@Nate, good stuff. Very interesting. Like I said, people/groups don't change without pain...so there must be some kind of crunch they are facing. Something that is making them look like, on the surface level, that they are making changes. That's why my guess is it's the
threat of punishment/litigation, and a threat that they believe will pass.
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I understand the anger over method, but I don't think people are giving enough consideration to the potential level of deep trouble they could be in. I don't feel for them myself because they should have been enforcing this better from the beginning or finding a different way to handle it when they instituted the rule. At the same time, if they really are feeling heat from 50 Shades of Grey and I was faced with the choice off negative publicity over something like that or possibility legal liability with the prospect of angry users over deletions, I'd take my chances with pissing off the user.
This is the part the doesn't make sense to me: Why wouldn't a policy like this be pursued site-wide, and why wouldn't FF.net take the next most apparent and most easily self-protecting step of setting up and MA area?
For a site that could get into some trouble for housing fifty shades of kiddie porn, they should be much more strident in cleaning out the erotic lit. Applying some filters to their content, they could easily have a full list of every page that uses fragrant words more than three times on a page. That would give the best indicator of smut within a story.
But they're not.... Doesn't make sense.
I wonder if it doesn't have to do with their cms only allowing one level restricted access area instead of two. So you have a mature access point for teens, but not a mature-adult access point. It would be cheaper to set up a separate website, running off the same cms (such as AFF.net), than buying a whole new cms (serious $$$) then having to waylay your site/users during a migration.
And I wonder if the surface level changes (only deleting stories that are recommended by a user group) are not just to show interested parties that they are cleaning up their act without truly having to clean up.
@nick: elit-diots, elitenoramus.... there's got to be a good word for those elite idiots....
@sakurablossoms: I agree, from a design standpoint, I don't care for the pics in the story list. It's a step toward a more graphic-friendly lit site, but the straight line of thumbnails doesn't make it easier to find stories. They don't give a user any more information to help them find their story, and their are too small and too close together to easily identify at first glance. The other issue is that stories are not so frequently updated that the icons are instantly recognizable as belonging to a particular user, and since it's all from the same fandom...all the pics will basically be the same. Upgrading the system is good, but I would have preferred more bling in the blurbs (bolded text on titles of lates updated stories, for example) than just the addition of pics. However, I'm glad they added a higher word count to the blurbs. That's a good thing. I agree though that all these upgrades at the same time as the purge seems like a bait-and-switch. They're upgrading somethings so it feels less like they're taking content away.
@kns: mine isn't a sense of entitlement over a site, but a sense of ownership in a community. To that end, I'd be happy to follow rules, log-in where they ask, etc., etc. My point is by letting a vitriolic user group have a hand in policing the site, the owners of FF.net break the trust of the users who provide their content. FF.net has no mods. It has no HQ. It has no "about us" page. I believe the only reason why groups like CU get traction is because they are reporting stories and doing the work of a true site mod. Someone, somewhere listens to their recommendations and deletes stories.
I see it as two separate (but connected) issues: 1) The upgrades and policy changes are coming down through the actual admins. 2) The guise of enforcement is coming through a user group.
FF.net functions is a database that a community has sprung up around. And a community needs rules, which FF.net is pretty lax about enforcing. But it's a betrayal of trust to allow/encourage a user group to police the site.
As a mod, it sounds like you do take your job seriously. What I'm saying is that FF.net lets user groups function as pseudo mods because it's convenient. You, as a mods on the HP site, wouldn't let a user group even pretend to have that much authority. It wouldn't happen here, either.
My issues is not the deleting of xxx material...but the terrible handling of all of it. It is a huge galloping community...with no apparent mods. Just TOS that they brandish occasionally. It pulls the rug out from under the users, and shines a light on groups like CU that boast of being unofficial site police, when there should be a clear divide between user and mod.
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