They took my story down!

[jessioriginal]

I'm pretty ticked off here.  First, they ignore you whenever you contact them.  But then they can suddenly allegedly review and decide to delete your story?  And over what?  The fact that they felt it should have been rated higher?  Their ratings guidelines are extremely vague.  I gave it the rating I thought was appropriate.  It takes FIVE SECONDS

Comments

[paksenarrion2]

Part of the problem (possibly even the main reason for this) is because this group has appointed themselves the arbiter of what is good fanfic.

I received this info via a Yahoo group and this was part of the email:
They even go into membership guidelines to hand out 'assignments' which
are stories THEY deem to be unacceptable to fanfiction's guidelines.
They want all of their members to review stories that are assigned to them
and cite the violations within them. They also massively group report these
fics to the site administrators in order to have them pulled off of
fanfiction thinking that they are doing a service to the rest of the
world.
They appear to have only been really active since the end of April, and
it takes time for the story lists to build, and reports to get in to the
admins, which goes perfectly in line with the sudden surge of stories being
hit and removed from fanfiction.
These people will stop at nothing to spread their idea of a good fic around and will mass report stories that they deem unacceptable.

Be warned, if you do post in their forum, they will attack you if they haven't already targeted you. Back up all your fics, even if it is to your own hard drive.

[jessioriginal]

That is seriously disturbing. And the ironic part, is that they are essentially trolls. I'm sickened by what I read in their little report thread, and I posted a link and emailed the site to report abuse. Honestly, I doubt they'll get punished in anyway, though. Makes me want to report their stories.>_< Who are they to police the site and decide what's appropriate? And it definitely looks like they are behind the mass-deletion for the Hunger Games fandom.

[paksenarrion2]

From the discussion thread on my yahoo group, the Twilight fandom was another fandom that was targeted.

What really pisses me off is the sheer number of plagarists that have stories on that site but nothing was getting done to have their stories taken down. Or the many, many song fics and I am not talking about ones that have snippets of lyrics with appropriate credit given. They just piss me off.

[thelastpen]

Just out of curiosity, if they're making a habit of maliciously giving false reports, why isn't anyone reporting them? Last I heard, they weren't quiet about it.

[paksenarrion2]

In reading that email and trying to wade through some of those threads, I don't think they are giving false reports. They are reporting stories that have words like blood or kill in the summary and are reporting stories that have very mature content or otherwise violate the TOS (like songfics, lists, chatfics, etc). I do know two fics in one of my fandoms they reported. One got pulled due to the mature content, one has not (yet). I think because the one that got pulled had keywords that pinged the bots and the one that was pulled used euphemisms that didn't ping so didn't end up getting yanked. I think that the site has a program that can search fics according to certain parameters it sets and when those parameters set off flags, the admins can look at them and delete them if they violate the TOS. So if you call a penis a cock-it will get flagged and removed. If you call it a member and uses a lot of euphemisms for the various sexual acts, it won't ping the search bots. (Which is how my other favorite has survived the purge so far.)

I do think that many of the fics that got pulled did violate the TOS and should have been pulled. I think the admins handled it the wrong way. Warning emails should have been sent out allowing people to change or remove the parts that were in violation and they should have been given a reasonable frame of time to do it in-say a week. After that, purge away.

I also think they need to reinstate an MA area. You would have to filter that in and also click a link saying you are over the age of 18 to read the fic. There are several websites that do this-the one that immediately comes to mind is Teaspoon. One of the larger Doctor Who websites out there.

They've spent all this time on a stupid site redesign that makes it look worse when they should be dealing with clarifying the ratings and what really constitutes an M rating in their mind, among other things.

/soapbox.

[jessioriginal]

They are making false reports, they are acting like mods, and their overall behavior is atrocious and trolling.