Comment on OTW Board response to concerns about the meta decision

  1. kelcat Mon 25 Feb 2013 08:26PM UTC

    I for one am happy to see OTW recognizing more types of fanworks as being valid and worthy of being archived. At a time where so many sites not only disallow but outright scorn and invalidate fanworks, I am glad for a place that is so welcoming and all-inclusive.

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    1. Huh? (Guest) Mon 25 Feb 2013 08:31PM UTC

      While I'm not against meta-hosting on Ao3 for policy reasons for sure (and definitely want to see it on here once it's actually supported by the user interface) meta as fanwork is "disallowed, scorned and invalidated" on "many sites"? Really? What sites? *curious*

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      1. kelcat Mon 25 Feb 2013 08:34PM UTC

        I was referring to fanwork as a whole, not just meta. The archive's goal is to preserve works, and in my opinion all types of fanworks should be included.

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        1. Oh yeah (Guest) Mon 25 Feb 2013 08:38PM UTC

          Oh, they definitely should be. I'd just really prefer Ao3 to build its infrastructure before, because as it is, it looks more and more like a house of falling cards. It's already apporaching FF.net levels of badness in the bigger fandoms, as it is. I just don't get why coding an additional category on the base DB and making that a mandatory input is such a hard thing to do, even if UI implementation comes later. That's literally the job of a few hours at most.

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          1. kelcat Mon 25 Feb 2013 08:45PM UTC

            I know nothing about coding so I can't speak to that at all (one failed programming class in high school let me know that that was definitely not the right careeer for me :D).

            As far as ffnet levels of badness, what do you mean exactly? I've found AO3 to be infinitely preferable to ffnet, not only in what types of fanworks they allow but also in functionality. The only tags you can use on ffnet are characters, and a maximum of two at that. There isn't any way to add warning or content tags, which I think is a major flaw on their part.

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            1. Really? (Guest) Mon 25 Feb 2013 09:11PM UTC

              I meant mostly in terms of having to wade through stuff you don't want in order to get to the stuff you do, but since you brought this up, as a reader I find FF.net's pure site functionality way better, definitely. Their fandom categories are mostly pretty clear, without a lot of the angst that goes on with Ao3 categories. Their fandom categories are easily visible in one go without massive whitespaces, and have the option of the user being able to arrange them by popularity (aka no. of fics) or by name. Plus, there's the thing like no-one putting "thorki" in the fandom category.

              Their search function, for one thing, works like a dream, with filtering options from the same page of search results. Their normal fanfic pages on-page filtering system not only allows filtering by time and word count, but also allows one to browse only the incomplete works.

              Crossovers are all easily findable or avoidable as one's preference might be; for canons like HDM, I can go to their category page and be assured that I will not run into a Sherlock or Avengers Daemon AU. Even their character option is pretty great, in that I know that if I'm searching for "Pepper Potts", i will get only fics where Pepper Potts plays a prominent role and not a 1:25 ratio of fics with Pepper in a prominent role: Pepper appearing as a background character or god forbid, a 1-line cameo. There's the author PM function, fan forums, and for authors, there's even a beta network for those looking for one.

              Their mobile view is great (and they actually also have an extremely functional mobile app. Though hell, even Literotica has an pretty great mobile app!) Their share functionalities are also a lot more integrated. And most importantly, the site almost never gives me errors while trying to access it. (Though definitely, AO3 has been better about this for some while)

              Warnings and content info can be pretty adequately added to the summary (in fact, content info is what the summary is for, isn't it?), if they're really required, which they aren't in the vast majority of fanfic, even that posted to this site.

              I do love AO3's tagging a LOT, don't get me wrong, but from my POV, that pretty much the only thing Ao3 functionality has going on for itself, and since that's what most of the current debate in centered around (ie. lack of good code, lack of maintainable infrastructure, lack of transparency in that the so-called freeform tags are actually not so freeform at all), I do feel a fair bit of worry, when it comes to this. I don't really frequent FF.net at all much, these days, because my current fandoms are all mostly on AO3, but functionality-wise I don't think that's really true.

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            2. (13 more comments in this thread)

      3. Oshun Mon 25 Feb 2013 10:24PM UTC

        Oshun

        FF net does not even allow author's notes on stories.

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        1. kelcat Mon 25 Feb 2013 11:22PM UTC

          The summary can, in theory be used for author's notes, but the character limit is so small that it's not really feasible. You can put author's notes directly into the fic, of course, but given that the functionality of the site refuses to recognize such characters as double dashes, ~'s and asterisks, it's sometimes hard to distinguish the note from the actual story

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          1. Oshun Mon 25 Feb 2013 11:42PM UTC

            Oshun

            I have put notes at the bottom of stories there, but it IS against the rules. If someone reported me, they could take the story down because of my footnote and I would lose years of readers and comments. I was never sure about the prohibition's purpose. Writers of historical fiction often have extensive notes at the back of a book, bibliographies, etc. I often write in literary fandoms with complicated canon and I do think notes can be overdone, but in small quantities may also add to a story. And that is what I think of when I think of non-fiction part of fanfiction--a separate document for what amounts to expanded footnotes for the hardcore geek.

            But I'm beginning to realize today that there are other concerns I had not thought about being raised here--not just paranoia about accidentally encountering the equivalent of an extended footnote, but instead worries about flooding the archive with fandom wank, I guess? I am still not sure. But I feel like I am nowhere close to the heart of the discussion, so I should just let people who care more worry about it.

            It is useful to know that everyone is not starting from the same preconceptions.

            I distinctly get the impression underneath it all is a concern that the tags are not what people wish they were.

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            1. kelcat Mon 25 Feb 2013 11:47PM UTC

              Footnotes are against the rules? Seriously? I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that.

              But yeah, it never occurred to me that meta would be so contentious so this is definitely a learning experience for me to! An interesting topic to view from the outside.

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              1. ratcreature Tue 26 Feb 2013 12:05AM UTC

                reading RatCreature

                To be fair to ff.net, I think the intended target of the anti-footnote rule were the long chatty footnotes in which authors answered dozens of questions and comments to the previous chapter at the end of the next in their WIPs, often taking up almost as much or more space as the actual story part of a chapter, distorting story length for example with what was more or less social interaction, not really related to the text.

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                1. SkaianRedeemer Sun 03 Mar 2013 05:40AM UTC

                  "long chatty footnotes"

                  Even this is misrepresenting the issue, I'm afraid. This sort of thing takes in the footnotes, in the summary, at the top of the fic and most definitely peppered about the middle like a spice made of absolute nonsense.

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            3. Carmarthen Tue 26 Feb 2013 06:51AM UTC

              I thought they only forbade separate-chapter author's notes (which I did once, for a 19K piece of historical fiction)...huh.

              I do not think FFN's TOS is something to emulate.

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              1. Tyloric Sun 17 Mar 2013 02:52AM UTC

                I've just had to stop posting to FFN. Many of their policies are really just completely stupid, and the quality of the works on the site as a whole has taken a nose dive in recent years. I don't understand a lot of their TOS decisions (no author's notes, nothing above M, no links allowed, offsite websites can't automatically archive the stories. Like AO3, for example, can't pull the text from FFN). It's all just really weird and petty.

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              2. (2 more comments in this thread)

        3. Ruri (Guest) Mon 25 Feb 2013 11:46PM UTC

          It doesn't allow author notes posted as chapters. But author's notes at the beginning and/or the end of a story or a chapter? Perfectly ok.

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          1. kelcat Mon 25 Feb 2013 11:49PM UTC

            Ohh, okay, I knew they didn't chapters that were solely author's notes--good to know that they're still okay within story chapters.

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