Thoughts and questions about the 852 Prospect move

[mab_browne]

And I hear you saying, "Mab, why don't you address those to the OTW people?" And I'd agree, and I already have, but these are an entirely different set of thoughts.

Cut for confusion, naked neediness and one or two genuine thoughts and questions on fannish history and protocol. If you don't want to read those things, you know what not to do.

Comments

[alassenya]

Like others I'm a relative newcomer to the fandom, so the formatting and appearance issues with 852 vs AO3 don't really worry me, I'm not emotionally attached to either, and I would like to think that, accessiblity aside, the text is more important than the style. I think that manual importing give you a little more control over appearance, though, but it sounds like a fair bit of work, so do what you are comfortable doing and let the bots handle the grunt work.

As for backdating ... well I hope that when they do the automatic transfer they do backdate otherwise we'll get thousands of new entries which will make it difficult to keep track of the new uploads. For manual importing I think you would get a lot more visibility for your stories if you don't backdate, and you can always add the original posting date to the author's notes. On the whole I think that visibility for new fans outweighs the possible adverse effect of having to scroll through for fans who have previously read your fics. /two cents' worth

[mab_browne]

My narcissistic little heart is glad at your suggestion of visibility for new fans. :-) Apparently the stories that aren't already there will be backdated. I'm not sure what this means for RSS feeds, as I know that stories posted backdated appear on the DW feed even when they don't appear on the actual update list at AO3. It will be interesting to see. :-)

(And I haven't forgotten that I owe you a Moonridge story. My apologies for the slackness of my muse.)

[alassenya]

The muse is always fickle. *Sigh* Don't stress about it, though, I'm sure she will cooperate eventually. Would you like some more prompts? Would a Pros or Pros/Ts crossover set work better for you?

[mab_browne]

If you don't mind offering some Pros prompts, that might make a change of pace. I haven't written those boys in a while, although I still drag the eps out reasonably often. It's not that I don't have ideas at the moment - it's just that the writing process is very very slow. /whining

[alassenya]

Give me 24 hours to ponder prompts and I'll email them to you (if you are still using the same email you had back in July).

I can sympathise about writing speed - mine is glacial. I'm lucky to get 500 words a fortnight at the moment. Roll on retirement ...