The SWG started almost twenty-one years ago on early versions of social network sites, namely Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. Our website and archive wouldn't come for another two years, and while that has since become the center of our organization in many ways, it is not the center of community life on the SWG, and we maintain presences on several social media as a way to reach out beyond our website and foster community among our members.

Because we have new members joining us all the time, we like to periodically use the newsletter to share information that, to those of us who have been around a while, can be easy to forget that everyone doesn't know.

So if you are new or just want to get more involved on the SWG, how can you do it?

If you want to read, view, and post your own fanworks, the SWG site and archive is the place to begin. The SWG, like Archive of Our Own and many other fanworks archives, structures its site much like Rebecca Smallwood's highly influential eFiction script, so using it should be familiar if you've wandered around a fanworks archive before. Start at the Fanworks menu and explore from there. If you want to do stuff with your own account, start at the My Account menu. Our FAQs have detailed instructions on how to post and do things on the site, or you can reply here and get our mod team and ask for help—that's what we're here for!

The social center of our site is our Discord. For fandom olds who don't use Discord, it functions like the instant messaging platforms back in the day, letting you talk with other SWG members in real time. The #read-me-first channel will get you start, then each channel has a description of what it's used for. You can join our Discord here—and again, if it's a new platform for you and you need help, just reply here and ask!

The SWG maintains a presence as well on Tumblr and Dreamwidth. All announcements are posted here but both are also open to contributions from our members. (No one has ever submitted anything to our tumblr! You could be the first!) We accept Silmarillion-based fanworks, links to work you've posted elsewhere, essays and meta, and announcements for fandom events and projects.

Yahoo! Groups closed in 2019. In 2022, we stopped using LiveJournal as one of our official social media platforms, meaning that we stopped posting official SWG announcements there. The community remains open, however, and is also available for SWG members who want to use it to share their work, including event announcements.