Despite the best efforts of some very talented people, SugarHive is officially no-more. Hammered with spam, and lacking new content - I see no way to take it forward using a MediaWiki backbone. The software, which works well for Wikipedia, offers no easy way to give people authority, has primitive spam protection, and isn’t sexy enough to entice new users.
An open repository of free sex information is still a great idea and one that I don’t want to let die. Many people have told me they’d love to use it. The problem seems to be no-one wants to write it. Is the answer better software? Or is a free resource on that scale simply too ambitious or naive? Would a community sex-info blog, which anyone could post to, work better than a wiki? What do you think?
Sam, I’ll be completely honest. I love it. I get lost in there when looking for stuff - I look for one thing and end up finding something else to interest me. If I had to make any suggestions, it would be to let everyone post to it and maybe have a panel of people to police it. Possibly have the definitions sit in limbo while they’re checked for accuracy by “The Man”, then they’re approved? I dunno. I’m just throwing stuff out there.
I’m with Mia. While I didn’t visit the site daily, when I did I’d get lost looking at the variety of writing. Maybe the hive can be resurrected some day?
I like Mia’s suggestion too. I think making it easier to get started and promoting the Hive from time to time would help drive submissions. A lot of people (like me?) have just never messed around on a wiki before. The more clear you make it that anyone’s welcome to post the more comfortable people will feel stepping up. A blog would probably get more submissions but I don’t know how structurally suited it’d be or how much of a pain in the ass it’d be to make it work like a wiki and a blog all at once.
Nice ideas but the spam problem’s a lot of work to address. As far as promotion driving posting, I’m afraid to report that when there was a lot of promotion there wasn’t much posting.
Your comments seem to confirm the problem - everyone wants to read it, but very few people want to write it. Given an 1000:1 ratio perhaps it’ll work when the network’s seeing 100,000’s of people. Right now there just doesn’t seem to be the motivation. A wiki needs thousands of articles to become a real resource, and that means a good number of prolific writers. I don’t think there’s the woman-power.
Well, since you said woman power… The linkback for contributions thing would still be valid, assuming you decided to keep it up, right? Because I know of a bunch of women who are very fetish-knowledgeable and like traffic. The phones have been slow for a lot of people this week… Let me know.
Sabrina - if there were 20-30 people writing an article or two a week the SugarHive could explode. With less than that though it’s thankless and relentless. Maybe I should post on this. 50-100 new articles a week and suddenly we’ve got something.
It’s worth one last try, right? I don’t know if I can round up 20 or 30 but we’ll see. I’m going to wake up, get some fucking caffeine and put the word out.
I’d be up for it, I think. I’ve been eyeing it in a somewhat-lusty manner for a while now.
I can chip in, Sabrina, and I know some local sex-rag writers (http://www.quakemag.com) that might be interested as well. I’ll spread the word.