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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think further complaints about FFN are really on-topic here, but I would like to say that "offsite websites can't automatically archive the stories" is in my book a GOOD thing--I emphatically do not want random websites pulling my story text and wouldn't sign up on a website that permitted that kind of scraping by default. I archive deliberately and in places where I have control over the text.
Unless you're talking about the ability to import your own stories yourself from one site to the other, but even then, I think to avoid making plagiarism super-easy you'd have to have a system set up so the accounts on AO3 and FFN would have to link to each other, and that would require a lot of inter-site cooperation.
What's so difficult to understand about their TOS. There were authors writing longer author notes than stories and authors 'updating' their stories with nothing but apologise on why they haven't uploaded or how they need x reviews before updating or other non-story blabla, so FFN updated their TOS to explicitly state that they are fanfiction archive and not a blather on archive since the authors apparently didn't twig to that by default.
Nothing above M means nobody can come after them for exposing minors to porn. There was a time when NC-17 stories were allowed and they had a pop-up question of 'are you over 18' on them. I guess then someone did come after them, and it's cheaper for them to ban NC-17 instead of getting the infrastructure so they are protected if someone wants to come after them.
No links offsite means that they are unattractive to RUssian, Vi@gra, Penis enhancement and other kinds of spam and advertising, they are also not liable for people linking to problematic sites and someone coming after them, because 'think of the children'.)
FFN is an extremely big and for profit site, their actions can be explained by looking at their actions from that angle.
Same goes for why they don't have an 'view entire work' button, means they get to load the ads that pay them on each chapter instead of only once.
In my experience the fic quality is the same it has been for the last more than ten years on FFN and is the same as on AO3. 90% of everything isn't of interest to me and of the remaining 10% 90% is shit. With AO3 it's just that more annoying to find the fic of potential interest, since they are encouraging to tag for every character and their original male dog and for every fandom even if there's only a throw away mention. Unlike with FFN, where also need less scrolling, cause blurbs are shorter, where if I search for fic about fandom ABC, they fic will primarily be about ABC and if I search for characters Z, Y, X and U, the fic will primarily be about Z, Y, X, and U.
Comment on OTW Board response to concerns about the meta decision
Oshun Mon 25 Feb 2013 10:24PM UTC
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