When I first found Pros the_safehouse was the place to post all things Pros - except that the mod at the time increasingly had very stringent rules about the wordings of things in headers, and, it turned out, would delete comments and posts that she didn't like. She also refused to allow Prosfic recs and discussions, despite people saying they'd like to be able to do that. She ran a couple of gift-exchange Pros comms (santa_pros and summerof78) and actually didn't post stories and artwork that had been sent to her, despite telling people she would - and in some cases commissioning it. When I was first in Pros she ran a weekly challenge at SH, which seemed fun and popular, which eventually just trailed away and left nothing in its place. When Josey and I offered to run challenges there, we were told that we could send in our ideas, and the new mod would post them - once checked over by the old mod who in fact was still running things (including blocking HG's membership of SH). This sort of behaviour on behalf of the old mod worried people, and it led to two things - Josey and I setting up discoveredinalj where we could run challenges that were now missing from Pros on lj, and Josey and PRZed setting up ci5hq where people could post recs and discussions, and where people who'd been put off posting at SH could post whatever they wanted without fear of being shouted at or being deleted. So there were very specific reasons for those two comms to set up - they were filling gaps in the Pros lj community.

I felt there'd been a split when teaandswissroll was set up, because it wasn't offering anything that wasn't already in Pros lj - the posts there could all surely be made to Safehouse, for example.

The Big Bang is something completely different, so that's good - but it's been interesting to see that it's also had an impact on discoveredinalj, and it's why I've not posted a challenge there fore a while. People are working on their long fic, and a few people are responding to the weekly challenges at t&sr (in a way they didn't when Drayce was posting them to SH, which is a shame). No one at all wrote for the Chinese New Year challenge at Dialj, and there were only a few entries for Robeau's Nightmare challenge. I know I should post another challenge to Dialj, and I do plan to, but it's alot of hard work if people aren't really bothered about it or not, so... I haven't managed to get up the enthusiasm for it yet. *g*

So I do think there's been recent duplication of some elements of Pros on lj, as well as simply its expansion via Big Bang for example - there's only so many people in Pros (we seem to lose and gain at a roughly steady rate, somehow!), who can only write so much, so inevitably if some things expand others are going to die off...

People only have so much time to devote to lj, and if there was also a second recs/reviews comm (rather than one that contributed to the existing comms, as I think Prosficspoilers could do) then that might mean that the quieter members of CI5hq lost out on the non-spoilered side of things as there was less posted without spoilers. Surely better to post recs for both sides of the spoiler issue?