[rant] Taking a short break from laughing at Fanfic.me
Okay, Fanfic.me is utterly hilarious, but they deserve a proper rend-and-tear post anyway. They put so much effort into their... thing. No, really, they did! It's all part of a cunning long-term plan!
Many thanks again to
watersword for all the sleuthing work. A lot of the info in this post was already in her awesome write-up from yesterday, and in the comments to said write-up. I did some more digging because I want to be a plucky girl detective too.
EDIT 3/10: A few people have correctly pointed out that the limits of my personal fannish experience are showing in the way I interpret the fannish background of people behind Fanfic.me. Qualifiying statement about why I chose to call them "not fans" here. Also, there's some extra info about Fanfic.me's money-making strategy at the bottom of the post now.
EDIT 5/10: Huge batch of edits at the bottom of the post, including links to lots of new Fanfic.me pages and discussion of problems with the software being used. And another qualifying statement about the use of "fannish" in this post. Sorry, people, I didn't realize at first posting that I made a couple of snap judgements and inadvertedly made it sound like this is all about the fannish background of the Fanfic.me people. It definitely isn't.
So, what's the problem?
Fanfic.me isn't evil just because it mentions fanworks and money in the same sentence. I'm not opposed to the idea of fanwork commodification. Not at all, in fact; I think that fan-controlled organizations or businesses have the potential to become strong forces for encouraging and defending fannish practices. And as
facetofcathy pointed out, there's nothing wrong with involving some money in the running of a fic archive (like, say, FF.net) to cover server costs. However, I'm very much opposed to attempts at commodification that come from outsiders who have no goal but to profit from the free work done by fans. These people only take and never give, and anything they come up with turns into a huge clusterfuck that keeps fans occupied and paranoid while more subtle and arguably more dangerous forms of encroachment fly under our radar.
Perhaps some form of commodification could make fandom stronger, but Fanfic.me is not the droid we're looking for. This is not a good-faith attempt to support fandom by way of a commercial venture. And that is the reason why we should give it the Fanlib treatment and make it go the hell away, right now. The problem here isn't that this is a project that tries to combine fanworks and money, but that it's a project that is not trying to benefit fans and will only set back fannish efforts to make the industry treat us like participants instead of purses that blog a lot.
Is Fanfic.me run by fans?
To be sure, Fanfic.me looks like a very stupid and poorly-executed idea no matter what. But if there are actual, well-meaning fellow fans behind this, we might have reason to be merciful and let the thing die a quiet death by itself. The people behind Fanfic.me certainly claim that they're fans themselves and are making this site to help other fans express themselves. I don't think that's true.
Let's see who's involved. Fanfic.me is owned by a company called Fandom Entertainment, the CEO of which is a woman called Jacky Abromitis. A simple Google search turns up oodles of info about her, if you want. (Yes, the person with the long-distance education company site is the same Jacky Abromitis. She just tweeted something spammy to both her education company twitter and Fanfic.me's twitter, then deleted it from Fanfic.me's before I could get a cap. Doesn't matter, there's plenty of other indications that there is only one single Jacky Abromitis who shows up in search results. Her linkedin page shows all of her work involvements together. It also says she used to be an associate professor of English. I hope this is not true, because part of me really doesn't want to know about an English professor capable of showing this little respect for writers.)
Er. More to the point, everything I can find seems to point to Jacky Abromitis and the other people behind Fanfic.me not being fans who just want to help others. Fandom Entertainment claims to be completely by the fans, for the fans, on pretty much every single page of every site that they own, over and over and over. They also claim to be nothing like Fanlib on their websites and elsewhere, showing that they are definitely aware of Fanlib and all that went on there. Jacky Abromitis provides some details about her fannish likes here and there, for instance at that last link. But I can't find any evidence of her having been active in any sort of fan community, and on the whole, there is a definite overcompensation vibe to all their reassurances.
The Fan History wiki is hilariously defensive of Fandom Entertainment, which is probably a red flag all by itself. It looks like most of the articles related to Fandom Entertainment were written by someone involved with the company; the author's name is the same as their archive software, and they are, um, not very good at pretending that they're not writing about themselves. The article about their older website MyFandoms.com, of which Fanfic.me appears to be a clone, says:
Archive Funding
Jacky's checkbook and some ad revenue from L-word.com.
Some fans have mistakenly thought that myFandoms.com was associated with FanLib. IT IS NOT. We are fans creating fan tools for other fans. We are not a corporation with .com funding, nor do we have "venture capital", a board of anything, partners, shares, or anything else that is conglomerate-like.
myFandoms.com is completely funded personally by Jacky.
Fandom Entertainment does, however, have a CruchBase entry saying that Jacky Abromitis was listed as its CEO on 12/14/03 (around the launch of their L-word site), that a person called Chad Horton (also mentioned in FH) was added in 2005, and that the company specializes in "Proprietary Fan Fic Sites", among other info. The article
franzeska dug up also mentions "COO Kathleen Ulisse, a former senior project executive at IBM; (the aforementioned) CTO Chad Horton, who has experience at a Fortune 500 company; and adviser Alice O’Brien, who has designed web and mobile sites for a large Canadian bank." This entity might not be a corporation, true, but it sure is a company.
(Just curious, and because I'm not sure if she's just obfuscating or actively lying - under US law, what types of business entities are required to have a board?)
If anyone wants to check the FH articles without upping FH's hit count, I saved some copies here, along with copies of other related Facebook and Twitter pages, shots of Fanfic.me and other relevant Fandom Entertainment websites, news articles etc. Just preserving for posterity, feel free to grab it all or post the links in a more accessible format. I just got my new Pinboard and I don't want to fill it up with junk just yet ;) Fandom Entertainment owns a large number of other sites, listed in
watersword's post. I could only check out the ones I mention by name in this post, so maybe there are other surprises lying around in the rest. It's this weird little self-contained ecosystem of badly designed sites that all reference each other. Apart from the main sites, MyFandoms.com/Fanfic.me have profiles on pretty much every online service it's possible to have a profile on. I didn't check all of those either, but most of them seemed to be empty or full of random videos. There is a user called fanficme on DW, LJ and the AO3, but it looks like that may be a regular, unrelated person. I pray it is. *shudder*
All the Fandom Entertainment pages are pretty fun reading. Endless reassurances that this is not a corporation and we're all fans for the fans guys, accusations of spamming, and much talk about their "leading edge, feature rich, and user friendly" and ad-filled software, which includes exciting features like:
a totally new "commenting" system that totally rocks. Writers now have an easy to use "list" of all comments on all stories, without having to check each one individually. Writers can now *reply* to readers comments. We now have smilies, too. :-) (MyFandom.com's Facebook page, 10 december 2008.)
That's so cool. The AO3 doesn't have smilies, does it? Hah.
About that software...
As very many people have pointed out, the websites that Fandom Entertainment creates are not exactly marvels of innovation or technical sophistication. The software they use and distribute is called Fan Fic Fan, and they claim that a total number of 232 sites and 5419 stories use this software. (EDIT 3/10 for clarity: this part is about the software Fandom Entertainment has been using up to now and which seems to run all of their more established sites. The new Fanfic.me and seemingly related new sites like fflslash.fanfic.me and GleeKlub.com use different software that seems to be based on WordPress.)
Apparently, most sites created with Fan Fic Fan software are hosted on Fanficfan.com; it's possible to get the software and then host the site yourself, but that doesn't seem to be an attractive option, given that the FAQ states that users who do this get no support whatsoever. If a user decides to use the software to host a fic site on Fanfiction.com, one of the added features is that stories can be sent to MyFandoms.com automatically.
Here's where it gets interesting. Jacky Abromitis provides some pretty revealing details about this "feature" in a 2007 news article called A Day At the Biggest Mall on Earth: Fanfic Archiving and You (which somehow manages to discuss the OTW, AO3, and MyFandoms as comparable organizations):
"We have a few ad spots reserved for ourselves within the software, which is called FanFicFan and can be found at www.fanficfan.com. We have a few folks testing it out now, and we're in the process of adding two huge features -- a complete admin panel and an announcements area. Any fan fiction uploaded through fanficfan from any user, will also be uploaded to myFandoms.com. We feel this is a fabulous win-win for both us and the end user. They get to use the coolest, best fan fic software for their own purposes and on their own sites for absolutely free. We get some ad revenue when they use it, and we continue to grow myFandoms.com. Everything we do is free -- no 'premium' for-pay anything. Advertising is the revenue stream for our sites."
They get to continue to grow MyFandoms.com? So they can do something with it as soon as they have a critical mass of content, like turning it into Fanfic.me? It almost looks like we're seeing an actual long-term plan here. (I'm not sure if we are, because I don't understand how the plan is supposed to work.)
The article was later edited to add:
Abromitis said, "[B]ased on input we've been getting this week, we've decided there WILL be an 'opt out' of having stories added to myFandoms." Additionally, she said, "any story deleted/edited/updated via FanFicFan **is also** deleted/edited/updated on myFandoms."
Okay then. But it's still an opt out, not an opt in. Those are two very different things. Perhaps this "feature" at least a partially explains where MyFandoms.com got those ten thousand stories that they ported to Fanfic.me: people using this software added and maybe still add things posted on their own sites to MyFandoms.com. There's a list of all the sites using Fan Fic Fan, but I don't have time right now to verify those against any usernames that pop up on MyFandoms.com or Fanfic.me.
(Yesterday, I suggested that they might be scraping from FF.net because stories that were also there were turning up on Fanfic.me under different user names. There's been a bit more investigating about that possibility, but nothing conclusive yet. It's possible there was no scraping and most of the content comes from the sites that use Fan Fic Fans software. The Fan Fic Fans site says only 5419 stories are archived by its users, while Fanfic.me boasts over ten thousand, but the Fan Fic Fans site looks like it may be pretty out of date. It talks about things coming up in 2008 at some point.)
This is not sounding very much like a fannish initiative anymore, insofar as it ever did. And it's definitely not getting any less commercial from now on. As
watersword pointed out,
(Fanfic.me will be) featured in the New York Web 2.0 Expo‘s Startup Showcase on October 12, 2011. It’s the last item that concerns me; there’s no information on the site, Twitter, Facebook, or Google that I can find about their plans for financial stability, but their presence in the Showcase suggests they’re hoping for venture capital. (One of the judges of the Showcase is a partner in a VC firm.)
The explanation on the Showcase site does make it sound like the event is about startups pitching themselves to try and find funding.
(Note: most of the above is information I'm pretty sure of. From now on, a lot more interpretation/speculation.)
But are they doing bad things?
All right, so Fanfic.me is almost certainly a commercial venture, not just a by-the-fans for-the-fans affair. But the fact that the site has commercial aims doesn't make it harmful to fandom per se. Plenty of archives and other fansites have ads, and although the purposeful way in which Fanfic.me seems to be chasing profits rather than just seeking to cover hosting costs is pretty distasteful to me, I might cut them some slack if they were also trying to help fandom while making money.
They're not, though. I don't see Fanfic.me doing anything that's likely to support fannish activities in any meaningful way. Fanfic.me's claims that its (proprietary) platform is highly innovative and will give fans new opportunities for publishing their works is just risible. They must know that, I don't see how they could be unaware that Fanfic.me is not what they claim it is. So they're lying about their supposed technological contribution to the fan community, and the rest of what they get up to doesn't exactly inspire confidence either.
Take the way they address their audience. As mentioned pretty much everywhere, the tone and vocabulary that Fanfic.me uses towards fans it supposedly wants to attract is... awkward at best. They sound like they know zip about how fans actually talk. I can't help but think that if the people behind Fanfic.me have been hanging around here since 2003, they can't possibly be as ignorant about how fans interact as they seem to be. The way they talk is clearly not geared towards us, and I think that may be deliberate. We're not the target audience here.
Who are they trying to reach, then? By creating profiles on every web service known to humankind and pushing fanfic fanfic fanfic as a keyword everywhere, Fanfic.me seems to be targeting internet users who don't know much about fanfic and enter the word in a search engine in the hope of ending up somewhere useful. I hate to make assumptions without some research on hand about how people discover and become a part of particular fan communities, but I suspect that the people likely to search for "fanfic" in a way that makes them end up on Fanfic.me are either very new and very young fans who want to take part in this "fanfic" thing they've heard mentioned somewhere, or people who are not participants in the kind of organized and knowledgable fandoms that have their home bases on various parts of the internet. Again, no idea how correct this is, but I'd guess that very new and very young fans are particularly likely to a) end up on Fanfic.me and b) not realize immediately that they're being patronized and that this is not the way the whole fan community works. For the record, I don't think that someone needs to be part of the organized and vocal LJ/DW crowd to call him/herself a fan. But it seems somewhat likely that the youngest and most inexperienced fans would be quicker to assume that Fanfic.me is what it claims to be. I think Fanfic.me knows this and is talking to them, because they're well aware that talking to us would only get them the kind of reaction that Fanlib got.
The choice of their target demographic makes it clear to me that Fanfic.me doesn't intend to support fandom as a whole. If they have any serious plans to go ahead with this venture, and I hope they're smarter than that because it makes no sense whatsoever as a business, they intend to take advantage of those fans whom they think they can dupe. Now, I don't think that every person on the internet should be protected from their own stupidity. But it's definitely not okay for a company to deliberately target very young people, people who are most likely underage, because they know that older and more experienced users would probably not fall for their sales pitch.
Some of the people on MyFandoms/Fanfic.me may be well aware of how Fanfic.me functions and just not give a damn. They're entitled not to give a damn. People have the right to post their fic wherever they please. However, I think it should be treated as a problem for all of us if Fanfic.me is trying to trick new fans into thinking that this is what they need to subscribe to if they want to enjoy making and consuming fanworks about their favorite shows and books.
Fanfic.me's whole modus operandi reveals a pretty stunning disregard for the lessons learned during Fanlib, an incident that they obviously know about. They don't seem to care about making sure that their users retain control over their data. There's that software and its opt-out "feature", and it looks like the entire contents of Fanfic.me were ported directly from MyFandoms.com (link includes an interesting discussion on porting and TOS issues, also related to FF.net). It's possible that MyFandoms.com informed their users that they were planning to carry off the stories to a completely different site, but the language they use on their about page doesn't suggest so.
Nobody seems to have located a Fanfic.me TOS that could explain what control writers would retain over their stories, and what the site will do to protect its users in case copyright holders come knocking or advertisers take offense at sexually explicit content in the fanworks their ads will appear next to. Fanlib's TOS was incredibly hostile to fans in a variety of ways, and this was one of the biggest problems with the service. For a new site that looks to have a similar business model to Fanlib but goes out of its way to scream that it's not like Fanlib at all, it's simply not acceptable to be unclear about the TOS in any way or form. Given that there simply is no TOS right now, I'm not hopeful.
(Perhaps there are some clues in the Fan Fic Fan software's TOS about what might end up in the TOS for Fanfic.me, given that people who use the software have the "option" of sending their stories straight to MyFandoms.com. I haven't found a TOS for the software, but its FAQ page contains lovely phrases such as "please do not post anything illegal. Anyone who infringes upon another's copyright will lose their privileges to use FFF". I don't even know if they understand what that means.)
In short, for a site that claims to be by and for the fans, Fanfic.me is showing some pretty stunning behavior. The kind of total disregard for fans displayed by this site and the persons and organization associated with it can't be due to simple ignorance, not if the site owners have been fans (or at least observing fandom) for as long as they claim. This is not a benign attempt to help and support fandom. I don't think there's any reason to give Fanfic.me the benefit of the doubt. But even in the very, very unlikely event that these people really are fans trying to do good for fandom as a whole, they're going about it in such an utterly stupid way that I believe we should stop them anyway.
They may be trying to do bad things, but they're not very good at being bad. Why worry?
This won't be the last doomed attempt at squeezing money out of fanworks. If Fanfic.me is still around by the time yet another outsider who thinks they have a bright idea comes along, it's pretty much guaranteed that we'll just get to go through this incredibly pointless process again. They'll see that this kind of site can apparently survive, and assume that they can make it work if they can only improve the model a bit.
Seeing Fanfic.me is not going to encourage non-fannish businesspeople to treat fans like valuable partners with which they can cooperate and form a mutually benificial relationship. Fanfic.me does not scream "We are a savvy, creative, and powerful group of people who love consuming commercial products and want to work with the industry so everyone can all make all the awesome stuff they want and be compensated in whatever way they want or need". Fanfic.me suggests that fans are a gaggle of idiots who have no idea of the goldmine they're sitting on and would be deliriously happy to have others make money off their hard work in exchange for a lollipop a two-bit piece of crappy software. If we want to be taken seriously, letting this image of ourselves continue to reverberate will set us back.
And not just because it will only encourage entities like Fandom Entertainment or Keith Mander to come and take another shot at this monetizing fanfic thing. I don't think these people are the biggest threat fandom is currently facing. They don't even have anything to do with the media companies that fandom usually deals with; they're just ignorant outsiders who blunder into fandom, fail, and never get anywhere. (Fandom Entertainment ranking far higher than Mander on the stupidity scale, because they really should know better after nine years. Seriously, if anyone understands what these people think they're going to accomplish, I want to know.)
If we're ever going to have any sort of fannish commodification of fanworks, the ones we'll have to find a good balance with are the media companies. Neither fans nor companies will ever need outsider middlemen like Keith Mander (haha) to play intermediary. They're ineffectual and irrelevant. The companies are the ones we'll have to impress or scare if we want them to not encroach on fan communities in unpleasant ways. And I don't think we'll look like a very impressive or scary bunch if random people can just come in and make money off our works. If we can't even keep our spaces not-for-profit while we're swearing up and down that fandom is purely a gift economy and that's why companies should leave us be, what's that going to look like? What company will be persuaded to relax its stance on copyright and give fans leeway to create without having to feel like they're doing something illegal, if it looks like we can't keep outsiders from barging in and abusing our privileges? I think that letting sites like Fanfic.me hang around working on their SEO and being visible won't do us any favors anywhere.
Plus, if sites like Fanfic.me are allowed to live on and work themselves up the search engine results like they obviously mean to, any reporter-type person who's just googling for a good quote about fanfic could see Jacky Abromitis on top and assume that she must be the go-to person for anything fanfic. This may sound paranoid, but it's happened already. Remember the 2009 Lesbian Fan Art Empowers Queer Women article from AfterEllen.com? She's right in there, talking nonsense. (She seems to think a "ship fic" is about a canon relationship, and fics about non-canon pairings are something separate called "fantasy pairings".) We don't want these people to become our spokespersons just because they're the easiest to find. This is really not okay. I don't want non-fans to speak for me. And I sincerely hope that Jacky Abromitis is a queer woman herself, because if she's neither a queer woman nor a fan and still got up there to lecture AfterEllen.com on femslash... I would not be okay with that. Just, no.
Done yet?
All right. It could be argued that the birth of a new archive for fanworks should always be welcomed. The more the merrier, and every fan who doesn't find what she wants from an archive among the existing options should definitely try to make a better one. There's no one-size-fits-all for anything fandom-related, and consolidation is a bad thing wherever it takes place (hi, media industry). But this is not a benign new archive, insofar as it can even be called "new". If it were benign, it would be presenting itself as a cool new option, not the saviour that will lead the fannish masses out of the stone age.
In short, I think it's pretty justified to release the hounds on this one. Granted, Fanfic.me is such a craptastic piece of junk that it'll probaby manage to self-destruct even without any outside intervention. But there's value in actively running after it with torches and pitchforks - value apart from the joy of the chase, I mean. If we leave it alone to fizzle out by itself, it may just do a MyFandoms and reawaken from its slumber to terrorize the countryside again a few years from now. And I think it's important to send a clear and obvious message that if we ever want our fanworks commodified, we'll do it ourselves, thanks very much. This kind of thing shouldn't happen unless fans get to control exactly what is done with their creations and exactly who gets to benefit.
*gets off the soapbox* Okay, back to pointing and giggling now. Maybe we could start by writing fic about Fanlib, Keith Mander, and Fanfic.me and pasting it all over the internet as a warning to what happens to those who mess with fandom? They deserve it a lot more than the poor Pinboard guy. (Fine, maybe it's not really okay to make it so that NSFW slash is the first thing that comes up when people google someone's name. I know. I just like to think about it sometimes.)
Also, my apologies if there's any broken links or broken sentences, I haven't slept much. Please give me a heads-up if something seems odd.
EDIT 3/10: Made it clearer in the text that Fandom Entertainment has been using the Fan Fic Fan software up to now (all their established sites seem to be running it) but that the new Fanfic.me and seemingly related new sites like fflslash.fanfic.me and GleeKlub.com use different software that seems to be based on WordPress. ffslash.fanfic.me has no about or ownership info, but it's being advertised on Fandom Entertainment's L-Word site as "NEW Lesbian Fanfic Site ALL Fandoms! Embed pics, vids, art! This site is just getting started - show some love and help spread the word!". It's not made clear anywhere that Fandom Entertainment owns this new site as well.
EDIT 3/10 2: Some more info on the WordPress-based software mentioned above. fansitepress.com is another site owned by Fandom Entertainment (WHOIS). The company name is once more not mentioned on the site, which contains no ownership, copyright, or TOS info whatsoever. The "plugin features" and "support" pages don't work yet. They seem to be building the site as we speak -the big "learn about our premium features" button goes nowhere but was posted on September 28.
Fansitepress.com offers to host "fanfic blogs" as a WordPress, with a "Fanfic.me plugin". There is a free and a "premium" option. Apart from a bunch of WordPress features, free users get the following:
You get tons of free features at Fanfic.me.
Fanfic.me Free Features
#1 - you are allowed to archive up to 250 fanfiction stories with our awesome fanfiction software. If your still starts going viral and your community start growing, we’ll need you to kick in towards the costs a bit. No worries… it’ll be super cheap, and you’ll get to use the coolest, easiest fanfic software anywhere!
Crazy Easy
Fill out the 4 step form, and BOOM - you’ve got a Fanfic.me site just like that.
Pick a name like Harry Potter Fan Fic
Describe your site
Grab your domain like potterfics@fanfic.me.com
Pick your fandom
And away you go. Import an existing WordPress site, or start fresh. If you can type or copy and paste, you’re going to have a hell of site. Get started.
Track comments
We know that the comment fanfic readers leave for writers are of great importance. When you go to your dashboard, you’ll find a Manage Comments option. Everything is easy and intuitive to help both fan fiction writers and readers.
Not just a fan fiction archive
Fanfic.me has a feature called “pages” which allows you to easily create web pages. You can even create an entire web site/fan site using WordPress pages on Fanfic.me.
No lock-in
You can leave Fanfic.me any time you want. We provide a complete XML export of all your posts, pages and comments outside our exclusive plugin. Of course, you should always keep copies of your own stories, but you already knew that.
We protect you against spam
Spam Pack comes with every Fanfic.me site. We provide a nice “captcha” (and one that is not as easily hacked like others), automatic trackback filtering and protection, and the comment protection features that check against a number of factors like the site owner’s white list, black list, 3rd party anti-spamservice, etc. We want you to be spam free.
I'm not a WordPress user myself, so I'd love to hear from anyone who can judge how interesting these features are. My first reaction is deep scepticism, especially since several of the features described as "free Fanfic.me features" separate from the free WordPress features that offered with a fansitepress.com site actually seem to be free WordPress features instead. They even use the same image for the Fanfic.me spam blocker, and the text for the XML export bit is identical to that on WordPress.com's own site. They just replaced "WordPress.com" with "Fanfic.me".
What happens when fansitepress.com wants you to " kick in towards the costs a bit"?
So what happens if you need more storage or want to have a www.customname.com?
Be the master of your domain - ($20/year).
We know how fans are - you’re going to eventually want your own name. It’s easy to add your own domain name, like thebestfics.com, to your site here at Fanfic.me. Or if you already have your own domain name, it’s easy to transfer it to your WordPress.com blog. Email us to transfer or get your own domain.
Your fandom is growing - add storage ($25/25o additional stories)
The free limit of 250 stories per site is enough for most fans, but if you’re building a fanfic site that will have a large community or if you’re a large organization, grabbing this upgrade is the way to go. The first 250 stories are free. For each additional 25o writers, it’s just $25 a year. What if you keep growing? It gets even cheaper. That’s just a buck a writer to be part of your amazing site using our rockin’ fanfic plugin.
Custom CSS ($15/yr)
If you know your way around a cascading style sheet, you can really put a personal touch on your WordPress.com blog. Or use the Custom CSS upgrade with our Sandbox theme to create an entirely new design.
Go Ad-Free ($40/yr)
From time to time, we display ads in fanfic. No worries about junk ads. We only use ads relevant to your fandoms. Doing this allows us to keep bringing you the free features you love. However, if you’d prefer your readers didn’t see ads, you have the control to turn them off.
$20/year for a domain, $25 per year per 250 stories, plus $40/year to make ads inside stories go away? I suppose this is one part of their elusive plans for highway robbery financial stability.
EDIT 4/10: From people with actual knowledge of WordPress: yes, this appears to be highway robbery/a scam.
EDIT 4/10 2: Fanfic.me has posted a TOS now (
elf notes that it's the same TOS as on MyFandoms.com). The TOS, which Fanfic.me calls a TSA, appears to be kind of dreadful.
BUNCH OF EDITS 5/10: Lots more things going on at the original post. Fic posted by
elf to Fanfic.me got bahleeted, she got mail implying that her content is not welcome in the community Fanfic.me founders are part of.
On the software side, it seems that the code of the Wordpress plugin offered by Fansitepress.com is being kept under wraps in violation of the GPL licence (EDIT 5/10 Or perhaps not). Claims that much work and years of development (founders contradict each other about the time frame here and here) went into the plugin appear to be false, as the plugin was only released and pulled from the Wordpress.org site again in February 2011, and seems to add extremely little functionality to the kind of Wordpress install offered by Wordpress.com (which Fansitepress.com seems to be confusing with itself.) See links in EDIT 4/10 for some appraisals of the plugin's functionality, and here for links to where it can be seen in action (EDIT 5/10 The links are no longer active. We appear to be under surveillance. I think we should get credit for beta-testing this product and suggesting so many improvements). On this new page, Jacky Abromitis claims that the old Fan Fic Fan software was bad because "Unfortunately, we built it on a really lousy open source platform". She then proceeds to wax poetic about their new Wordpress plugin without mentioning that Wordpress is also open source.
Fanfic.me has just published some new pages: founders, blog, and privacy. All are well worth a look. Will link to more discussion about them later, no time for extensive analysis ATM. What struck me the most after a quick first read is the 'founders' piece, in which Jacky Abromitis discusses at length why her venture is beneficial for the fan community, and why she thinks the concerns of fans who think "Fanfiction should never be about “business”" are not relevant here. She appears to be quite knowledgable about the history of fanwork commodification. Interpretations about the content of this text may vary. But personally, I'm becoming more and more convinced that she knows exactly what she's doing, why the way she's going about this can be harmful to fandom in ways I've already outlined, and why we're criticizing her.
watersword and
elf have pointed out that Jacky Abromitis appears to be reading the original post. No idea if she may be reading here as well, but just FYI.
Mea culpa again about the confusion caused by my use of "fan" and "fannish". I meant to just dig into the fannish background of Jacky Abromitis a bit to understand where she's coming from and what her motives for making Fanfic.me could be, but I ended up sounding like I was judging her for not being a fan in the same way as I. That sort of thing is obviously not okay and completely besides the point. *headdesk* Thanks again to the people who called me out on that. I think Jacky Abromitis should be criticized because I believe her venture is disingenuous and harmful to fans in general and as individuals, not because she and I are apparently from very different fannish spaces. And I agree completely with what
watersword said in this addition to the original post:
I would really appreciate it if we could stop trying to determine if Abromitis is “fannish enough” - at this point it seems pretty clear that Abromitis is Not One Of Us in a different way than Chris and David Williams of Fanlib were Not One Of Us. The point remains that Fandom Entertainment, the company, owns sites which (a) approach the line in the sand which many fans have drawn vis-a-vis commerce and fandom, but that’s a personal mileage thing, and for all I know, her fannish community is more comfortable with the intersection of capitalism and fandom than I am; I would still like an explanation of WTF she hopes to achieve by attending the NY Expo Startup Showcase; (b) commercially exploit fans who may not know better (disregarding the Tolkien estate and Disney and Warner Bros. entirely, I am comfortable making a blanket statement that tricking your fellow fans into paying for unnecessary services is not cool); and (c) are not very good fanfiction archives.
EDIT 12/10: Forgot to mention that
elf has made a Fanlore page for Fanfic.me. Gathering info over there is much more efficient in the long run than keeping things in a bunch of DW entries, so I'm in the process of moving all the verifiable facts we have to Fanlore. Please do feel free to edit the page to bits! I don't have copious amounts of time available right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Latest news: Fanfic.me was down for a couple of days and is now back with a new design but no new content, and today Fansitepress.com has been taken offline as well. Maybe it will be back before Fanfic.me takes part in today's Web 2.0 Expo New York startup showcase. (Note: my time zone is 14 hours ahead of New York, so this 12/10 edit is really a 11/10 edit from a US point of view.) This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/35981.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Many thanks again to
watersword for all the sleuthing work. A lot of the info in this post was already in her awesome write-up from yesterday, and in the comments to said write-up. I did some more digging because I want to be a plucky girl detective too.
EDIT 3/10: A few people have correctly pointed out that the limits of my personal fannish experience are showing in the way I interpret the fannish background of people behind Fanfic.me. Qualifiying statement about why I chose to call them "not fans" here. Also, there's some extra info about Fanfic.me's money-making strategy at the bottom of the post now.
EDIT 5/10: Huge batch of edits at the bottom of the post, including links to lots of new Fanfic.me pages and discussion of problems with the software being used. And another qualifying statement about the use of "fannish" in this post. Sorry, people, I didn't realize at first posting that I made a couple of snap judgements and inadvertedly made it sound like this is all about the fannish background of the Fanfic.me people. It definitely isn't.
So, what's the problem?
Fanfic.me isn't evil just because it mentions fanworks and money in the same sentence. I'm not opposed to the idea of fanwork commodification. Not at all, in fact; I think that fan-controlled organizations or businesses have the potential to become strong forces for encouraging and defending fannish practices. And as
facetofcathy pointed out, there's nothing wrong with involving some money in the running of a fic archive (like, say, FF.net) to cover server costs. However, I'm very much opposed to attempts at commodification that come from outsiders who have no goal but to profit from the free work done by fans. These people only take and never give, and anything they come up with turns into a huge clusterfuck that keeps fans occupied and paranoid while more subtle and arguably more dangerous forms of encroachment fly under our radar.
Perhaps some form of commodification could make fandom stronger, but Fanfic.me is not the droid we're looking for. This is not a good-faith attempt to support fandom by way of a commercial venture. And that is the reason why we should give it the Fanlib treatment and make it go the hell away, right now. The problem here isn't that this is a project that tries to combine fanworks and money, but that it's a project that is not trying to benefit fans and will only set back fannish efforts to make the industry treat us like participants instead of purses that blog a lot.
Is Fanfic.me run by fans?
To be sure, Fanfic.me looks like a very stupid and poorly-executed idea no matter what. But if there are actual, well-meaning fellow fans behind this, we might have reason to be merciful and let the thing die a quiet death by itself. The people behind Fanfic.me certainly claim that they're fans themselves and are making this site to help other fans express themselves. I don't think that's true.
Let's see who's involved. Fanfic.me is owned by a company called Fandom Entertainment, the CEO of which is a woman called Jacky Abromitis. A simple Google search turns up oodles of info about her, if you want. (Yes, the person with the long-distance education company site is the same Jacky Abromitis. She just tweeted something spammy to both her education company twitter and Fanfic.me's twitter, then deleted it from Fanfic.me's before I could get a cap. Doesn't matter, there's plenty of other indications that there is only one single Jacky Abromitis who shows up in search results. Her linkedin page shows all of her work involvements together. It also says she used to be an associate professor of English. I hope this is not true, because part of me really doesn't want to know about an English professor capable of showing this little respect for writers.)
Er. More to the point, everything I can find seems to point to Jacky Abromitis and the other people behind Fanfic.me not being fans who just want to help others. Fandom Entertainment claims to be completely by the fans, for the fans, on pretty much every single page of every site that they own, over and over and over. They also claim to be nothing like Fanlib on their websites and elsewhere, showing that they are definitely aware of Fanlib and all that went on there. Jacky Abromitis provides some details about her fannish likes here and there, for instance at that last link. But I can't find any evidence of her having been active in any sort of fan community, and on the whole, there is a definite overcompensation vibe to all their reassurances.
The Fan History wiki is hilariously defensive of Fandom Entertainment, which is probably a red flag all by itself. It looks like most of the articles related to Fandom Entertainment were written by someone involved with the company; the author's name is the same as their archive software, and they are, um, not very good at pretending that they're not writing about themselves. The article about their older website MyFandoms.com, of which Fanfic.me appears to be a clone, says:
Archive Funding
Jacky's checkbook and some ad revenue from L-word.com.
Some fans have mistakenly thought that myFandoms.com was associated with FanLib. IT IS NOT. We are fans creating fan tools for other fans. We are not a corporation with .com funding, nor do we have "venture capital", a board of anything, partners, shares, or anything else that is conglomerate-like.
myFandoms.com is completely funded personally by Jacky.
Fandom Entertainment does, however, have a CruchBase entry saying that Jacky Abromitis was listed as its CEO on 12/14/03 (around the launch of their L-word site), that a person called Chad Horton (also mentioned in FH) was added in 2005, and that the company specializes in "Proprietary Fan Fic Sites", among other info. The article
franzeska dug up also mentions "COO Kathleen Ulisse, a former senior project executive at IBM; (the aforementioned) CTO Chad Horton, who has experience at a Fortune 500 company; and adviser Alice O’Brien, who has designed web and mobile sites for a large Canadian bank." This entity might not be a corporation, true, but it sure is a company.
(Just curious, and because I'm not sure if she's just obfuscating or actively lying - under US law, what types of business entities are required to have a board?)
If anyone wants to check the FH articles without upping FH's hit count, I saved some copies here, along with copies of other related Facebook and Twitter pages, shots of Fanfic.me and other relevant Fandom Entertainment websites, news articles etc. Just preserving for posterity, feel free to grab it all or post the links in a more accessible format. I just got my new Pinboard and I don't want to fill it up with junk just yet ;) Fandom Entertainment owns a large number of other sites, listed in
watersword's post. I could only check out the ones I mention by name in this post, so maybe there are other surprises lying around in the rest. It's this weird little self-contained ecosystem of badly designed sites that all reference each other. Apart from the main sites, MyFandoms.com/Fanfic.me have profiles on pretty much every online service it's possible to have a profile on. I didn't check all of those either, but most of them seemed to be empty or full of random videos. There is a user called fanficme on DW, LJ and the AO3, but it looks like that may be a regular, unrelated person. I pray it is. *shudder*
All the Fandom Entertainment pages are pretty fun reading. Endless reassurances that this is not a corporation and we're all fans for the fans guys, accusations of spamming, and much talk about their "leading edge, feature rich, and user friendly" and ad-filled software, which includes exciting features like:
a totally new "commenting" system that totally rocks. Writers now have an easy to use "list" of all comments on all stories, without having to check each one individually. Writers can now *reply* to readers comments. We now have smilies, too. :-) (MyFandom.com's Facebook page, 10 december 2008.)
That's so cool. The AO3 doesn't have smilies, does it? Hah.
About that software...
As very many people have pointed out, the websites that Fandom Entertainment creates are not exactly marvels of innovation or technical sophistication. The software they use and distribute is called Fan Fic Fan, and they claim that a total number of 232 sites and 5419 stories use this software. (EDIT 3/10 for clarity: this part is about the software Fandom Entertainment has been using up to now and which seems to run all of their more established sites. The new Fanfic.me and seemingly related new sites like fflslash.fanfic.me and GleeKlub.com use different software that seems to be based on WordPress.)
Apparently, most sites created with Fan Fic Fan software are hosted on Fanficfan.com; it's possible to get the software and then host the site yourself, but that doesn't seem to be an attractive option, given that the FAQ states that users who do this get no support whatsoever. If a user decides to use the software to host a fic site on Fanfiction.com, one of the added features is that stories can be sent to MyFandoms.com automatically.
Here's where it gets interesting. Jacky Abromitis provides some pretty revealing details about this "feature" in a 2007 news article called A Day At the Biggest Mall on Earth: Fanfic Archiving and You (which somehow manages to discuss the OTW, AO3, and MyFandoms as comparable organizations):
"We have a few ad spots reserved for ourselves within the software, which is called FanFicFan and can be found at www.fanficfan.com. We have a few folks testing it out now, and we're in the process of adding two huge features -- a complete admin panel and an announcements area. Any fan fiction uploaded through fanficfan from any user, will also be uploaded to myFandoms.com. We feel this is a fabulous win-win for both us and the end user. They get to use the coolest, best fan fic software for their own purposes and on their own sites for absolutely free. We get some ad revenue when they use it, and we continue to grow myFandoms.com. Everything we do is free -- no 'premium' for-pay anything. Advertising is the revenue stream for our sites."
They get to continue to grow MyFandoms.com? So they can do something with it as soon as they have a critical mass of content, like turning it into Fanfic.me? It almost looks like we're seeing an actual long-term plan here. (I'm not sure if we are, because I don't understand how the plan is supposed to work.)
The article was later edited to add:
Abromitis said, "[B]ased on input we've been getting this week, we've decided there WILL be an 'opt out' of having stories added to myFandoms." Additionally, she said, "any story deleted/edited/updated via FanFicFan **is also** deleted/edited/updated on myFandoms."
Okay then. But it's still an opt out, not an opt in. Those are two very different things. Perhaps this "feature" at least a partially explains where MyFandoms.com got those ten thousand stories that they ported to Fanfic.me: people using this software added and maybe still add things posted on their own sites to MyFandoms.com. There's a list of all the sites using Fan Fic Fan, but I don't have time right now to verify those against any usernames that pop up on MyFandoms.com or Fanfic.me.
(Yesterday, I suggested that they might be scraping from FF.net because stories that were also there were turning up on Fanfic.me under different user names. There's been a bit more investigating about that possibility, but nothing conclusive yet. It's possible there was no scraping and most of the content comes from the sites that use Fan Fic Fans software. The Fan Fic Fans site says only 5419 stories are archived by its users, while Fanfic.me boasts over ten thousand, but the Fan Fic Fans site looks like it may be pretty out of date. It talks about things coming up in 2008 at some point.)
This is not sounding very much like a fannish initiative anymore, insofar as it ever did. And it's definitely not getting any less commercial from now on. As
watersword pointed out,
(Fanfic.me will be) featured in the New York Web 2.0 Expo‘s Startup Showcase on October 12, 2011. It’s the last item that concerns me; there’s no information on the site, Twitter, Facebook, or Google that I can find about their plans for financial stability, but their presence in the Showcase suggests they’re hoping for venture capital. (One of the judges of the Showcase is a partner in a VC firm.)
The explanation on the Showcase site does make it sound like the event is about startups pitching themselves to try and find funding.
(Note: most of the above is information I'm pretty sure of. From now on, a lot more interpretation/speculation.)
But are they doing bad things?
All right, so Fanfic.me is almost certainly a commercial venture, not just a by-the-fans for-the-fans affair. But the fact that the site has commercial aims doesn't make it harmful to fandom per se. Plenty of archives and other fansites have ads, and although the purposeful way in which Fanfic.me seems to be chasing profits rather than just seeking to cover hosting costs is pretty distasteful to me, I might cut them some slack if they were also trying to help fandom while making money.
They're not, though. I don't see Fanfic.me doing anything that's likely to support fannish activities in any meaningful way. Fanfic.me's claims that its (proprietary) platform is highly innovative and will give fans new opportunities for publishing their works is just risible. They must know that, I don't see how they could be unaware that Fanfic.me is not what they claim it is. So they're lying about their supposed technological contribution to the fan community, and the rest of what they get up to doesn't exactly inspire confidence either.
Take the way they address their audience. As mentioned pretty much everywhere, the tone and vocabulary that Fanfic.me uses towards fans it supposedly wants to attract is... awkward at best. They sound like they know zip about how fans actually talk. I can't help but think that if the people behind Fanfic.me have been hanging around here since 2003, they can't possibly be as ignorant about how fans interact as they seem to be. The way they talk is clearly not geared towards us, and I think that may be deliberate. We're not the target audience here.
Who are they trying to reach, then? By creating profiles on every web service known to humankind and pushing fanfic fanfic fanfic as a keyword everywhere, Fanfic.me seems to be targeting internet users who don't know much about fanfic and enter the word in a search engine in the hope of ending up somewhere useful. I hate to make assumptions without some research on hand about how people discover and become a part of particular fan communities, but I suspect that the people likely to search for "fanfic" in a way that makes them end up on Fanfic.me are either very new and very young fans who want to take part in this "fanfic" thing they've heard mentioned somewhere, or people who are not participants in the kind of organized and knowledgable fandoms that have their home bases on various parts of the internet. Again, no idea how correct this is, but I'd guess that very new and very young fans are particularly likely to a) end up on Fanfic.me and b) not realize immediately that they're being patronized and that this is not the way the whole fan community works. For the record, I don't think that someone needs to be part of the organized and vocal LJ/DW crowd to call him/herself a fan. But it seems somewhat likely that the youngest and most inexperienced fans would be quicker to assume that Fanfic.me is what it claims to be. I think Fanfic.me knows this and is talking to them, because they're well aware that talking to us would only get them the kind of reaction that Fanlib got.
The choice of their target demographic makes it clear to me that Fanfic.me doesn't intend to support fandom as a whole. If they have any serious plans to go ahead with this venture, and I hope they're smarter than that because it makes no sense whatsoever as a business, they intend to take advantage of those fans whom they think they can dupe. Now, I don't think that every person on the internet should be protected from their own stupidity. But it's definitely not okay for a company to deliberately target very young people, people who are most likely underage, because they know that older and more experienced users would probably not fall for their sales pitch.
Some of the people on MyFandoms/Fanfic.me may be well aware of how Fanfic.me functions and just not give a damn. They're entitled not to give a damn. People have the right to post their fic wherever they please. However, I think it should be treated as a problem for all of us if Fanfic.me is trying to trick new fans into thinking that this is what they need to subscribe to if they want to enjoy making and consuming fanworks about their favorite shows and books.
Fanfic.me's whole modus operandi reveals a pretty stunning disregard for the lessons learned during Fanlib, an incident that they obviously know about. They don't seem to care about making sure that their users retain control over their data. There's that software and its opt-out "feature", and it looks like the entire contents of Fanfic.me were ported directly from MyFandoms.com (link includes an interesting discussion on porting and TOS issues, also related to FF.net). It's possible that MyFandoms.com informed their users that they were planning to carry off the stories to a completely different site, but the language they use on their about page doesn't suggest so.
Nobody seems to have located a Fanfic.me TOS that could explain what control writers would retain over their stories, and what the site will do to protect its users in case copyright holders come knocking or advertisers take offense at sexually explicit content in the fanworks their ads will appear next to. Fanlib's TOS was incredibly hostile to fans in a variety of ways, and this was one of the biggest problems with the service. For a new site that looks to have a similar business model to Fanlib but goes out of its way to scream that it's not like Fanlib at all, it's simply not acceptable to be unclear about the TOS in any way or form. Given that there simply is no TOS right now, I'm not hopeful.
(Perhaps there are some clues in the Fan Fic Fan software's TOS about what might end up in the TOS for Fanfic.me, given that people who use the software have the "option" of sending their stories straight to MyFandoms.com. I haven't found a TOS for the software, but its FAQ page contains lovely phrases such as "please do not post anything illegal. Anyone who infringes upon another's copyright will lose their privileges to use FFF". I don't even know if they understand what that means.)
In short, for a site that claims to be by and for the fans, Fanfic.me is showing some pretty stunning behavior. The kind of total disregard for fans displayed by this site and the persons and organization associated with it can't be due to simple ignorance, not if the site owners have been fans (or at least observing fandom) for as long as they claim. This is not a benign attempt to help and support fandom. I don't think there's any reason to give Fanfic.me the benefit of the doubt. But even in the very, very unlikely event that these people really are fans trying to do good for fandom as a whole, they're going about it in such an utterly stupid way that I believe we should stop them anyway.
They may be trying to do bad things, but they're not very good at being bad. Why worry?
This won't be the last doomed attempt at squeezing money out of fanworks. If Fanfic.me is still around by the time yet another outsider who thinks they have a bright idea comes along, it's pretty much guaranteed that we'll just get to go through this incredibly pointless process again. They'll see that this kind of site can apparently survive, and assume that they can make it work if they can only improve the model a bit.
Seeing Fanfic.me is not going to encourage non-fannish businesspeople to treat fans like valuable partners with which they can cooperate and form a mutually benificial relationship. Fanfic.me does not scream "We are a savvy, creative, and powerful group of people who love consuming commercial products and want to work with the industry so everyone can all make all the awesome stuff they want and be compensated in whatever way they want or need". Fanfic.me suggests that fans are a gaggle of idiots who have no idea of the goldmine they're sitting on and would be deliriously happy to have others make money off their hard work in exchange for a lollipop a two-bit piece of crappy software. If we want to be taken seriously, letting this image of ourselves continue to reverberate will set us back.
And not just because it will only encourage entities like Fandom Entertainment or Keith Mander to come and take another shot at this monetizing fanfic thing. I don't think these people are the biggest threat fandom is currently facing. They don't even have anything to do with the media companies that fandom usually deals with; they're just ignorant outsiders who blunder into fandom, fail, and never get anywhere. (Fandom Entertainment ranking far higher than Mander on the stupidity scale, because they really should know better after nine years. Seriously, if anyone understands what these people think they're going to accomplish, I want to know.)
If we're ever going to have any sort of fannish commodification of fanworks, the ones we'll have to find a good balance with are the media companies. Neither fans nor companies will ever need outsider middlemen like Keith Mander (haha) to play intermediary. They're ineffectual and irrelevant. The companies are the ones we'll have to impress or scare if we want them to not encroach on fan communities in unpleasant ways. And I don't think we'll look like a very impressive or scary bunch if random people can just come in and make money off our works. If we can't even keep our spaces not-for-profit while we're swearing up and down that fandom is purely a gift economy and that's why companies should leave us be, what's that going to look like? What company will be persuaded to relax its stance on copyright and give fans leeway to create without having to feel like they're doing something illegal, if it looks like we can't keep outsiders from barging in and abusing our privileges? I think that letting sites like Fanfic.me hang around working on their SEO and being visible won't do us any favors anywhere.
Plus, if sites like Fanfic.me are allowed to live on and work themselves up the search engine results like they obviously mean to, any reporter-type person who's just googling for a good quote about fanfic could see Jacky Abromitis on top and assume that she must be the go-to person for anything fanfic. This may sound paranoid, but it's happened already. Remember the 2009 Lesbian Fan Art Empowers Queer Women article from AfterEllen.com? She's right in there, talking nonsense. (She seems to think a "ship fic" is about a canon relationship, and fics about non-canon pairings are something separate called "fantasy pairings".) We don't want these people to become our spokespersons just because they're the easiest to find. This is really not okay. I don't want non-fans to speak for me. And I sincerely hope that Jacky Abromitis is a queer woman herself, because if she's neither a queer woman nor a fan and still got up there to lecture AfterEllen.com on femslash... I would not be okay with that. Just, no.
Done yet?
All right. It could be argued that the birth of a new archive for fanworks should always be welcomed. The more the merrier, and every fan who doesn't find what she wants from an archive among the existing options should definitely try to make a better one. There's no one-size-fits-all for anything fandom-related, and consolidation is a bad thing wherever it takes place (hi, media industry). But this is not a benign new archive, insofar as it can even be called "new". If it were benign, it would be presenting itself as a cool new option, not the saviour that will lead the fannish masses out of the stone age.
In short, I think it's pretty justified to release the hounds on this one. Granted, Fanfic.me is such a craptastic piece of junk that it'll probaby manage to self-destruct even without any outside intervention. But there's value in actively running after it with torches and pitchforks - value apart from the joy of the chase, I mean. If we leave it alone to fizzle out by itself, it may just do a MyFandoms and reawaken from its slumber to terrorize the countryside again a few years from now. And I think it's important to send a clear and obvious message that if we ever want our fanworks commodified, we'll do it ourselves, thanks very much. This kind of thing shouldn't happen unless fans get to control exactly what is done with their creations and exactly who gets to benefit.
*gets off the soapbox* Okay, back to pointing and giggling now. Maybe we could start by writing fic about Fanlib, Keith Mander, and Fanfic.me and pasting it all over the internet as a warning to what happens to those who mess with fandom? They deserve it a lot more than the poor Pinboard guy. (Fine, maybe it's not really okay to make it so that NSFW slash is the first thing that comes up when people google someone's name. I know. I just like to think about it sometimes.)
Also, my apologies if there's any broken links or broken sentences, I haven't slept much. Please give me a heads-up if something seems odd.
EDIT 3/10: Made it clearer in the text that Fandom Entertainment has been using the Fan Fic Fan software up to now (all their established sites seem to be running it) but that the new Fanfic.me and seemingly related new sites like fflslash.fanfic.me and GleeKlub.com use different software that seems to be based on WordPress. ffslash.fanfic.me has no about or ownership info, but it's being advertised on Fandom Entertainment's L-Word site as "NEW Lesbian Fanfic Site ALL Fandoms! Embed pics, vids, art! This site is just getting started - show some love and help spread the word!". It's not made clear anywhere that Fandom Entertainment owns this new site as well.
EDIT 3/10 2: Some more info on the WordPress-based software mentioned above. fansitepress.com is another site owned by Fandom Entertainment (WHOIS). The company name is once more not mentioned on the site, which contains no ownership, copyright, or TOS info whatsoever. The "plugin features" and "support" pages don't work yet. They seem to be building the site as we speak -the big "learn about our premium features" button goes nowhere but was posted on September 28.
Fansitepress.com offers to host "fanfic blogs" as a WordPress, with a "Fanfic.me plugin". There is a free and a "premium" option. Apart from a bunch of WordPress features, free users get the following:
You get tons of free features at Fanfic.me.
Fanfic.me Free Features
#1 - you are allowed to archive up to 250 fanfiction stories with our awesome fanfiction software. If your still starts going viral and your community start growing, we’ll need you to kick in towards the costs a bit. No worries… it’ll be super cheap, and you’ll get to use the coolest, easiest fanfic software anywhere!
Crazy Easy
Fill out the 4 step form, and BOOM - you’ve got a Fanfic.me site just like that.
Pick a name like Harry Potter Fan Fic
Describe your site
Grab your domain like potterfics@fanfic.me.com
Pick your fandom
And away you go. Import an existing WordPress site, or start fresh. If you can type or copy and paste, you’re going to have a hell of site. Get started.
Track comments
We know that the comment fanfic readers leave for writers are of great importance. When you go to your dashboard, you’ll find a Manage Comments option. Everything is easy and intuitive to help both fan fiction writers and readers.
Not just a fan fiction archive
Fanfic.me has a feature called “pages” which allows you to easily create web pages. You can even create an entire web site/fan site using WordPress pages on Fanfic.me.
No lock-in
You can leave Fanfic.me any time you want. We provide a complete XML export of all your posts, pages and comments outside our exclusive plugin. Of course, you should always keep copies of your own stories, but you already knew that.
We protect you against spam
Spam Pack comes with every Fanfic.me site. We provide a nice “captcha” (and one that is not as easily hacked like others), automatic trackback filtering and protection, and the comment protection features that check against a number of factors like the site owner’s white list, black list, 3rd party anti-spamservice, etc. We want you to be spam free.
I'm not a WordPress user myself, so I'd love to hear from anyone who can judge how interesting these features are. My first reaction is deep scepticism, especially since several of the features described as "free Fanfic.me features" separate from the free WordPress features that offered with a fansitepress.com site actually seem to be free WordPress features instead. They even use the same image for the Fanfic.me spam blocker, and the text for the XML export bit is identical to that on WordPress.com's own site. They just replaced "WordPress.com" with "Fanfic.me".
What happens when fansitepress.com wants you to " kick in towards the costs a bit"?
So what happens if you need more storage or want to have a www.customname.com?
Be the master of your domain - ($20/year).
We know how fans are - you’re going to eventually want your own name. It’s easy to add your own domain name, like thebestfics.com, to your site here at Fanfic.me. Or if you already have your own domain name, it’s easy to transfer it to your WordPress.com blog. Email us to transfer or get your own domain.
Your fandom is growing - add storage ($25/25o additional stories)
The free limit of 250 stories per site is enough for most fans, but if you’re building a fanfic site that will have a large community or if you’re a large organization, grabbing this upgrade is the way to go. The first 250 stories are free. For each additional 25o writers, it’s just $25 a year. What if you keep growing? It gets even cheaper. That’s just a buck a writer to be part of your amazing site using our rockin’ fanfic plugin.
Custom CSS ($15/yr)
If you know your way around a cascading style sheet, you can really put a personal touch on your WordPress.com blog. Or use the Custom CSS upgrade with our Sandbox theme to create an entirely new design.
Go Ad-Free ($40/yr)
From time to time, we display ads in fanfic. No worries about junk ads. We only use ads relevant to your fandoms. Doing this allows us to keep bringing you the free features you love. However, if you’d prefer your readers didn’t see ads, you have the control to turn them off.
$20/year for a domain, $25 per year per 250 stories, plus $40/year to make ads inside stories go away? I suppose this is one part of their elusive plans for highway robbery financial stability.
EDIT 4/10: From people with actual knowledge of WordPress: yes, this appears to be highway robbery/a scam.
EDIT 4/10 2: Fanfic.me has posted a TOS now (
elf notes that it's the same TOS as on MyFandoms.com). The TOS, which Fanfic.me calls a TSA, appears to be kind of dreadful.
BUNCH OF EDITS 5/10: Lots more things going on at the original post. Fic posted by
elf to Fanfic.me got bahleeted, she got mail implying that her content is not welcome in the community Fanfic.me founders are part of.
On the software side, it seems that the code of the Wordpress plugin offered by Fansitepress.com is being kept under wraps in violation of the GPL licence (EDIT 5/10 Or perhaps not). Claims that much work and years of development (founders contradict each other about the time frame here and here) went into the plugin appear to be false, as the plugin was only released and pulled from the Wordpress.org site again in February 2011, and seems to add extremely little functionality to the kind of Wordpress install offered by Wordpress.com (which Fansitepress.com seems to be confusing with itself.) See links in EDIT 4/10 for some appraisals of the plugin's functionality, and here for links to where it can be seen in action (EDIT 5/10 The links are no longer active. We appear to be under surveillance. I think we should get credit for beta-testing this product and suggesting so many improvements). On this new page, Jacky Abromitis claims that the old Fan Fic Fan software was bad because "Unfortunately, we built it on a really lousy open source platform". She then proceeds to wax poetic about their new Wordpress plugin without mentioning that Wordpress is also open source.
Fanfic.me has just published some new pages: founders, blog, and privacy. All are well worth a look. Will link to more discussion about them later, no time for extensive analysis ATM. What struck me the most after a quick first read is the 'founders' piece, in which Jacky Abromitis discusses at length why her venture is beneficial for the fan community, and why she thinks the concerns of fans who think "Fanfiction should never be about “business”" are not relevant here. She appears to be quite knowledgable about the history of fanwork commodification. Interpretations about the content of this text may vary. But personally, I'm becoming more and more convinced that she knows exactly what she's doing, why the way she's going about this can be harmful to fandom in ways I've already outlined, and why we're criticizing her.
watersword and
elf have pointed out that Jacky Abromitis appears to be reading the original post. No idea if she may be reading here as well, but just FYI.
Mea culpa again about the confusion caused by my use of "fan" and "fannish". I meant to just dig into the fannish background of Jacky Abromitis a bit to understand where she's coming from and what her motives for making Fanfic.me could be, but I ended up sounding like I was judging her for not being a fan in the same way as I. That sort of thing is obviously not okay and completely besides the point. *headdesk* Thanks again to the people who called me out on that. I think Jacky Abromitis should be criticized because I believe her venture is disingenuous and harmful to fans in general and as individuals, not because she and I are apparently from very different fannish spaces. And I agree completely with what
watersword said in this addition to the original post:
I would really appreciate it if we could stop trying to determine if Abromitis is “fannish enough” - at this point it seems pretty clear that Abromitis is Not One Of Us in a different way than Chris and David Williams of Fanlib were Not One Of Us. The point remains that Fandom Entertainment, the company, owns sites which (a) approach the line in the sand which many fans have drawn vis-a-vis commerce and fandom, but that’s a personal mileage thing, and for all I know, her fannish community is more comfortable with the intersection of capitalism and fandom than I am; I would still like an explanation of WTF she hopes to achieve by attending the NY Expo Startup Showcase; (b) commercially exploit fans who may not know better (disregarding the Tolkien estate and Disney and Warner Bros. entirely, I am comfortable making a blanket statement that tricking your fellow fans into paying for unnecessary services is not cool); and (c) are not very good fanfiction archives.
EDIT 12/10: Forgot to mention that
elf has made a Fanlore page for Fanfic.me. Gathering info over there is much more efficient in the long run than keeping things in a bunch of DW entries, so I'm in the process of moving all the verifiable facts we have to Fanlore. Please do feel free to edit the page to bits! I don't have copious amounts of time available right now, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Latest news: Fanfic.me was down for a couple of days and is now back with a new design but no new content, and today Fansitepress.com has been taken offline as well. Maybe it will be back before Fanfic.me takes part in today's Web 2.0 Expo New York startup showcase. (Note: my time zone is 14 hours ahead of New York, so this 12/10 edit is really a 11/10 edit from a US point of view.) This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/35981.html. Please comment there using OpenID.