An Archive Of One's Own
**NEW ETA**: we're going to take a stab at putting this together. For more information and discussion, please join and/or watch fanarchive.
ETA: If you are coming to the conversation late, xenacryst has helpfully collected up a bunch of links to a subset of noteworthy discussion threads, over here!
First, why fanfic is not illegal and why YOU should stop ( Read more... )
ETA: If you are coming to the conversation late, xenacryst has helpfully collected up a bunch of links to a subset of noteworthy discussion threads, over here!
First, why fanfic is not illegal and why YOU should stop ( Read more... )
I haven't read through all of the comments, but I think that ff.net stands as a very valid example of why an all-encompassing multi-fandom archive probably never *would* work on a large scale, at least not any better than ff.net works (which is, IMHO, pretty damn well, but its problems are a case study in fandom archiving on that scale).
I was there on the ground floor, more or less, with ff.net, and I've watched it evolve over the years. It's largely been a victim of its own success. In the beginning, ff.net was basically what's being advocated above. In 1999, when most fic was still on individual people's websites or mailing list archives, when only a few fandoms were big enough to have their own widely-read archive (e.g. SG-1 with Heliopolis) ff.net was pretty damn cool. Nobody really knew how a large, multi-fandom archive should be put together, and the system that Xing & co. came up with for ff.net was straightforward, workable and very usable. It didn't have a lot of bells and whistles, but you could upload your stories and generally find what you were looking for, and just about EVERYTHING was represented on there.
But, like I said, it's been a victim of its own success. Its high profile outside the fanfiction community means that the administrators have taken more and more CYA steps -- first banning adult fanfic, then changing the default view so that mature-rated stories don't even show up -- until the site is basically catering to a young-teen audience. The tons of bad fic on the site have meant that it's increasingly difficult to find the gems (and there *is* a lot of good fic to be found) and the site is starting to be abandoned to the preteens, novices and badficcers because new writers come in already knowing about its reputation and not wanting to post there. The attempts by the administration team to clean it up resulted in a number of fic purges that just made its reputation WORSE, because people were having stuff deleted without notification (one of my fics was deleted, for example, for allegedly containing material in excess of its rating -- basically, implied torture and the "fuck" word in a PG-13 story got it booted). So now they have a reputation for having crappy content AND being unfair, clique-ish and arbitrary in their rules enforcement.
Meanwhile, the look and navigation of the site are becoming horribly dated -- and that's going to be a problem with ANY archive. But who's got the time to recode it from the ground up, especially when it contains millions of stories? The ff.net solution is to do a lot of little "fixes" as they go along that have resulted in, half the time, the site being impossible to upload to, and even when you CAN, their upload interface has gotten more and more buggy, cludgy, restrictive and generally horrible. Meanwhile, the problems with their search interface and navigation are becoming increasingly obvious -- the interface that worked great when there were 30 stories in a section is almost unusable when there are 30,000. But what can you DO short of rewriting the codebase for the entire site? And can you do it, or hire someone else to do it, every 3-5 years?
No matter what interface you use, what sort of searching or navigation or tagging, a lot of people are going to complain that it doesn't suit their needs. If it's too simple, you'll have a lot of the same problems as ff.net has with its navigation; if it's too complex, then a lot of people won't be able to figure out how to use it; and in a few years something much cooler is going to come along (like, say, tagging) and suddenly everyone will be using THAT and your archive will look so very 2007.
And fics that aren't wholly text-based (e.g. illustrated ones or those that involve downloads) are a whole new level of headache for accommodating in the code and search structure.
I just don't think it can be done. I mean, even if someone tries to do the next generation's ff.net -- and I'm sure someone will at some point -- it'll ultimately get weighed down by the same problems.
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But of course, anybody can try to solve a problem -- it is great, in fact, that the problem has been noticed. But it is not a great idea to try to solve it by menas that have already been tried and failed.
So, because I know that the team formed for this project is reading these comments, I suggest them the following: learn from ff.net. Don't think of it as teenagers think of adults, because in the end you'll find there was some reason for certain things being the way they were.
And I wonder if all this fandomish energy trying to solve ff.net problems (or working with them as affiliates) wouldn't be the best course of action ...
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But like I said in my other comment, I don't want to end up being the naysayer who stands in the corner and tells everyone they're going to fail. I *want* to see this work. I just have a lot of qualms about it.
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Would that really be the worst thing in the world? IMO, any archive is doomed to eventually become outmoded. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth it to create new ones. Maybe it will be the ffn of 2050 instead. You never know.
a huge multifandom archive at this point in time is kind of going against the current trends in fandom
I agree, but if this project gets popular, it may well be influential enough to set fandom trends instead of following them. I've seen a lot of debates suggesting that the format of LJ is largely responsible for the rise of drabbles and the lack of novel-length fic these days. Whether or not that's actually true, I know I find the lj format less than ideal for posting and reading longer fic.
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But as a fic writer, I'm sure I can't be the only person who suffers from (for lack of a better way to put it) "archive fatigue". Right now I post stories in three places -- Livejournal, my own website and (some of them) at ff.net. I don't post to the fandom specific archives for the fandoms I'm in, because I just don't have time to learn a bunch of new upload interfaces and then keep a bunch of different sites updated, keep up on comments, etc. I'm not saying "OMG no one would come!", because I really don't think that's true; however, speaking for myself, I'm not sure I'd put in the legwork to archive my work somewhere new when I already have a readership at the other sites where I post.
But as a reader and fan, I'm never gonna argue with OMG more fic!
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As a side note, I really wish the Yuletide archive would let me upload .txt. files written in Textedit (or whatever that default Mac OSX text program is) instead of only ones written in MS Word. Maybe it's just me...
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I'd love to know more about the initial ff.net design, and what the design now is like, if you know anything more about it. Is it currently distributed across multiple servers? And do you know what programming language the code is written in? Is it all PHP?
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