A Livejournal Introduction Guide - Arashi Fandom

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

For any Arashi fans that are brand new to livejournal and find themselves confused over how the site works, I've written up a brief guide to how you can get the most out of your livejournal fandom experience.

I've seen plenty of fans lost when they start out in fandom, and it's difficult to make friends when you don't know what livejournal users are looking for in posts, especially if English isn't your first language and you've come here specifically for Arashi.

Any users who are livejournal veterans can feel free to ignore this, as for you I'm sure it's become second nature. :)

For the guide, go here: Livejournal Introduction Guide - Arashi Fandom

Hope it helps a few people out there!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

might i suggest including a section on crossposting? because it can honestly get really annoying when people post to several communities simultaneously every time they want to share something.

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

I think that's a good suggestion, thank you. I added a short section about it.

[heartilly26.livejournal.com]

good idea ^_^ can i link to it on my LJ? (with credits of course) its a good resource

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! I have the best intentions with it, and if it gets linked elsewhere and helps more people, I'm entirely for that. Thanks for asking as well! :D

[rainawallis.livejournal.com]

This is awesome. I wish I had this when I was first getting my feet wet in the LJ community. :) Thanks for posting it! I'll be sure to point this out to my students who want to know how to use LJ better for their Arashi fixes. XD

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I hope it helps them. I've been using livejournal for... 6 years now? So things that feel like common sense to me I know can be a little "... what?" for others. :)

[pamoreno.livejournal.com]

That was a great LJ guide for any fandom. :D I wish I would have had access to such information when I first got here.

Excellent post! *thumbs up*

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much! :D

[ofs1992.livejournal.com]

this is nice!
we sometimes see posts like introducing themselves so and so and people sometimes respond harshly. but really, reading the rules is a basic thing to do

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

I know that it's best to read the rules, but I still feel bad when someone clearly new to livejournal breaks a rule and has no one, but several people point it out. Hopefully this will help people avoid that problem in the future! :D

[cassyclim8.livejournal.com]

wow!!!! thank you so much for this!!!! i'm just relatively new here where i've just started using lj because of arashi a few months ago and i seem so lost here! although i kinda had a hang of things a bit, still your post is so helpful for newbies.

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'm glad you can see it being useful. And even if it's a few months late, welcome to livejournal! ♥

[kuzylala.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much..
It's help alot..
Arigato gozaimasu (^+^)

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. :)

Thank you!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for providing something positive! Kudos to you!

I only wish things didn't have to be so locked up these days...it's unfortunate due to current circumstances. I was enjoying the community without having to get my own LJ account but I'm starting to think I'll have to do it soon and your guide is a fantastic place to start!

Re: Thank you!

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

It is unfortunate that there are so many communities to join now. Especially when each place has its own set of rules and expectations, it can be overwhelming - but I'm trying to see it as a positive thing. So many people are joining fandom with the intent to share, and that can't be so bad. :)

If you do get a journal, I'm glad you'll find the guide useful. Thanks for commenting and letting me know.

[blufox-o7.livejournal.com]

I read through it and it was nicely articulated. The language part made me nod several times. Indeed, when they mix Japanese words w/ English, often times it doesn't come as endearing as they intend.

Same goes for the fonts. Instead of 'em grabbing one's attention, it often turns people off and leads them to scroll over 'em instead.

Good job in making this one. In one way or the other we all started "ehhhh-ish", but we learn to cope. Hopefully this would serve as a faster way for new LJ fans to cope. :)

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they'll still have plenty to learn that's not in the guide, and some are probably able to figure things out on their own, but I thought... it would be nice to just have something to make it easier. If I were in their position, it'd probably be a relief to have something to consult.

[ichigo-246.livejournal.com]

It's a good idea. And you might want to add that the lj-cut coding can only work when we post our entries using HTML mode? It won't work if we use the Rich Text mode.

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, thank you. I completely forgot about that aspect of things. I'll add that!

[hontowa.livejournal.com]

I saw you mention in the comments to a journal that you were thinking of doing this, and I'm glad that you did :)

One small suggestion, if you can come up with a less wordy-than-me way to use it - maybe expand a little more on how LJ is different from a forum and what the "friending" option and "friends page" really are? I think there are a lot of new users that genuinely don't understand that many LJ users read community and friend entries only through their friends page. If you're just going directly to the arashi-on url, it's not as big of a deal to scroll through a few spammy posts. You can pick and choose ones individually like you do threads at a forum. But if it's all on the feed-that-is-the-flist then you can easily lose blog entries from your real life friends or even fandom entries with real content among the frivilous stuff.

I think a lot of people new to LJ assume that if they find another user with similar interests that that person would want to be friends, but don't understand that being "friends" actually has a function - they don't realize that getting added as a friend to someone's journal gives them access to potentially really private stuff. Asking someone to add you can put them in a really awkward situation because they might not have anything against you and don't want to hurt your feelings, but they don't necessarily want you to read about their family problems and such.

So uh. If there's a way you can trim all that down to a lot less words, it might be useful info XD

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's essentially what I was trying to lean toward with the friend section of the guide, but it's really difficult to try and word it in a way that's easy to understand and, like you said, not too wordy.

But I'll add something in that'll hopefully cover this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

[amtopm-xx.livejournal.com]

I'm not new to the fandom, but I think this is absolutely brilliant! I'm glad there are fans out there who actually care about others and want them to not be embarressed and what not. I think many people will appreciate your thoughtfulness. Where was this when I was new? lol.

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

It just really makes me anxious for people when they post something that gets a lot of negativity thrown their way. When you're first starting out, it's just... to state the obvious, something that would make you feel so unwelcome and really ruin the fandom experience.

So, hopefully, a few people have stumbled upon this and will avoid those mistakes and we can all be happy. Haha. :D

[nepheliads.livejournal.com]

I know I'm not the first to say this but I wish I'd had something like this when I started. I'm still stumbling around a bit. Thank you so much for taking the time to put this together. It's really clear and helpful. :D

[sharksoul24.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I wish I could find something when I started in LJ. But I guess you never stop learning so this is really useful.

[chazarst.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing this guide. It is extremely resourceful :D

[sunnydreams416.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the guide... I kinda wish it was around several months ago when I started using LJ (not exclusively for Arashi!) I'm still relatively a newbie to all this so thank you for doing all this =)

[hopelessheartz.livejournal.com]

You did a great job writing this.

I thought I was the only one who thought mixing japanese with english was an annoyance since many people write that way, apparently I'm not. But thankfully I'm finally starting to get over that pet peeve...

[yuriesatori.livejournal.com]

ooo...can't denied its complicated to use LJ for the first time...as it happened to me. thanks for your post..it help me to understand easily but i don't think i wanna post any to my page since i'm not fluent in english or japanese haha...and i much more love to view others and commenting. is it accepted...if i just stopping and leave my comment and just let my page empty? (oh, i'm not sure if i ask to the right space)

[nicefinalbeam.livejournal.com]

If what you're asking is if you can still leave comments, but not write in your journal, then yes. It's okay! Really the guide is just a list of suggestions. If you don't feel comfortable writing in your journal, you can just follow some of the other tips - I'm sure you'll still make friends if you want them.

[kapeng-mainit.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post! It was very helpful. :) Even though I've been around LJ for a while for my Arashi fix, there are still some things that I had to learn, especially on LJ-etiquette. I have to admit that I am guilty to some of the things you wrote but I have learned my lesson. :)

[tapsilogue.livejournal.com]

This is really, really useful. It's about time someone wrote something like this. :D It's great that you took the time to compile everything, and I'm pretty sure you didn't miss anything. :D

Great work! Thanks for sharing! This will certainly help lessen the wank and increase the love and the peace. Haha. :D

[ai-nino.livejournal.com]

my icon says what i want to say =)

[x-vickiiiie.livejournal.com]

Although I'm a mega old member to LJ now..

I think we should get the mods to approve of this to be put as a link on the front page/top/sidebar links section of this community!

It'll be really useful to the new members who don't know much about LJ and purely joined LJ for Arashi.

[fecundeety.livejournal.com]

Though I'm not new to LJ, I clicked it out of curiosity. I felt that overall it was a pretty good guide, but it was WAY too wordy for me :\ I know it isn't easy to be concise as I tend to ramble on too but it felt pretty tough getting past paragraph after paragraph. Just putting my two cents worth, I hope I'm not offending anyone it wasn't my intention to at all (:

thanks for making something like that, I'm not really the type who'd get annoyed at new users but I'm sure others will be glad that this exists.

[fecundeety.livejournal.com]

getting through* sorry about that

My, my, thank you!

[soothing-sight.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely going to read that. Like, right away. This is so thoughtful of you, sincerely. There are probably so many of us out there, lost Arashi fans, wandering in Livejournal, trying our best to learn the ways of this place.

:D I'm too curious to wait any longer... ²hurries to open the guide*

Again, thanks so much!! *bows*


Edith, Qc, Canada

[cerraazizi.livejournal.com]

Never had I seen a guide so complete; this is seriously useful to new LJ users. Lately, my friends have been signing up for LJ accounts so I think this guide would be a great help to them. Thanks so much for this! And I'm definitely going to +mem it! ^_^