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ffdotnetrants2012-06-03 07:47 pm
My thoughts on this deleting drama
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.
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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...).
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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.
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