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

[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.