Shiny Archive is Shiny
I have my Archive of Our Own (AO3) profile set up. I am, predictably, gabrielleabelle over there. Thanks, grav_ity, for the invite!
I apparently have 50 works in the Buffy fandom. Yep. That's everything. Drabbles, longfic, one-shots. Hell, I was even able to post What Giles Found in the Library, my non-conventional drabble.
Since I went through the somewhat-lengthy process of adding 50 works to the thing yesterday, I feel a bit qualified to spell out the pros and cons here.
Pros
- As was discussed on my begging post yesterday, you can put all your stuff on there. I have my Spuffy stories on the various Spuffy archives. But I have quite a few rare pairing drabbles, as well as my Willow/Cordy series, that didn't have a home. Not to mention Murphy's Law which isn't quite Spuffy enough for me to feel comfortable putting it on TSR or BSV. I do have some stories on fanfiction.net, but they don't allow NC-17 material. So no other place has all my stuff. AO3 does, though. It even allows drabbles, which are usually too short to qualify for archives. This is great, even if just as a back-up.
Also, while I love LJ, I've often complained that it's just not set up to archive fanfic. So it's nice to have all my fic in an actual, honest-to-god fic archive. It makes a difference.
- As other people have mentioned, you can batch import your stories. Ten at a time. This made it much easier than archiving elsewhere. I'm horrible at taking the time to archive my stories outside LJ. AO3 has a decent system to make it more convenient to do so. You can also import a multi-chaptered fic in one fell swoop, though you'll have to make edits to make it presentable.
You import by entering the URLs of your stories. This works for LJ and ffn.net. I usually imported from LJ because I don't have many stories up on ffn.net. I did find that importing from ffn.net caused some formatting errors, though, which had to be corrected manually. Very annoying. Stick with pulling from LJ.
- The site looks nice. No, really. It's very pretty. I love the layout, the fonts, the colors. It's very clean and neat-looking.
- The tagging is just nifty. I wasn't sure what to do with it at first, but I got the hang of it by looking at the tags people had already set up. It'll make it so much easier, as a reader, to find stuff that hits my kinks.
Although something I'm not certain on, are readers allowed to tag fics? I tentatively hope that they are, because I think that would make the system more effective (Much like Amazon's tagging system), as the author sometimes misses a tag or doesn't bother to tag at all. Of course, that opens up possibility for abuse, but I can't help but think there must be a way to safeguard against that.
- The labeling system is just straight-on neat. You can categorize a story as M/F, F/F, M/M, Gen, Multi, Other, or something else. It provides the option to warn for the biggies or to choose not to warn at all (Tagging allows you to provide warnings for more minor things that you'd still like to provide the heads up for). You also have the rating system, of course.
I like categorizing stuff. Hush.
Cons
- As nifty as the batch import thing is, importing multi-chaptered fics was a bitch. I felt like I got stuck in a loop. You import a fic, and then you get taken to a page to edit, presumably the entire fic, but then changes don't quite save. And the default view is to lay all the chapters out on one page, but from that page, you can't edit individual chapters (Which you have to do to get rid of the LJ coding junk that gets imported). You have to scroll all the way down to "Edit Entire Work" and then, on the next page, click on the chapter number to get to where you can edit an individual chapter.
This...not too bad. Figuring this out, though, took me forever, and I ended up trying in vain to change things only to have my changes not take. Then I'd get frustrated and couldn't figure out how to edit the text of Chapter 3. Or I'd try to title the first chapter and somehow it would end up changing the title of the entire fic, and I couldn't figure out what the page I was on was actually editing.
It looks as if multi-chaptered fics are easier to edit once they've been posted as opposed to immediately after importing. If I'd known that, I would have posted right off the bat, then went back and made the necessary edits.
Minor nitpicks
- When you're looking through, say, the fics in a particular fandom, they have a filter system off to the side. It's nice, but whatever you're filtering by (pairing, for example), it lists all the pairings that are in the system. This can be quite long, especially for a fandom like BtVS. Why not a drop-down menu to save space and scroll time? I guess because they want to give us the opportunity to select more than one. Then how about a textbox where you can control + click to highlight multiple options? It's much neater and less clunky than listing out every available pairing or tag with a check box beside it.
- You have the ability to group fics into a series (I did it with my Closet series), but when you're looking at the list of an author's fics, there's no indication that a fic is part of a series until you actually click through to the work. A little note on the preview of the fic that it's Part X of Such-and-Such Series would be nifty.
- On multi-chaptered fics, you indicate whether a fic is complete or not when you fill out how many chapters there are. If you have twelve chapters planned but only eight posted, the system knows it's incomplete. If you don't know how many chapters will be in the fic, you would leave the field blank. This works fine, but I was confused at first glance by how indirect it was. I also wasn't sure what to do with my fic when I didn't know how many chapters it would have. I left it blank, hoping the system would take it. It did. But a little note would have been helpful, especially considering how much other trouble I was having with the multi-chaptered fic at the time.
Conclusion
It's nifty and shiny. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.
Again, check out my profile! I can request invitations if someone's interested, though there is an invitation queue. Apparently, they're getting through the queue fairly quickly, so go ahead and give that a shot.
I apparently have 50 works in the Buffy fandom. Yep. That's everything. Drabbles, longfic, one-shots. Hell, I was even able to post What Giles Found in the Library, my non-conventional drabble.
Since I went through the somewhat-lengthy process of adding 50 works to the thing yesterday, I feel a bit qualified to spell out the pros and cons here.
Pros
- As was discussed on my begging post yesterday, you can put all your stuff on there. I have my Spuffy stories on the various Spuffy archives. But I have quite a few rare pairing drabbles, as well as my Willow/Cordy series, that didn't have a home. Not to mention Murphy's Law which isn't quite Spuffy enough for me to feel comfortable putting it on TSR or BSV. I do have some stories on fanfiction.net, but they don't allow NC-17 material. So no other place has all my stuff. AO3 does, though. It even allows drabbles, which are usually too short to qualify for archives. This is great, even if just as a back-up.
Also, while I love LJ, I've often complained that it's just not set up to archive fanfic. So it's nice to have all my fic in an actual, honest-to-god fic archive. It makes a difference.
- As other people have mentioned, you can batch import your stories. Ten at a time. This made it much easier than archiving elsewhere. I'm horrible at taking the time to archive my stories outside LJ. AO3 has a decent system to make it more convenient to do so. You can also import a multi-chaptered fic in one fell swoop, though you'll have to make edits to make it presentable.
You import by entering the URLs of your stories. This works for LJ and ffn.net. I usually imported from LJ because I don't have many stories up on ffn.net. I did find that importing from ffn.net caused some formatting errors, though, which had to be corrected manually. Very annoying. Stick with pulling from LJ.
- The site looks nice. No, really. It's very pretty. I love the layout, the fonts, the colors. It's very clean and neat-looking.
- The tagging is just nifty. I wasn't sure what to do with it at first, but I got the hang of it by looking at the tags people had already set up. It'll make it so much easier, as a reader, to find stuff that hits my kinks.
Although something I'm not certain on, are readers allowed to tag fics? I tentatively hope that they are, because I think that would make the system more effective (Much like Amazon's tagging system), as the author sometimes misses a tag or doesn't bother to tag at all. Of course, that opens up possibility for abuse, but I can't help but think there must be a way to safeguard against that.
- The labeling system is just straight-on neat. You can categorize a story as M/F, F/F, M/M, Gen, Multi, Other, or something else. It provides the option to warn for the biggies or to choose not to warn at all (Tagging allows you to provide warnings for more minor things that you'd still like to provide the heads up for). You also have the rating system, of course.
I like categorizing stuff. Hush.
Cons
- As nifty as the batch import thing is, importing multi-chaptered fics was a bitch. I felt like I got stuck in a loop. You import a fic, and then you get taken to a page to edit, presumably the entire fic, but then changes don't quite save. And the default view is to lay all the chapters out on one page, but from that page, you can't edit individual chapters (Which you have to do to get rid of the LJ coding junk that gets imported). You have to scroll all the way down to "Edit Entire Work" and then, on the next page, click on the chapter number to get to where you can edit an individual chapter.
This...not too bad. Figuring this out, though, took me forever, and I ended up trying in vain to change things only to have my changes not take. Then I'd get frustrated and couldn't figure out how to edit the text of Chapter 3. Or I'd try to title the first chapter and somehow it would end up changing the title of the entire fic, and I couldn't figure out what the page I was on was actually editing.
It looks as if multi-chaptered fics are easier to edit once they've been posted as opposed to immediately after importing. If I'd known that, I would have posted right off the bat, then went back and made the necessary edits.
Minor nitpicks
- When you're looking through, say, the fics in a particular fandom, they have a filter system off to the side. It's nice, but whatever you're filtering by (pairing, for example), it lists all the pairings that are in the system. This can be quite long, especially for a fandom like BtVS. Why not a drop-down menu to save space and scroll time? I guess because they want to give us the opportunity to select more than one. Then how about a textbox where you can control + click to highlight multiple options? It's much neater and less clunky than listing out every available pairing or tag with a check box beside it.
- You have the ability to group fics into a series (I did it with my Closet series), but when you're looking at the list of an author's fics, there's no indication that a fic is part of a series until you actually click through to the work. A little note on the preview of the fic that it's Part X of Such-and-Such Series would be nifty.
- On multi-chaptered fics, you indicate whether a fic is complete or not when you fill out how many chapters there are. If you have twelve chapters planned but only eight posted, the system knows it's incomplete. If you don't know how many chapters will be in the fic, you would leave the field blank. This works fine, but I was confused at first glance by how indirect it was. I also wasn't sure what to do with my fic when I didn't know how many chapters it would have. I left it blank, hoping the system would take it. It did. But a little note would have been helpful, especially considering how much other trouble I was having with the multi-chaptered fic at the time.
Conclusion
It's nifty and shiny. I look forward to seeing what comes of it.
Again, check out my profile! I can request invitations if someone's interested, though there is an invitation queue. Apparently, they're getting through the queue fairly quickly, so go ahead and give that a shot.