Back to Middle-earth Month

1. The LiveJournal community will be closed to new fanworks on August 1.

2. B2MeM has been imported onto Dreamwidth. If you have not already commented and you have posted one or more fanworks on the LiveJournal B2MeM community between 2012 and now, please comment here or on the linked post to acknowledge you have read the linked post and know that your fanworks are now hosted on Dreamwidth. If your DW username is different from your LJ name, please tell us. You only need to comment on one post.

After August 1, we will be privately contacting everyone who has not commented in order to inform them of the import. Please help us by letting us know you know.

Acknowledging the import is just that: if you do not want your fanworks on Dreamwidth, please let us know.

Thank you to everyone who has commented so far or who will comment in the future.

B2MeM has been imported onto Dreamwidth. If you have not yet done so, please comment here or on the linked post to acknowledge you have read the post and know that your fanworks are now hosted on Dreamwidth. If your DW username is different from your LJ name, please tell us. You only need to comment on one post.

After August 1, we will begin privately contacting everyone who has not commented in order to inform them of the import. Please help us out by letting us know you're aware.

Acknowledging the import is just that: an acknowledgment. If you do not want your fanworks on Dreamwidth, please let us know.

Thank you to everyone who has commented so far or who will comment in the future.

In June, we asked the members of this community to take a poll regarding the future of Back to Middle-earth Month on LiveJournal. (Read the original post and the reasons behind our asking here.)

66 people took our poll. We greatly appreciate you doing so.

Importing the LiveJournal community to Dreamwidth

Our first question asked about importing the B2MeM LJ community to Dreamwidth.

94% wanted an import to Dreamwidth at the same security levels (public or members-only). The other 6% were evenly split between higher security levels or no import. The import to Dreamwidth, both entries and comments, has been completed.

In the following weeks, we will contact via PM any member of the LJ B2MeM community who has posted one or more fanworks here in order to inform them of the import. So that we do not contact you about this, please comment on this post if you have read and understand that your fanworks are now hosted on Dreamwidth. If your LJ name is different from your DW name, please mention that. Furthermore, if you do not wish to have your content on Dreamwidth, let us know and we will delete your posts there. You can do this by PMing Indy1776, Dawn_Felagund, or Zdenka (DW; LJ is Lignota) or by emailing the mod team at b2mem.mod@gmail.com.

Because it fits best here even though it’s out of order: our final poll question asked you to consider removing the TOS-mandated adult content warning on the LJ community after we import it to DW. 80% said to keep the content warning on LJ. We will leave the content warning in place.

To make it clear: we will not use any such content warning on Dreamwidth. (DW explicitly welcomes diverse content; an adult content warning on DW is specifically for adult-only content.) If individual posters wish to use it, that is their prerogative. But it will not be a community-wide thing because we do not want to exclude minors from our event.

Hosting B2MeM in the Future

Our second question was: “Where would you prefer B2MeM to be hosted in the future?”

54 people (82%) said Dreamwidth.
12 people (18%) said LiveJournal.

The next two questions concerned hypothetical behavior: how you think you would act if B2MeM was hosted on either LJ or DW. Because the poll allowed multiple answers via checkboxes to these two questions, the percentages do not round up to 100%.

29% said they would not participate on LJ. 35% said they would post fanworks and 53% said they would comment. 24% said they would leave links to fanworks posted elsewhere. 68% said they’d view fanworks posted on LJ.

9% said they would not participate on DW. 64% said they would post fanworks and 83% said they’d comment. 46% said they’d leave links to fanworks posted elsewhere. 83% said they’d view fanworks posted on DW.

There are significant differences between how people would participate on LiveJournal versus Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth outperformed LiveJournal in every active participation category. The especially concerning answer was where people wouldn’t participate: there were three times as many who would not do so on LJ as on DW. Furthermore, nearly twice the number of people said they would post fanworks on Dreamwidth as opposed to LiveJournal.

Our modly preferences for Dreamwidth aside, it is clear that the community wishes to and needs to move to Dreamwidth to survive.

Back to Middle-earth Month will be hosted on Dreamwidth in 2018 and beyond.

What This Means for B2MeM on LiveJournal

The LiveJournal community will be a mod-post only mirror in 2018. All mod posts will be crossposted from DW to LJ and it will be possible to comment on them. No fanworks can be posted to the community after August 1. After that date, if necessary, another import will be run for those fanworks posted on LJ between now and then.

We have created a feed on LJ of the Dreamwidth community if you wish to follow that: http://b2mem-feed.livejournal.com. The feed is completely automated; if something is publicly posted to DW, it will appear in the feed. Subscribing to it works the same way as friending someone. The feed is set so that only things above a cut can be read; full fanworks will not be inundating your flist. You will have to click the link in the feed posts to visit Dreamwidth to look at the fanworks. There are two major downsides to using an RSS feed: posts in the feed disappear after two weeks and comments on posts on the feed itself are not seen by the people who wrote the posts. Any comments left also disappear with the posts. To be explicitly clear: comments on the feed posts will vanish unread.

If you do not have a Dreamwidth account, you can comment on DW using OpenID. (Read more about OpenID here.) Everyone who has ever posted or commented on the LJ community has an OpenID on DW because of the import. If you have an account on DW, you can claim your OpenID. We will continue allowing signed anonymous comments on Dreamwidth for those who have neither a DW or OpenID account.

We know this is a major change with a multitude of emotions wrapped up in it. I will not deny that it was difficult to write this post. Yet this is the end of an Age and the start of another. May it be a long and creative one!

If you have any comments or questions, please ask them here or email us at b2mem.mod@gmail.com.

The poll about the future of Back to Middle-earth Month on LJ will close on June 26 at 11:59 PM Hawaiian time. We made this poll because we want member input into where B2MeM should host future events due to LJ’s new TOS and the issues surrounding it. If you have not yet done so and are interested in this, please read the post here and take the poll.

As we’re sure everyone is aware at this point, LiveJournal has changed its Terms of Service with the new User Agreement. This new agreement says that any content deemed adult under Russian law must be marked as adult on LiveJournal or the journal/community risks deletion without prior warning; “adult” can mean any LBGTQ+ content, no matter what the actual rating is.

We have already changed the adult content settings on the LiveJournal comm to protect the members of this community. This is not a change we agree with; we simply have dozens of members who have not participated in recent years and we do not want to risk their work being deleted. We have not and never will require slash, femslash, and poly fanworks to be rated higher than gen or het fanworks.

The new “adult content” setting means that minors cannot participate on LiveJournal and any person who isn’t logged into LJ must click an age-check banner both to enter the community and also to read individual posts.

Another part of the new ToS says any post that receives more than 3000 hits in 24 hours is subject to review under Article 10.2 of the Federal Act of the Russian Federation No. 149-03. (Go here for an English translation of the law.) While we do not and cannot know how any B2MeM posts fare hits-wise and we believe that fandom is not the target of this law, it is something we are wary about.

Furthermore, there was a recent report that LiveJournal has implemented a new spam blocker. We do not know what the algorithm detects. It is indiscriminate and targets both locked and unlocked posts. This has resulted in some journals and communities in another fandom being deleted without warning; some of them have not been restored despite asking.

We do know that AO3 and DeviantArt are on the whitelist. It appears that smaller fandom archives such as SWG or Faerie are not and links to them are thus considered spam.

Given the above information, we are seeking your input on the future of Back to Middle-earth Month on LiveJournal. We are interested in your opinions on importing the LJ comm to Dreamwidth and which site you would prefer B2MeM to be hosted on.

*** Please click here to fill out a five question survey about this.***

You do NOT need to be a member of B2MeM on LiveJournal to participate; the survey is hosted offsite. We encourage everyone interested in the future of B2MeM no matter your primary platform to answer these questions. We also encourage you to signal boost this survey so that we can reach as wide an audience as possible.

If the decision is made to move to Dreamwidth, we will not delete B2MeM from LiveJournal. The LJ comm was created as a way for multiple groups to participate in B2MeM without needing to be hosted by a particular group. As B2MeM became its own thing, not run by the groups, the LJ community became even more a necessity. There are half a dozen years of history on this community, as well as an untold number of links pointing to it. This is not something we take lightly.

If Dreamwidth becomes our new home, the LiveJournal community will turn into a mod post only mirror for 2018. No participant content will ever be deleted from LJ by the mods unless we are explicitly asked by the creator. There is a way for LJ participants without DW accounts to comment on Dreamwidth posts via OpenID.

If you have questions or would prefer to talk about this via email, please contact the mod team at b2mem.mod@gmail.com.

The poll will close on JUNE 26 at 11:59 PM Hawaiian time. We will post a reminder a few days before then.

In order to comply with the April 3, 2017 LiveJournal User Agreement that says users must mark material "estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0-18) as 'adult material,'" we have marked this community as containing Explicit Adult Content. The vast majority of the entries are and will continue to be safe for minors to view; we are simply being cautious because we-the-mods cannot edit the adult content settings on individual posts.

If you are older than 18 and logged in, your experience will not change. If you are younger than 18 and logged in, you will not be allowed to join or view the community. If you are logged out, you will only be able to view the community’s content after confirming you are over 18 on an intermediate banner page (it’s a simple button click). We welcome anonymous comments if you want to participate.

We are both sorry and angry at the idea of excluding minors. B2MeM has always and will always welcome everyone's participation. Please, please use anonymous comments if you want to participate.

We do NOT agree with the new User Agreement. This was not a change we wanted to make, but given the circumstances, we felt it best to make this change to protect our members and the existence of this community. We do not know precisely what could be covered under this agreement and do not want to risk this community's deletion.

The mods are discussing how to keep B2MeM safe and what the future could look like. If you have questions or concerns, please comment or contact us at b2mem.mod@gmail.com.

We want to thank everyone for participating in Back to Middle-earth Month! We had over 280 fanworks posted for B2MeM, mostly on LiveJournal but also some on AO3 and on Tumblr. We loved seeing newcomers and veteran fans alike. We also want to thank anyone who reviewed, whether or not you created something else for B2MeM.

We want to thank our moderators: Independence1776, Linaewen, DawnFelagund, Zdenka, and Ysilme, as well as our new tagging volunteer Just_jenni.

The gameboard and prompts will remain available for use year-round. If you are still working on fanworks, feel free to post them in the LiveJournal comm and/or AO3 collection, along with whatever archives or sites you normally use, no matter when you finish them.

We hope to see you again next year!

We want to thank everyone for participating in Back to Middle-earth Month! We had over 280 fanworks posted for B2MeM, mostly on LiveJournal but also some on AO3 and on Tumblr. We loved seeing newcomers and veteran fans alike. We also want to thank anyone who reviewed, whether or not you created something else for B2MeM.

We want to thank our moderators: Independence1776, Linaewen, DawnFelagund, Zdenka, and Ysilme, as well as our new tagging volunteer Just_jenni.

The gameboard and prompts will remain available for use year-round. If you are still working on fanworks, feel free to post them in the LiveJournal comm and/or AO3 collection, along with whatever archives or sites you normally use, no matter when you finish them.

We hope to see you again next year!

We the mods encourage creativity and we wanted to remind you that you can switch paths at intersections. There’s also the option of just picking what prompts you want to work with, but that would be individual and not something we can help with.

If you do use these alternate ways to move around the board, continue tagging for whatever path the prompt comes from.

You’ll likely have to be looking at either the board or the text list for the following list to make sense. All intersections are either Wild or Acts of Kindness squares.

( List of switches )

Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM) began in 2006 with an anonymous announcement on LiveJournal that encouraged people to pick a day of the week and post something Tolkien-related on it during March.

There_n_back jumped on board with prompts in both 2006 and 2007. The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild encouraged people to participate in 2006 and began holding events of its own in 2007. In 2009, Many Paths To Tread and SWG coordinated for the first time. In 2012, Arda Inspired on DeviantArt joined in and the B2MeM LiveJournal community was created. B2MeM has been hosted on LJ ever since. Over the past couple of years, we've expanded to other sites, but we still remain primarily on LJ.

Please check the sidebar for links for information about the current event. If you are on mobile, the links are at the very bottom of the screen below all the entries.

You can find more details about B2MeM's history in our Fanlore article.

Main Community: this community

Mirrors (please note these are admin posts only): on Dreamwidth or on Tumblr

AO3 Collection: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/b2mem/profile
Each year has a different subcollection; 2014 has its own collection.

Participating Groups
If you want to affliate with us, please email the mods at b2mem.mod@gmail.com.

The Silmarillion Writers' Guild
Many Paths to Tread/LotR GenFic Community
Arda Inspired