Wow, AO3. I didn't know you were this full of fail.
So I've been thinking again about the merits of getting an account on some fic-uploading site.
There's fanfiction.net, but... it's fanfiction.net. Pros: easy to create an account, lots of people browse it. Cons: ...well, it's fanfiction.net. Actually when I was younger, I had an FFN account that I posted a few things to, but... there's only one story there, I think, that I wouldn't be too embarassed to associate myself with these days. It's a moot point, though, because I can't even get into my old account any more since I've forgotten the password I used, and I no longer have the email address that I signed up with.
And really, as much as people often like to think of their fandoms as having had some kind of "golden age," there was always more bad writing than good on FFN. (The FFIX section had so much of it that I had to make myself stop reading it within a few months of the game being released.)
Anyway, reading WTF Fanfiction on Tumblr (which can be everything from hilarious to brain-breaking; let the reader beware, I guess) brought me the information that FFN is doing another one of its periodic 'reinforcements' of its inconsistent rules. This time, a lot of M-rated stuff is apparently being targeted. (Which sort of made me boggle: I remember back when FFN purged the whole NC-17 category, and then suddenly decided to start letting people post smut again with the "M" rating, and is now... going back on that, or something. Or they're saying some of it can stay and some of it has to go, which brings up the ever-problematic What Is Porn debate.)
Also, there is apparently a group of people calling themselves "Critics United" going round trying to "improve the quality of work" on FFN by... leaving snarky reviews, and "reporting" every fic with anything that could be interpreted as a violation of FFN rules, no matter how minor. There's another one called "Literate Union," along the same lines. I might have thought this was funny when I was younger (I left a few reviews, back when you could review anonymously, that I'm frankly embarassed of now). Right now, I feel like I am just... too old for this nonsense and embarassed on behalf of everyone who's ever tried to give real constructive criticism to beginning writers. Apparently "Literate Union" has a thread on their forum where you can ask other people to flame fics you don't like, and a "graveyard" showcasing all the fics taken down because of them. I admit I'm confused as to what any of this is supposed to have to do with the concept of literacy.
(Not to mention that the whole premise is completely ludicrous in the first place. The entire idea that you can significantly reduce the amount of bad writing on the site by going around flaming people until they take their fics down is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. With holes in.)
So FFN: was never great to begin with, is getting worse, is mainly only good if you just want a lot of people to read your fics (relatively speaking, compared with how many people read them on other fic uploading sites or on LJ).
Anyway, I've been hearing people talk up Archive Of Our Own (AO3) for the past year or so. That it's like fanfiction.net, format-wise, but with a higher ratio of good to bad stuff. That it doesn't have the vague and inconsistently applied restrictions FFN has about "adult" content.
After the latest round of inconsistent FFN deletion policies, I've seen some people declaring that everyone should just forget FFN and jump ship for AO3. The problem is that... well, AO3 has problems. A lot of them. The main one being: they are currently so overloaded with requests to join that there is now a six-month waiting queue to get an account, if you don't have an invite from someone else. And there are currently close to 17,000 people waiting for invites.
What makes the problem worse is that while you can browse the site without having an account, there are some stories you can only see if you're a member. And the navigation/tagging system is... a mess. From what I could understand of the programming talk (I am a hopelessly visual learner, so it's hard for me to wrap my brain around anything I can't visualise), it's a horrible mess. Starting with code that apparently worked okay when there were only a small number of people on the site, but became unworkable when they were getting a lot of traffic. I think comparison to a house with a crappy foundation might work: you might be able to make it look good on the outside when it's finished, but if the foundation is crap, things will start to go wrong one after another. (I went to a school once with a building that started developing cracks in the floor less than a year after construction, because the builders skimped on materials, so yeah.)
But seriously, you don't keep a site "in beta version" for years on end when there are very obvious problems with it and just tell everyone that you're working on the problems. Just admit you've screwed up, and get someone who knows what they're doing to help you rework it from the ground up. Don't keep thousands of people frozen out from your site because you didn't bother to adapt the code as the number of users increased. *headdesk* (And I've also wanted to try Yuletide one of these years, but having an AO3 account is a prerequisite for participation. Obvious problem is obvious.)
So I'm just wondering now: is there any other fic archive that a lot of people actually read, where you can get decent concrit? I've heard of others like Mediaminer and Ficwad, but I don't think either of those are nearly as widely used.
There's fanfiction.net, but... it's fanfiction.net. Pros: easy to create an account, lots of people browse it. Cons: ...well, it's fanfiction.net. Actually when I was younger, I had an FFN account that I posted a few things to, but... there's only one story there, I think, that I wouldn't be too embarassed to associate myself with these days. It's a moot point, though, because I can't even get into my old account any more since I've forgotten the password I used, and I no longer have the email address that I signed up with.
And really, as much as people often like to think of their fandoms as having had some kind of "golden age," there was always more bad writing than good on FFN. (The FFIX section had so much of it that I had to make myself stop reading it within a few months of the game being released.)
Anyway, reading WTF Fanfiction on Tumblr (which can be everything from hilarious to brain-breaking; let the reader beware, I guess) brought me the information that FFN is doing another one of its periodic 'reinforcements' of its inconsistent rules. This time, a lot of M-rated stuff is apparently being targeted. (Which sort of made me boggle: I remember back when FFN purged the whole NC-17 category, and then suddenly decided to start letting people post smut again with the "M" rating, and is now... going back on that, or something. Or they're saying some of it can stay and some of it has to go, which brings up the ever-problematic What Is Porn debate.)
Also, there is apparently a group of people calling themselves "Critics United" going round trying to "improve the quality of work" on FFN by... leaving snarky reviews, and "reporting" every fic with anything that could be interpreted as a violation of FFN rules, no matter how minor. There's another one called "Literate Union," along the same lines. I might have thought this was funny when I was younger (I left a few reviews, back when you could review anonymously, that I'm frankly embarassed of now). Right now, I feel like I am just... too old for this nonsense and embarassed on behalf of everyone who's ever tried to give real constructive criticism to beginning writers. Apparently "Literate Union" has a thread on their forum where you can ask other people to flame fics you don't like, and a "graveyard" showcasing all the fics taken down because of them. I admit I'm confused as to what any of this is supposed to have to do with the concept of literacy.
(Not to mention that the whole premise is completely ludicrous in the first place. The entire idea that you can significantly reduce the amount of bad writing on the site by going around flaming people until they take their fics down is like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. With holes in.)
So FFN: was never great to begin with, is getting worse, is mainly only good if you just want a lot of people to read your fics (relatively speaking, compared with how many people read them on other fic uploading sites or on LJ).
Anyway, I've been hearing people talk up Archive Of Our Own (AO3) for the past year or so. That it's like fanfiction.net, format-wise, but with a higher ratio of good to bad stuff. That it doesn't have the vague and inconsistently applied restrictions FFN has about "adult" content.
After the latest round of inconsistent FFN deletion policies, I've seen some people declaring that everyone should just forget FFN and jump ship for AO3. The problem is that... well, AO3 has problems. A lot of them. The main one being: they are currently so overloaded with requests to join that there is now a six-month waiting queue to get an account, if you don't have an invite from someone else. And there are currently close to 17,000 people waiting for invites.
What makes the problem worse is that while you can browse the site without having an account, there are some stories you can only see if you're a member. And the navigation/tagging system is... a mess. From what I could understand of the programming talk (I am a hopelessly visual learner, so it's hard for me to wrap my brain around anything I can't visualise), it's a horrible mess. Starting with code that apparently worked okay when there were only a small number of people on the site, but became unworkable when they were getting a lot of traffic. I think comparison to a house with a crappy foundation might work: you might be able to make it look good on the outside when it's finished, but if the foundation is crap, things will start to go wrong one after another. (I went to a school once with a building that started developing cracks in the floor less than a year after construction, because the builders skimped on materials, so yeah.)
But seriously, you don't keep a site "in beta version" for years on end when there are very obvious problems with it and just tell everyone that you're working on the problems. Just admit you've screwed up, and get someone who knows what they're doing to help you rework it from the ground up. Don't keep thousands of people frozen out from your site because you didn't bother to adapt the code as the number of users increased. *headdesk* (And I've also wanted to try Yuletide one of these years, but having an AO3 account is a prerequisite for participation. Obvious problem is obvious.)
So I'm just wondering now: is there any other fic archive that a lot of people actually read, where you can get decent concrit? I've heard of others like Mediaminer and Ficwad, but I don't think either of those are nearly as widely used.