Fandom Snowflake: Day 2

[lost_spook]

Day 2: In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them.

1. I haven't really explored it properly yet, but

Comments

[persiflage_1]

Someone left me a review on my sole DW fic on ff.net and wanted to know why I didn't post more of my fics there (despite acknowledging I had them on LJ and Teaspoon), and I just said, "It's too much hassle!"

[lost_spook]

Isn't it just? I mean, I would for my non-DW fics if there was nowhere else, but now there's AO3, I just don't see the point. As long as people can find it and read it. I wasn't sure about AO3 at all to begin with, because it was so small and took ages to load, but these days I think it's great.

I'm still very fond of Teaspoon, though! :-)

[persiflage_1]

The only reason I posted my Foyle's War fics over on ff.net is because that's where the fandom was posting.

[lost_spook]

Which makes sense - and, of course, it's really only in the last two year's that AO3's started to grow so much anyway.

[swordznsorcery]

FF.net is rubbish, but I'm so used to it. I just checked, and apparently I've been a member there since November 2000, so clearly there is no hope for me. I just can't get into AO3. I find it really hard to use, and I hate the layout. FF.net is stupid, but it's friendly stupid. Also apparently I have 69 stories archived there, so I'm childishly amused now.

It used to be really good, honest. Back in about 2001. And you can get around the eating the scene break thing easily enough. And it's stopped eating special characters and italics now (I think). I last uploaded something about three years ago, and it was still doing weird things with centered text, but it's ff.net. The world would stop turning if it worked.

Editing's no problem by the way, but it does involve repeating the hilarious uploading process. Online editing works too, but... probably best avoided. Bit unpredictable. :)

[lost_spook]

Well, you see, I started with Teaspoon, and it works quite similarly to AO3, so I find that so much more intuitive than ff.net - now I have AO3, I'm never, ever going back to ff.net! I can understand of course, that people who are used to ff.net think the opposite (but then again, AO3 isn't basically that different to posting on LJ or Dreamwidth, so I find it hard to see as complicated - it fits easily into the few websites I'm really familiar with, like Teaspoon and LJ, whereas ff.net is a whole other ball game). Also, as I said, I love that I can write for an obscure character/pairing/fandom, post it, then go: hmm, has anyone else written... and just click on the tag itself and up comes everything - if there is anything, and you can browse about the archive like that. I wish they hadn't had to trim back the sidebar filters to only the top ten, though, because that was wonderful for finding things in bigger fandoms. So, yes, it works for me. Each to their own, though!

(Oh, and you can adjust the layout on AO3 if you don't like

[swordznsorcery]

I'm not a member of AO3, so I can't alter stuff. No matter though, as I really don't use it very often. I must admit that I don't read a lot of fanfic these days. Partly due to time, and partly due to my inevitable reaction of "Bloody hell, internet, are you interested in anything other than sex?!"

I know, I'm a Victorian. :)

[lost_spook]

The internet is also interested in cats. :-)

[clocketpatch]

The Teaspoon is the first archive I ever used and it utterly spoiled me with it's ease of use and wonderful search engine. I didn't bother with Ao3 at all until I start writing B7 stuff this fall because if all you're writing is Who, then what other archive do you really need?

(I do like how Ao3 lets you track statistics though. I'd no idea of the sheer quantity of words I'd written until I looked through there. It's a bit boggling)

[lost_spook]

Yes, I only used AO3 because I wrote other fandoms, and I wanted to do Yuletide. Teaspoon is lovely - though I actually found its search functions very difficult to use (it won't go back to the search results half the time, which is so frustrating) so AO3's searchability and navigation by tags is its big big plus over Teaspoon for me. But, yes, if you're only writing in DW, what else do you need?

I think the moment I was totally sold was when I realised how to get to the tag landing pages. I am sad about tags, I really am. :lol:

[clocketpatch]

It took me FOREVER to figure out how to use tags on Ao3. Once I got it I fell in love with them, but... the tags are part of why I don't like the search function on Ao3.

The Teaspoon makes it very clear what tags are available, but Ao3 doesn't (because there are so many), and so consistent labelling is an issue. Searching for fics that are labelled is easy, but if you search for a fic that has Avon and is 1000 words long... half of the fics are going to be left out because the author didn't bother to/ didn't understand how to tag their fic right.

It's very frustrating.

ETA, that bingo generator looks INCREDIBLY dangerous

[lost_spook]

I think the difference is you can browse easily on AO3 and that simply isn't an option on Teaspoon - and that's what I tend to do. On Teaspoon, you put in all this data, and every time I actually click on a fic and backbutton, the page loses the results and I have to do it all again. Also, you can't search for minor characters, because they rarely have a tag, and you can't search for pairings, just for fics that have x and y in them - and you're still reliant on authors tagging for all their characters, and if it's one of those multi-chapter things, Teaspoon has a limit, and cuts off any extra tags, so you won't find them. So I've only ever used Teaspoon by author and by Doctor category - the search option is reserved for sheer desperation in trying to find something very specific, and I can rarely get it to come up trumps

[elen_nare]

AO3 is awesome :) I do still post at fanfiction.net, because I think it does get more readers - and also I started there first - but it's such a pain to post there. At least now you can copy-and-paste into a text editor; I remember for ages all you could do was upload documents and then edit them. If I'm looking for fic, I usually go to AO3 rather than ff.net these days (with exceptions; Chalet School fic I find at the dedicated archives, and I do like the Swallows and Amazons fics on ff.net).

Being able to create fandom and character tags on AO3 is also amazing! No more 'Misc Books' and 'Misc TV' :)

[lost_spook]

Yes, everyone says ff.net gets more readers. I just can't forgive it for not only being fiddly (though you can actually do pasting into a text file now? That's definitely better) but it ate my scene breaks. And keeps finding new ways to eat them. :loL:

Yes, Fandom and character tags on AO3 are lovely. When I started posting there, I was the first person to post anything in a whole number of small fandoms, and it was fun to actually be able to just put them in and not leave them languishing somewhere.

[elen_nare]

Ah, yes, the dreaded scene break eater! I used to have ****** as a scene break, but that got eaten... These days I use .x.x.x.x.x. as a scene break there, because there is no way they can code it to remove something like that without risking taking away people's text, too.

[lost_spook]

:loL: Well done you! :-)

[sallymn]

I post at both... the more the merrier, I guess. I get more reviews at ff, but more kudos at AO3 than reviews at both, sooooo....

(Some guest obviously went on a reading spree on ffnet and left me reviews for something like 15 stories yesterday, which was nice :)

[lost_spook]

Oh, that's funny - I had a load of guest kudos yesterday, pretty much all on B7 - maybe someone's just entered the fandom?? (Well, unless yours were non-B7, of course.)

I'd really love to post everything in one place only if I could. I don't, of course - Teaspoon, here, AO3. But I would rather that, so I'm not at all tempted to try fighting ff.net again and its scene-break eating habits. I hear the comments are more plentiful, though. *sigh*

[sallymn]

Mine were Mag7 or crossovers, so couldn't be the same person :)

Yes, ffn's break-eating is a complete pain in the posterior, especially as you can't break it with a line as far as I know - so I use the following, centered, as a scene break ~oOo~

Other than that, I dind posting to ffn pretty easy because it really doesn't need to keep the formatting. AO3 does, and if you go in to fix something then preview, it seems to all play up on me :( but I wonder if that's 'cause I like to put in pretty heading bars and things. Not that that makes sense, but...

I don't get a lot of comments - I write in closed canons, so I don't expect them - but kudos are rather lovely too.

[lost_spook]

Yes, I wasn't reading properly and thought you meant you'd had a lot of kudos too (I have not had much brain the last few days. I couldn't even remember that I hadn't finished my lunch yesterday and then wondered why I was so weak and feeble later on in the afternoon. /o\). But, anyway, wherever they happen, comments and kudos are v nice and cheering to the author. Especially comments.

:-)

ETA: Yes, I think AO3 can be a bit funny with changes - I've got in the habit of pasting the doc in, previewing it, making the changes on the still open doc and repasting the whole thing in, and that seems to avoid it. (I tend to do that anyway, because otherwise I can't remember what changes I'm making by the time I get back to the edit page...)