs than anywhere else on the Internet, or indeed the world in any media format, than anywhere except for the legendary Erowid. However, unlike Erowid, our content is mostly uncategorized reports, which makes it difficult to actually use in a real way. But work is underway to fix this problem. I recently updated the Trip Reports Directory to have links to all of the substances, by category, so you can see a bit of what we're going for. But the custom search engine that is in the works will take it to the next level and make us comparable with Erowid in terms of ease of finding the exact reports you're looking for, and will allow searches on specific combinations of drugs, experience type (positive, negative, spiritual, life changing, etc), route of administration, and experience level, and any combination of these factors. And we have the additional advantage over Erowid of people being able to post in the thread and ask questions or have a discussion with the author and anyone else reading the report.
However, in order to make that a reality, we basically have to reverse engineer the way we've run the forum for decades, and manually curate all of our existing reports, like the way that Erowid has always done. This involves browsing each report for information about which substance(s) were taken, routes of administration, experience level and experience type, and using a tool to generate text "tags", which are then copied and pasted into the bottom of the report. It also involves reformatting a lot of titles to fit the guidelines, for consistency and ease of finding. Currently we have 3 full years tagged and parts of 2 more years, but we have trip reports all the way back from the year 2000, so there is a LOT more work to do. Currently it's just me, and I am starting to feel like it is not possible for me to do it all myself. That's why we're looking to add some new staff.
So it'll be a lot of work, but it's enjoyable work if you like reading trip reports! And once it's done, we'll have made an amazing and valuable resource for the world to use, that we can all be proud of.
All that said, we're looking to add several new staff members who are committed to helping with this big effort. This position is not so much about moderating - though that is a part of it - as it is about bookkeeping, essentially being a museum curator for digital trip report content. Once on board, you'll be assigned chunks of trip reports at a time, and learn to use the tagging tool to hand-tag reports and help make the dream a reality.
Please send a PM to me (@Xorkoth) if you're interested, with the role you want to play, the time you think you can spend, and any other relevant information you think might help us see you as qualified. Just please keep these points in mind:
However, in order to make that a reality, we basically have to reverse engineer the way we've run the forum for decades, and manually curate all of our existing reports, like the way that Erowid has always done. This involves browsing each report for information about which substance(s) were taken, routes of administration, experience level and experience type, and using a tool to generate text "tags", which are then copied and pasted into the bottom of the report. It also involves reformatting a lot of titles to fit the guidelines, for consistency and ease of finding. Currently we have 3 full years tagged and parts of 2 more years, but we have trip reports all the way back from the year 2000, so there is a LOT more work to do. Currently it's just me, and I am starting to feel like it is not possible for me to do it all myself. That's why we're looking to add some new staff.
So it'll be a lot of work, but it's enjoyable work if you like reading trip reports! And once it's done, we'll have made an amazing and valuable resource for the world to use, that we can all be proud of.
All that said, we're looking to add several new staff members who are committed to helping with this big effort. This position is not so much about moderating - though that is a part of it - as it is about bookkeeping, essentially being a museum curator for digital trip report content. Once on board, you'll be assigned chunks of trip reports at a time, and learn to use the tagging tool to hand-tag reports and help make the dream a reality.
Please send a PM to me (@Xorkoth) if you're interested, with the role you want to play, the time you think you can spend, and any other relevant information you think might help us see you as qualified. Just please keep these points in mind:
- We are looking for applicants who can commit to at least an hour per day spent reading and tagging trip reports for our search engine and dynamic links library. It's not like you're punching in, and of course everyone has days they can't or don't want to do their staff-ly duties, but please be sure you can commit to this level of participation on average, and that you'll be available to help for the near-term future.
- You should enjoy reading trip reports! Because you'll read a lot of them!
- Don't expect a lot of action in terms of moderating, but we do sometimes need to move threads mistakenly posted in here to the appropriate subforum, and deal with spammers.
- We can also accept applicants who don't want to be a full staff member with the duties that implies (moderating), but want to help with this tagging effort only. If that's you, please let me know in the PM application.
- We are looking for serious applicants only. Please do us both a favor and if you don't think you'll be able to commit to the time and effort, don't bother. There's no shame not applying, we want to make this happen for you and everopne else to be able to enjoy our collection of trip reports. We'd love to see you apply but if you don't honestly see yourself committing to the effort, it's not worth it for either of us.
