An Archive Of One's Own

[astolat]

**NEW ETA**: we're going to take a stab at putting this together. For more information and discussion, please join and/or watch fanarchive.

ETA: If you are coming to the conversation late, xenacryst has helpfully collected up a bunch of links to a subset of noteworthy discussion threads, over here!

First, why fanfic is not illegal and why YOU should stop

Comments

Fanfiction.net (redux)

[sholio]

I posted this as a comment to caitiedidit, but s/he suggested that I pull it out and post it in the main thread, so here it goes

Re: Fanfiction.net (redux)

[jerico_cacaw]

You see, friendshipper, I was just about to post asking if anybody here knew how Fanfiction.Net started and what happened to them =). Thanks for saying it, you have the words I lack.

But of course, anybody can try to solve a problem -- it is great, in fact, that the problem has been noticed. But it is not a great idea to try to solve it by menas that have already been tried and failed.

So, because I know that the team formed for this project is reading these comments, I suggest them the following: learn from ff.net. Don't think of it as teenagers think of adults, because in the end you'll find there was some reason for certain things being the way they were.

And I wonder if all this fandomish energy trying to solve ff.net problems (or working with them as affiliates) wouldn't be the best course of action ...

Re: Fanfiction.net (redux)

[sholio]

I think my big worry ... well, there's a couple of them, actually. I'm worried that there's going to be a huge influx of energy and talent and effort, and the end result will be an archive which will basically be the ff.net of 2010 -- i.e. outmoded and abandoned by most authors of talent. And I'm worried that an attempt to make a huge multifandom archive at this point in time is kind of going against the current trends in fandom, which seem (IMHO) to be favoring lots of little splinter niches of discussion and fic that are all networked via things like Google and LJ. I don't know if big monolithic archives are where fandom as a whole is heading.

But like I said in my other comment, I don't want to end up being the naysayer who stands in the corner and tells everyone they're going to fail. I *want* to see this work. I just have a lot of qualms about it.

Re: Fanfiction.net (redux)

[jerico_cacaw]

I know, I know! I want this to work too. I am one of those guys who love being proved wrong =). Maybe the solution is a mix between a 'monolithic archive' and 'little splinter niches'?

Re: Fanfiction.net (redux)

[franzeska]

I'm worried that there's going to be a huge influx of energy and talent and effort, and the end result will be an archive which will basically be the ff.net of 2010

Would that really be the worst thing in the world? IMO, any archive is doomed to eventually become outmoded. That doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth it to create new ones. Maybe it will be the ffn of 2050 instead. You never know.

a huge multifandom archive at this point in time is kind of going against the current trends in fandom

I agree, but if this project gets popular, it may well be influential enough to set fandom trends instead of following them. I've seen a lot of debates suggesting that the format of LJ is largely responsible for the rise of drabbles and the lack of novel-length fic these days. Whether or not that's actually true, I know I find the lj format less than ideal for posting and reading longer fic.

Re: Fanfiction.net (redux)

[sholio]

Oh, I know ... and looking back at my original post, I really do come across as something of a wet blanket on the whole idea. And that really isn't my intent. Even if the new archive doesn't end up as the be-all and end-all of archives, there's still no reason why there *can't* be another archive out there, especially a big inclusive one. As a reader, I think it'd be awesome to have another place to search for fic.

But as a fic writer, I'm sure I can't be the only person who suffers from (for lack of a better way to put it) "archive fatigue". Right now I post stories in three places -- Livejournal, my own website and (some of them) at ff.net. I don't post to the fandom specific archives for the fandoms I'm in, because I just don't have time to learn a bunch of new upload interfaces and then keep a bunch of different sites updated, keep up on comments, etc. I'm not saying "OMG no one would come!", because I really don't think that's true; however, speaking for myself, I'm not sure I'd put in the legwork to archive my work somewhere

Archive Fatigue

[franzeska]

I know exactly what you mean, but isn't the problem, as astolat said, just that most archives are a pain to post to? I see people cross-posting to dozens of lj communities at times and frequently to at least a few. I like the lj formatting, so I can usually just copy and paste a fic as is. (I normally add italic and bold tags as I write.) I'd be perfectly happy to post to more archives if they were that easy to deal with.

As a side note, I really wish the Yuletide archive would let me upload .txt. files written in Textedit (or whatever that default Mac OSX text program is) instead of only ones written in MS Word. Maybe it's just me...

Re: Archive Fatigue

[sholio]

You know what would be *really* cool would be some way to integrate such a thing with LJ or blogging so that you could click a button and publish to both places at once...

Re: Archive Fatigue

[franzeska]

Well, seeing as that's the first item on astolat's wishlist above, I'd say you're in good company.

Re: Archive Fatigue

[sholio]

I'd read that, but for some reason I hadn't gotten that it was talking about the same thing I'm talking about -- I'd thought that it just meant a standardized interface between different sites. But you're right, it actually *is* the same thing. *facepalm*

Re: Fanfiction.net (redux)

[astolat]

The look/navigation/downtime issues are I think more general issues of designing from the start with an eye towards long-term maintenance and large scale. The technical problems you're describing are all pretty well-known pitfalls that software projects can fall into; there has been a lot of research done in the field on how to avoid them, but those are a lot easier to implement if you start out that way -- and when ff.net started, no one anticipated it growing the way it did.

I'd love to know more about the initial ff.net design, and what the design now is like, if you know anything more about it. Is it currently distributed across multiple servers? And do you know what programming language the code is written in? Is it all PHP?

Re: Now with 50% more headdesking!

[astolat]

Hey, actually, if you would be willing to help, could I maybe ask you to drop him a line and ask him for some of this info, since you already know him? It would very much be useful to know a bit more about how ff.net worked, early in the beginning. :) *ropes you in, if you do not evade*

Re: Email - ff.net - etc.

[astolat]

Hey, rock. astolat at livejournal reaches me. :)