Valjiir

[Buster's Uncle]

It really bothers me that the people he serves with give him such a hard time claiming that he's cold when his eternal internal struggle is precisely the opposite.  It adds injury to bigotry, y'know?

[Valjiir1]

That does seem to be mostly Dr. McCoy, and that's clearly an only half-serious friendly enemy type of bantering - in which Spock gives as good as he gets, I might add.    There are other isolated instances, of course: Garrovick in Balance of Terror and some of the crew in Galileo 7 most notably.  Though I suppose a wider pattern is implied by the fact that Kirk uses the idea to get Spock's attention in What Are Little Girls Made Of to expose his android double, and in This Side of Paradise to get Spock angry enough to break the influence of the spores.  So I would hazard a guess that outside the Enterprise Spock's had it pretty rough.  After all, in Journey to Bable Amanda is moved to tears recalling how the other boys teased Spock as a child, an image which is made manifest in the animated Yesteryear.

Can we all say "Poor hybrid baby!"?

[Buster's Uncle]

BTW Cher, I've got some ideas about promoting Valjiir and getting the fan community back together, if you're interested...

[Valjiir1]

I certainly am!

[Buster's Uncle]

That does seem to be mostly Dr. McCoy, and that's clearly an only half-serious friendly enemy type of bantering - in which Spock gives as good as he gets, I might add.    There are other isolated instances, of course: Garrovick in Balance of Terror and some of the crew in Galileo 7 most notably.  Though I suppose a wider pattern is implied by the fact that Kirk uses the idea to get Spock's attention in What Are Little Girls Made Of to expose his android double, and in This Side of Paradise to get Spock angry enough to break the influence of the spores.  So I would hazard a guess that outside the Enterprise Spock's had it pretty rough.  After all, in Journey to Bable Amanda is moved to tears recalling how the other boys teased Spock as a child, an image which is made manifest in the animated Yesteryear.

Can we all say "Poor hybrid baby!"?

A lot of it's frenemy stuff, for sure, with McCoy - but you can't really claim he wasn't serious in episodes like That Which Survives, Paradise Syndrome and The Tholian Web...  God bless Kirk that he never did it single time without it being for a really good reason.

[Buster's Uncle]

BTW Cher, I've got some ideas about promoting Valjiir and getting the fan community back together, if you're interested...

I certainly am!

First thing, link your site in your sigline, and at every forum you have any posts.  Besides the people who click on it, it's that many copies of the URL for the search engines.  SEO .

Second, get yourself a forum so they can talk to each other and not just you.  Activity creates more activity.  I offer this thread as a pilot project, and if you start pointing people here and we outgrow the thread, I'll make a Star Trek subforum for Valjiir fans to take over, and listen to your druthers about how it's run.  If that works out well enough, you probably will want to host your own forum on your site - Dave ought to be able to take care of the technical side, and I recommend asking Valka to run it for you; she's well-qualified.

There's details, but that's the broad overview...

[Valka]

I will hop right over to TrekBBS and add the link to my sig.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I just googled Valjiir, and found out that this thread is the second hit    My best guess is that it's because every Mylochka post says Valijiir in her sig, where I told her to link the site.  I believe you guys are active places like Trek BBS - if you have always had sigs, and you added Valjiir links to them, and if it works there and other places you post the way it does on the vBulletin and SMF forum software I'm familiar with --- I've been building this here Alpha Centauri forum for two years and twenty days, focused on a single game from 1997 without a lot of aggressive recruiting, and we do really well, considering that and the lethargic depressed spells I get; the single most helpful thing I ever did was siglink at my last forum.  That was 36,000 copies of AC2's URL for Google to find at one stroke.  We do okay on the search engines.

A Valjiir FaceBook page - you need not rupture yourself on that one, but post some pictures and links to existing content on the site, and post links every time there's any new content.  If you get FB comments, the more time you're willing to put into replying, the more the page will grow and serve as a promotional device, and maybe a fan community nexus of its own.  FaceBook is FaceBook, and there's a billion possible eyes to draw your way.  FaceBook has some cross-promotional buttons and tools, as my co-owner installed here, and I cannot recommend using; I think they slow down pageloads, and make it entirely too easy for Big FaceBook Brother to track me, which it totally does.

You already have a Valjiir YouTube account, and I assume everything's linked back to the Valjiir site.  All of that the traffic will bear, though I assume you already know, as an adult, not to ever read YouTube comments at all.

You've got a lot of content, a lot of it art, which is ideal to spread around casually as promotional material.  Some places, according to your judgement, you may want some sort of "Sexy Star Trek fun" tag to warn of the NSFW aspects.  -Link back to the site everywhere, shamelessly.-

Eventually, it may be worth it to you to dig up the old mailing lists and do a mass postcarding with some URLs to see who's still at the old address, alive and on the internet - of course skipping all the people you can just email.

If it starts attracting people, do all you can to encourage fans to pitch in on getting the word out and getting fan community stuff done.  You are Queen Valjiir, and your job should be to make Valjiir and rally the troops, who do all the promotional/community-building work you can possibly manage to delegate.  You can do this.  A modest effort should yield tangible results; more time/effort should do more, though the elementary bits tend to give more bang for your time buck.

[ninja'd]

I will hop right over to TrekBBS and add the link to my sig.

See?  Valka is a fan who misses the old gang and took initiative; imagine if you had 15 here and encouraged them?

[Valka]

It's added. I'm active in the TOS forum there among other ST areas, the general media forums, the Doctor Who forum, and a couple of off-topic forums (one of which is NSFW). So there should be a decent cross-section of TOS fans who will see my sig.

Gotta be honest - I haven't been very active in the fanfic forum there since so much of the activity has to do with monthly competitions and I consider myself lucky to think up something vaguely witty for the caption contests.

[Buster's Uncle]

We have a fiction forum here, BTW - I would object to it being drowned with Valjiir stories, but I'd love to have some...  -Link back to the site, of course.

[Buster's Uncle]

[Valjiir1]

BTW Cher, I've got some ideas about promoting Valjiir and getting the fan community back together, if you're interested...

I certainly am!

First thing, link your site in your sigline, and at every forum you have any posts.  Besides the people who click on it, it's that many copies of the URL for the search engines.  SEO .

Second, get yourself a forum so they can talk to each other and not just you.  Activity creates more activity.  I offer this thread as a pilot project, and if you start pointing people here and we outgrow the thread, I'll make a Star Trek subforum for Valjiir fans to take over, and listen to your druthers about how it's run.  If that works out well enough, you probably will want to host your own forum on your site - Dave ought to be able to take care of the technical side, and I recommend asking Valka to run it for you; she's well-qualified.

There's details, but that's the broad overview...

Mylochka HAS told you how much of a Luddite I am, right?  I have no idea how to "link" the site in my "sigline"  Apart from being a Luddite, I'm also a fairly extreme introvert except with people I already "know" (like you  )  I don't really know how to interact outside of specific topics.    And Valka, PLEASE feel free to - uh - do what BUncle said.  I wish I could point more people to this forum - but The Gang doesn't count and I realty know very few other people.  Sorry

[Valjiir1]

A lot of it's frenemy stuff, for sure, with McCoy - but you can't really claim he wasn't serious in episodes like That Which Survives, Paradise Syndrome and The Tholian Web...  God bless Kirk that he never did it single time without it being for a really good reason.

True, true... sometimes I think McCoy falls into his 'good ol' country boy' schtick a bit too hard, especially when he doesn't think Spock is living up to his own compassionate standards.  And yes, we all bless the gods for Jim (especially Jade, but that's another topic  ).

[Buster's Uncle]

To do the siglink here at AC2:  Click on your username to go to your profile.  Click on "Forum Profile", the second entry under "Modify Profile", near the top in the left sidebar.  Add something like VALJIIR: Sexy Star Trek fun to your sig line.  (Hit quote to see the code for how I did that, and you can simply copy/paste that hyperlink line into your sig with the display text altered as you please.

The exact format for hyperlinking sigs at other forums will differ according to what forum software they use, but shouldn't by much, and I believe you are married to someone who computes for a living - I am a competent user, not at all teh haxxor, and this is easy stuff to master, believe me, and A Thing Worth Doing.  -Of course Valka can tell you the precise hyperlink code for Trek BBS.


The easiest and most time/effort-rewarding single thing you can do to direct fans here is to announce prominently on your site:

Sign up to chat with us about Valjiir (and anything else original Star Trek) here!

And if you drop a line to anyone, anyone you're comfortable pinging and likely to know how to contact anyone else and ask them to do same and ask them to do same, a chain-reaction could happen.  Your fans miss the old days, and want to hear for you, after all.  -But definitely the prominent announcement' top of the main page for maximum effect. 


P.S. "sigline" is where you have "Screw destiny. But give it flowers first or it feels used." (to which I'd quibble "Dinner and a movie first; a call and flowers the next day).

[FoldInTheWolf]

Hiya everyone. This is the "Dave" y'all been talking about. I finally got connected in.

Some random thoughts ...

Cher and I are terrible at networking and publicity and stuff like that. We have Facebook pages, but can never think of anything to post there, both because we can't imagine anyone would be interested, and because we don't necessarily want the world to know when we're going to the store or in bed with a bad case of indigestion. It's even worse in Real Life (tm). We used to be more outgoing, but a few nasty trolls cured us of that.

I have a Twitter account, which I seldom use, for similar reasons. It must frustrate my publisher and editor, because I suck at publicizing my novels (yes, I have three professional novels, one currently out-pf-print but in the process of hopefully being re-issued).

All this to say -- I love the suggestions, and I encourage more of them, and I can do the techie stuff, but Cher and I would be really bad at outreach. 

Beyond that -- I hope to get involved in the conversations here. If I can work up the courage to stick my nose any farther in.