In support of the Spoon

[wendymr]

So I hear in and around LJ that not everyone's thrilled with the recent changes over on the Teaspoon. Nothing wrong with that, of course; everyone's entitled to an opinion, and you'll never get everyone to agree on everything anyway. But since I do actually feel that, on the whole, the changes are making the 'Spoon a better site, I thought I'd

Comments

[dameruth]

The addition of the "Teen" rating and the creation of calufrax covers most of my concerns -- I also had problems with the two-choice "All Ages or NC-17" ratings system, and when I first joined I was one of those who liked using the "Tens" to get the equivalent of story/series recs.

Now we can designate "middle ground" ratings and have a comm that allows for story recs specifically tied to the archive, I'm a happy camper. I think it's great there's such a comprehensive (and huge!!) archive available for this fandom.

[wendymr]

Oh, agree entirely. My only real gripe in the beginning was the extreme divergence in ratings, though overall I was glad to see the end of the 7-8 different ratings, because it was often a real pain to decide which a story should be.

I'll be interested, too, to see how calufrax turns out. So far the recs have been largely - though not entirely - old-school, so it'll be nice to have some New Who recs as well; for the most part I'm not that interested in Classic fic, though I have read the occasional Five or Eight story. It's definitely good, though, to see fic from less-popular genres getting highlighted - it never stood a chance on the Tens lists.

And ETA, because I meant to say it and forgot: I hope you sign up to rec. You've got interesting tastes in fic; it's far from all Doctor/Rose; and I think you could come up with a good week's worth of fics :)

[dameruth]

And ETA, because I meant to say it and forgot: I hope you sign up to rec. You've got interesting tastes in fic; it's far from all Doctor/Rose; and I think you could come up with a good week's worth of fics :)

Erm. Wasn't expecting *that* invite, though I'm glad you think my opinion would be helpful. I don't have any great objection to reccing, but I'm gonna be kinda busy in RL for a while, so I don't want to commit now. Still got plenty of fics IP, and I'd prefer to put my writing time into them when I get it. After the crunch, though, I'll consider it for sure! :)

[the_sandwalker]

I completely agree with you. The one suggestions I've considered making to the mods (whom I've found to be lovely, attentive people and everything I could ever ask for in a mod for that kind of site) is that I think once a story's been approved for posting, not every chapter should have to wait for approval. It's a little redundant, and probably taking up too much of their time. I'm sure a few authors would take advantage of it, but on the whole I think most of the people who would do that sort of thing are already weeded out with the summary requirement.

Their turn-around is impressively quick, though, I have to say.

[wendymr]

Well, I've been looking around a bit more (including a sock-puppety LJ misscam linked to) and see some people citing delays of 10-18 hours. That's got to be exceptional, though. I've not noticed longer than an hour or so for my own fic. But, honestly, a delay in getting my fic up really doesn't bother me - I'm not that review-hungry that I can't wait a few hours ;) From the perspective of a reader waiting for a fic, as I was for the Aurora Dancing series a week or so ago, yes, it can be frustrating, but I remind myself that the archive I used to edit for had a turnaround time of a minimum of three weeks between submission and upload.

That's a very sensible suggestion, that subsequent chapters shouldn't be moderated, and I'm not sure why they are. Maybe it's just for the time being, until they're sure they've actually moderated any fic that was ongoing before the changes took place? They're not actually offering an editing service, though I see a post on whofic today with an author commenting that the mod pointed out an error which she was glad to

[the_sandwalker]

True, true. I think the longest delay I'd ever noticed on a chapter was maybe about three or four hours, maybe a bit more, but it was still that day.

[the_sandwalker]

Also, I'm betting that some chapters that take so long for a turnaround are chapters that probably need the consideration.

[un_sedentary]

I don't really get why people are complaining. I'm guessing it's mainly that fics are taking hours to be approved, rather than going up instantaneously, which will only take some getting used to and then no one will even bat an eyelid, and that some chapters/summaries are being rejected.

I'm willing to bet that every single rejected chapter or story has a good reason behind the rejection. Personally, I'm glad never to see "i came up with this in the bath, lol", "my friend dared me in maths haha r&r plz!" and "I'll only continue if enough people like it" as a summary ever again.

[wendymr]

Oh, yeah. That's exactly the kind of fic/summary I'm very glad to see gone. Chatspeak, review-whoring, 'I was dared' inspiration... and then the LONG summaries, full of spaces, that took up an entire screen.

Most of the complaints I've seen, yes, have been about delays - and, honestly, it may be inconvenient, but mods have lives. They're not just sitting at a computer all day long with no purpose but to approve our fic. If they were, I'd worry about them. ;)

[solarflar3]

I for one would LOVE it if there were no more Chatspeak or MSN conversation 'fics'!

[wendymr]

Oh, YEAH!

[lt_kitty]

I rarely look at Tsp, aside from authors I've had recced to me, b/c it was such a pain weeding through the badfic, badly written summaries and random opinions pretending to be fics in order to find well-written fics. Anything that changes that, IMO, is a good thing.

One thing I'd like to see in more fanfiction archives is the search system that was used at one of the Stargate fic archives; it let you search for fic by characters and pairings separately - and to search for "no pairing" if you wanted gen fics. That was nice if, say, you wanted to find stories that include Martha but aren't Doctor/Martha, or happen in the first two seasons and aren't Doctor/Rose or D/R/J. (You can sometimes get genfic by ratings, but there are darker stories without pairings and G-rated sappy shippy stories, so that doesn't always work)

[wendymr]

To be honest, I've never used the search function, so can't say how useful or otherwise it is. It's not possible to search for genfic? I wonder if that's something the techie people at the Spoon could fic - Alden B*** (who's replied to me once or twice on technical issues) seems to be pretty capable. Maybe it's worth asking on whofic whether that can be done?

And, yeah, all the crap that just proliferated on the Spoon in the last year or so. 'Random opinions pretending to be fic' - yup, that describes some of them pretty well. I also remember a 'fic' which was a self-insert where the author, in bed with Jack, bemoaned the laziness and bad manners of people for not reviewing her friend's fic, posted the previous day. Good god.

(Edited because I really shouldn't use someone's full name in an unflocked post, even if I'm not sure whether it's his real name or not)

[lt_kitty]

It's not possible to search for genfic?

Not very well. In the "Categories" section, there's "gen" included in the "Warnings" category, but it's unclear if that's warnings to include or warnings to exclude (advanced search allows you to do both).

For ex., if I search for Tenth Doctor/ Martha/ Warnings-General stories, I get a lot that are also categorized as "romance." Which may be a result of fic-contributers reading "gen" as "not-smut" rather than "not-shippy."

It's frustrating if I'm looking for non-shippy S3 fic (and I loved S3, like Martha), and I can imagine that non D/R fans can't read any S1 and S2 fics with any confidence.

The fic archive search thing I'm thinking of is this one.

[wendymr]

Right... I suspect there are too many possible pairings (trios?) in DW to allow that kind of search, but it should be possible to have some kind of gen search. Though I suppose if people aren't selecting 'gen' when they upload fic it'd be harder...

Perhaps calufrax might help you there, if you can find a reccer or two who will rec New Who genfic. Looking at who's signed up so far, I'm guessing some will. rose_lives seems to be gen-focused, so far as LJ and New Who are concerned, though I guess you know about that.

[honorh]

Given that at the Pit of Voles, it can take up to 24 hours for fics to get posted, I thought it was a bit stupid that people were whinging over a few hours' wait. But I do miss my Summary Executions.

[wendymr]

Really? I didn't realise ff.net had moved to a non-instantaneous posting time. Now, that really does make the complaints look a bit ridiculous.

I miss your Summary Executions too, but I don't miss the pages of crap I used to get every time I refreshed the Spoon. Sure, I still find quite a lot of fic I'm not that interested in reading, but that's generally for a different reason; I'm no longer wading past stuff that simply shouldn't be on any decent fic archive in the first place.