The beautiful thing that is "quid pro quo"

[lavvyan.livejournal.com]

Listen up, minions! Dearest members who use this community to find stories,

please let me direct your attention toward your one major resource: your fellow fen. The people who rec you their favourite stories. The people who create huge thematic lists and keep track of just about everything the SGA fandom has to offer. The people who look at your post and think, "ooh, I know one like that, now where's the link..." and spend the next half-hour or longer browsing through their Delicious tags or the thousands of files they've got saved to their hard drives. In other words, the people who invest a lot of energy into ensuring you've got exactly the kind of fic you want to read, just when you're craving it the most.

Are you picturing them? Good. Now let me quote a request from our user info that's gone a bit ignored recently:

If you ask for stories of a certain genre, please remember that those answering your request are putting time and effort into doing so, which means that the least you can do is say thank-you. This community relies on the good will of its members, and positive feedback encourages participation. We cannot and will not force you to be polite; however, if we know you as someone who appreciates the effort, we will be more likely to go the extra length.

I know of several people who are unhappy enough about the way their comments have gone by unacknowledged lately that they are reccing less or not at all anymore. That sucks. It takes less than a minute to reply to someone's comment with a brief thank-you, so if you have the time to post your request and read the stories you're pointed at, I don't see why you wouldn't have the time to say thanks to those who do the pointing. It's in your own self-interest, after all.

As stated above, we can't force you to be polite, nor do we want to. We're your mods, not the Courtesy Police. But hey, if you screw up your post? Chances are that if we know you as someone who regards the reccers of this comm as a tool rather than the helpful people they are, we won't quietly fix your tags or point out what you got wrong, but make the whole thing disappear without comment. You know. Quid pro quo.