So, you have a hunt coming up and you'd like to get blogged here at SL Freebie Hunters. First - thank you for reading our blog and wanting to be included! We love the SL hunt community and taking part in so many interesting events every month.
HUNTS
If you have an upcoming hunt, the easiest way to let us know is to drop a NC with the hunt info to Shadow. We make a list at the start of each month of hunts that interest us, and we more or less try to work through the list. It doesn't always work out that way time-wise, but it gives us an idea of what kind of schedule we need to keep for the month. We do NOT promise to blog any specific hunt, and we are not for hire to blog a hunt for this blog. We are always happy to hear about hunts, though. =)
We are more likely to blog the hunt if it is free. Aside from the blog premise being free hunts, it is simply cost-prohibitive to do the pay hunts just to take pictures and toss the items. There are too many pay hunts a month and the lindens add up quick, even for the 1L items. I won't say we NEVER do a pay hunt, but it has to be a pretty damn intriguing theme for us to do one! =)
Our three main "red flags" to quit or not do a hunt are simple:
1. We do not do kid hunts.
2. We do not do hunts where the folders have to be renamed to make any kind of sense. Working through 50 or 60+ folders when unpacking and taking pictures and keeping the pictures matched to the correct stores is work enough without having to figure out which folder belongs to which store and where the store falls in the hunt order.
3. Shadow hates hunts that give objects. It means having to unpack each gift at least twice, often renaming them to make sense, and there is always someone who gives an unpacked gift which results in bits and pieces all over inventory. (One memorable example of this was a store that gave a gorgeous latex outfit consisting of about 15 pieces, textures and prims, which resulted in items being sent to the clothing folder, objects folder, LM folder and NC folder. It was not pretty.)
GUEST BLOGGING
If you have an upcoming event and need a blogger, Shadow has been known to guest blog, which is different from blogging to this blog. These are paid gigs, and the main bulk of the blogging is posted to the event's own blog. In some cases, if the event is of interest to this blog, it will be cross-posted here as well. Contact Shadow in-world about guest blogging if you are interested.
A few guidelines about guest blogging:
1. Contact us as soon as you know you will need a blogger. We try to figure in the time it takes to do one of these "extras" when we look at what hunts we will be doing each month. Guest blogs typically take more time and work than our usual hunt posts, so we try to schedule accordingly.
2. Since the posts are going up on your blog site, arrangements need to be made for Shadow to have access to post on your site. Photos can be hosted on SL Freebie's Picasa account if needed.
3. We do ask for deadlines for submission of items from the designers taking part in the event. We have learned through trial and error that setting deadlines allows us to get the finished posts done in a timely manner without having late entries trickling in and requiring reworking of the posts over and over. We do not hunt the events we are guest blogging - if a designer does not send an item to be included, we do not chase them down for it.
4. We do ask that designers send us the actual items rather than their own photographs. For one thing, we prefer taking our own pictures for consistency in lighting/camera settings, which makes for a more cohesive-looking finished product. For another thing, SL pictures are 512x512 in size. Photos taken and saved to our hard drive are more than twice that size, allowing for a clearer, more detailed image when edited to create the blog images.
5. We provide the event coordinator with a notecard to pass to the designers detailing what we need from them and how to send items to ensure A) things do not get swallowed and lost in inventory and B) that we have all the information we need to do the best post possible for the event.
6. If the event is something that is in line with SL Freebie Hunters blog (i.e. free or nearly free), we may cross-post the entries here as well, time and space permitting. These are not the normal hunt posts we do, and are tagged accordingly. There is no guarantee that an event will be cross-posted.
