My thoughts on this deleting drama

[alex-axle.livejournal.com]

Removing stories with cursing in the title/summary? Well, I don't agree, and I think they should be more fair about warning first (instead of trying "most users got a warning from other users first" bullshit), but, well, okay.

Removing stories with explicit sex and violence? Well, I disagree with that too, especially because the definitions are so arbitrary and inconsistently applied. As I mentioned on a previous post, they would probably take down the Hunger Games or Harry Potter books if they were fics on that site, despite the fact that both have teenagers as a/the primary audience. Not to mention that adult stuff is, for many people, the entire reason they use the site. But I guess I could see that too. Their site, their rules and all that.

But deleting entire accounts with no warning? Removing stories with "blood" or "kill" in the summaries? Really? Fanfiction, we need to have a talk. This is getting out of hand. There's a difference between cleaning the site up and taking the enjoyment out for everyone and alienating your users. At this rate, you are going to drive many of your users away from the site and thus lose advertising revenue. If you want to clean up your site, there are much better and smarter ways to do it.

If they had handled this whole thing better, I might not have minded so much. But this is beyond stupid.

Comments

[germankitty]

"Well, in the end, they were never a user friendly site. As in, answering emails to support and stuff like that."

Actually, at one point it used to be.

I'm one of the few Ffnet-still-active users with a four-digit user ID; I joined in the last millennium, when a lot of my fandom-specific archives were dying down. Back then, the biggest complaint about Ffnet was that it was unmoderated and thus had no quality control, even over such a thing as SPaG.

I can still remember weekly/monthly columns about writing, or general fannish interests that sparked on-site discussions and whatnot; also, we knew the name of the person who started it all/created the site.

When the 2002 purge of adult material happened, all those extra features had already disappeared; things have been going further downhill from there ever since. *sigh*

[in_excelsis_dea.livejournal.com]

I have an early five-digit user name since I finally joined in summer 2000, but was lurking for months before that. And yeah, that was a HUGE uproar when they started purging the adult material. I mean, heck, at the time I was 15/16, so I technically shouldn't have been reading that stuff anyways, but... whoa. And I remember people saying that they were just going to upload MA stuff as M, because who would notice, but I guess that's now backfiring on them...

But remember when they switched over to the current chapter system? And that huge uproar? I remember authors were SO mad about having to upload chapters as part of an ongoing story instead of uploading every chapter individually, but that was one of the smartest things they've done. That, and sorting by update/post date... combing through the HP fan fic section in early 2000 was bad enough when there were 26 pages of 50 fics each, but now....*shudders*

They had that message board for awhile, I remember, and I used to enjoy those writing columns. Fact is, the site used to be decent. And I can understand that it's so massive now that it's hard to keep up with stuff, but... You can report a fic for bad grammar, which might not be as obvious, but it's pretty easy to check if a fic is in script format or has a chapter that is really an AN and not an actual chapter or has swearing in the title/summary (and that has been a rule for a long time, so I'm not sure why people are getting upset about it...).

[germankitty]

What I really hate about all the various changes are the small, petty things -- like removing asterisks or other symbols as scene dividers. I have a few 60+K fics up there which now have just massive, continuous chapters (I tend to write LONG) -- which makes them very tedious to read.

A solid line break is often just -too much-, IMO; three asterisks or ~*~ just works better if you change POV or just wnt to imply a small shift in time or locale. *sigh*

As for the "no adult" rule, that's something I may regret, but can live with; after all, there are archives which don't allow slash, or only specific pairings. *shrugs* Their site, their rules -- I've taken my old NC-17 fics elsewhere, and rewritten newer stuff from MA to M so I could post to all archives. Bit of a pain, but doable.

Luckily, there now are archives out there that have similar ease for uploading, review alerts and whatnot as well; they're just not as well-known as Ffnet. Yet.

[liliaeth]

and they keep changing what they'll accept as a line break. Something that works when you post it, may no longer work a month or a year later, which is annoying as hell.

[kagenoneko-maat.livejournal.com]

This has screwed up one of my stories because there was a line break thing where there shouldn't even be.

[isethia.livejournal.com]

Were those extra features that you mentioned things that were removed after the site was down for several weeks in the summer of 2001, because I know they took a lot down then. I think favorite stories and favorite authors were taken away or a while, or only available or paying users. And I can remember that it used to be possible to sort stories by title (and something else, but I can't remember what) in addition to publication and update dates.

I'd just joined the site shortly before that downtime, and I always kind of wondering if it had anything to do with the features that disappeared during the next year.

[germankitty]

Possibly ... quite likely, even, although I don't really remember; it HAS been over 10 years, after all. What I do remember is that the extra features were phased out before and/or during the NC-17 purge.

[kagenoneko-maat.livejournal.com]

I remember those weekly/monthly columns about writing, and I started lurking fanfiction.net in 2002. Don't remember when exactly, but yeah, I've lurked there for the longest time.

Those columns would be nice to have back.

[dannylionthe1st.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see, I didn't know that. I'm feeling slightly jealous that you've been on the site for that long. You know the happier times. :)

[germankitty]

*wry grin* I've around long enough to have had my very first fanfic ever 'publiished' in a print fanzine, which was then sent out by snail mail. The only thing that was free back then was the contributor's copy. :-} Happier times? Maybe ...