jarandhel

I've decided to try something new.  It has, at this point, almost become traditional for someone who is seeking knowledge about the otherkin community to put out a survey.  I've never done this before, but as I am seeking information about the community I thought I'd give it a try.  It's going to be reasonably simple, and it's not going to ask for any personal information from participants.  In fact, these are the only questions:

1.  What otherkin message boards, mailing lists, chat rooms, IRC channels, or other online groups are you a member of? (Please include URLS)  For each, has there been activity on that group since January 1, 2010?

2. What do you think the top ten most informative/useful websites about otherkin are?  (Please include URLS)  For each, has this website been updated with any new content since January 1, 2010?

Responses can be made in the comments, and all comments will be screened to preserve respondent's privacy.

I haven't decided where I'm going to post links to this survey yet, but wherever you come across it please feel free to pass it along to others.  The data collected will be used as part of an ongoing project to map the otherkin community and produce the most comprehensive list of links to active otherkin resources this community has ever seen.  The current results of this project can be viewed here: http://dreamhart.org/links/

So, now that Geocities is gone, anyone know what the current "cool" free webhosts are?  Are tripod and angelfire taking up the slack?  webs.com?  Bravepages?  If you were going to make a new site with no budget and very little coding experience, where would you put it?

Also, if you wanted an experience akin to the old MSN groups, where would you look these days?

I'm stalking some lesser-known sites/forums in the otherkin community at the moment, and actually having pretty good luck with it.  Rollyo is a great search service for combing through various free site providers.  Only catch is you have to know which free site providers to tell it to look through.

Of course, if y'all wanted to just straight up point me to otherkin sites I haven't found yet, that'd be cool too. ;-)

Oh, one last thing -- anyone know of a good working directory project?  DMOZ and Yahoo Directory both seem fairly dead.  I know most aren't likely to have much on otherkin, but sometimes they're useful for other stuff... like figuring out the current popular free webhosts without having to post to LJ about it. ;-)

So, today I went through the Otherkin.net Otherkin Directory and took a look at all of the websites people listed as their homepages. Just wanted to see if I had missed anything important that desperately needed to be added to the Otherkin Link Project on my site. As far as I can tell, I didn't. But I did notice there are a LOT of Geocities sites listed. Way more than I realized. All of which, of course, are now dead.

Now, Orion Sandstorm's already created a post going through and archiving a bunch of old geocities-based otherkin sites. And he did a great job. But I think there's probably a lot more based on what I just saw.

Archiving, in case anyone deems them important:

So, the Otherkin Link Project on Dreamhart.org is going rather well... currently there are 162 resources listed.  These include 27 "General" otherkin sites (or just otherkin sites I couldn't categorize),  5 Otherkin-owned Businesses, 10 Otherkin FAQs, 10 resources on otherkin forms of magic, 11 resources on otherkin remembered languages, 3 otherkin blogs (these are not just blogs by otherkin or we'd have hundreds, these are blogs whose primary subject is otherkin), 11 Otherkin chats (irc channels, chatrooms, and one MUCK... all active), 61 Otherkin Forums (also all active), and 24 Otherkin Mailing Lists (again, all active... I've even joined a lot of the ones whose archives are private just to make sure that recent messages are real rather than spambots.)

By way of comparison, the Pathwayz.org Link Directory had 199 links in July of 2007, just before it shut down, according to the archive.org copy.  We're not there yet, but we're getting there.  I believe Pathwayz was previously the largest single directory of links to otherkin resources.  Otherkin.net currently reports 316 links and a separate section specifically for mailing lists, but in practice many of the links are completely defunct (the sites no longer exist) or to currently inactive forums and mailing lists.  They've also branched out a bit by linking to resources that may be in some way helpful (everything from mirriam-webster online to the aeclectic tarot) but are not directly connected with otherkin.  So I think we compare favorably there too.

I haven't included links to otherkin gathers/events in the link project, because the dreamhart.org forums already have a section for listing events that includes tagging each event with whether it is still upcoming or has already passed.   If you'd like your event added to that listing, please let me know.  I had been focusing on local events, but the actual users of the forum have proven to be more far-flung than I first anticipated so I'm thinking of changing that policy and going with any otherkin event.

As always, if you own a resource that's not listed, or even just know of one, please let me know.  I'm trying to be fairly comprehensive, but I'm only one person and I don't know all the myriad branches the community has taken these days.