204 replies to this topic

[Gammy Das]

And here I am, with a fanfic Rated T, when, if I was to follow this guideline, it should've been 'M'.

Honestly, dafuq's their problem when we; the users, don't give a single kitten about Lemons being rated 'M'. FFnet needs to change its priorities.

[Nate River]

And here I am, with a fanfic Rated T, when, if I was to follow this guideline, it should've been 'M'.

Honestly, dafuq's their problem when we; the users, don't give a single kitten about Lemons being rated 'M'. FFnet needs to change its priorities.

Because giving minors (minimum age for ff.net is 13, but people younger than that are all over the place) unobstructed access to literary porn is frowned upon and probably illegal.

[Gammy Das]

Because giving minors (minimum age for ff.net is 13, but people younger than that are all over the place) unobstructed access to literary porn is frowned upon and probably illegal.

Perhaps, but limiting the visibility of 'M' rated fics to authors who are legally allowed to read Lemons would work better. I mean, half of the people who read 'M' rated fanfictions, which are Lemons, don't have FF accounts. Limiting it to authors would be a better step. Perhaps later on they'd be able to come up with a better solution[Because, if minors read lemons, with a fake age set, they'd be the ones at fault legally, and not the site. :\].

P.S. - I'm freaking out here. You're a Kage! Wow.

Edited by Gammy Das, 03 July 2012 - 08:52 PM.

[Sakura Blossoms]

For the love of all things good, Fanfiction.net PLEASE STOP ADDING POINTLESS USELESS CRAP WE DON'T NEED -

)B --Click here to view--

Now the front page is even MORE cluttered with some random utter pointless 'Twitter feed'. I don't want or NEED Twitter cluttering up my screen space. I don't like or USE Twitter, so this new ridiculous addition is completely unnecessary, and an absolute waste of website space. And I don't like having all this invasive 'social media' coming in and taking up residence. I don't want or need Facebook to log-in. Why would I want my relatives and more conservative friends to know that I read animated cartoon MA content? The short answer? I don't.

Stop it FFnet. Just...Stop.

[Nate River]

Perhaps, but limiting the visibility of 'M' rated fics to authors who are legally allowed to read Lemons would work better. I mean, half of the people who read 'M' rated fanfictions, which are Lemons, don't have FF accounts. Limiting it to authors would be a better step. Perhaps later on they'd be able to come up with a better solution[Because, if minors read lemons, with a fake age set, they'd be the ones at fault legally, and not the site. :\].

P.S. - I'm freaking out here. You're a Kage! Wow.

See, I don't know what the minimum you are required to do to prevent access.

Why they decided on that route, I don't know. I don't think they have an obligation for not allowing them at all and don't are what path they pick. Consistent enforcement is all I ask for. That would help, but it would not remove the need for judgment calls, it just changes from what is allowed on the site to what goes in or out of pornoland.

[Gammy Das]

See, I don't know what the minimum you are required to do to prevent access.

Why they decided on that route, I don't know. I don't think they have an obligation for not allowing them at all and don't are what path they pick. Consistent enforcement is all I ask for. That would help, but it would not remove the need for judgment calls, it just changes from what is allowed on the site to what goes in or out of pornoland.

They decided on that route because the site's board is sadistic.

Edited by Gammy Das, 07 July 2012 - 03:37 AM.

[tricksie]

For the love of all things good, Fanfiction.net PLEASE STOP ADDING POINTLESS USELESS CRAP WE DON'T NEED -

)B --Click here to view--

Now the front page is even MORE cluttered with some random utter pointless 'Twitter feed'. I don't want or NEED Twitter cluttering up my screen space. I don't like or USE Twitter, so this new ridiculous addition is completely unnecessary, and an absolute waste of website space. And I don't like having all this invasive 'social media' coming in and taking up residence. I don't want or need Facebook to log-in. Why would I want my relatives and more conservative friends to know that I read animated cartoon MA content? The short answer? I don't.

Stop it FFnet. Just...Stop.

Yeah....

In my long history of being underwhelmed by stupid ff.net, this is just another drop in the bucket. I think these changes are a weak attempt give some legitimacy and some waaaay-late web 2.0-ness to the site. I think with the popularity of 50 shades, it's shined a bright light on the fact that ff.net is a database...and a crummy one at that.

So someone, somewhere decided that jumping on the social media bandwagon would make them look more connected without actually having to change the site structure. But you've hit the nail on the head: These "improvements" are nothing that ff.net's target user would want/use/need. Ever. I would venture a guess that three-quarters of the users on ff.net would not want their personal lives connected to their ff.net accounts. For that very reason you mentioned above. So what's the point of offering better social media connectivity? Only to provide surface-level changes that give the impression of improvement, while the site itself is not actually improving.

[Codus N]

For crying out loud... you guys can just login with your email y'know??

[Onionhead Attacks]

For the love of all things good, Fanfiction.net PLEASE STOP ADDING POINTLESS USELESS CRAP WE DON'T NEED -

)B --Click here to view--

Now the front page is even MORE cluttered with some random utter pointless 'Twitter feed'. I don't want or NEED Twitter cluttering up my screen space. I don't like or USE Twitter, so this new ridiculous addition is completely unnecessary, and an absolute waste of website space. And I don't like having all this invasive 'social media' coming in and taking up residence. I don't want or need Facebook to log-in. Why would I want my relatives and more conservative friends to know that I read animated cartoon MA content? The short answer? I don't.

Stop it FFnet. Just...Stop.

To quote myself from a previous post in regards to all this social media nonsense:

Also, I'm probably in the suuuuuppper minority that doesn't like social media. It's taken over our lives! Which I suppose isn't uncommon in this day and age, but having it directly linked to everything is sort of annoying. I don't fb (but I used to), tweet, use tumblr, google+ or anything so although handy to have those features available for sharing and logging in, I feel like social media is seeping into every little part of our lives. It's just... is personal space from too much social media too much to ask for? Almost every single website has a social media link or option somewhere which makes casual anonymous surfing kind of awkward. I can't even read an article I saw off of yahoo without my fb showing that I read it. It's happened with a friend and I found it strange just being able to know what they're reading without them actually posting it themselves. It's like an invasion of privacy in some way. It's creepy.

For crying out loud... you guys can just login with your email y'know??

(sarcasm) Yes, but why would we ever want to do THAT? We don't get to socialize at the same time too! (/end sarcasm)

But seriously. Plain and simple email or username would suffice. What's with all this extra junk we don't need?

[Sakura Blossoms]

For crying out loud... you guys can just login with your email y'know??

Really? Are you going to start complaining at us now for not liking another pointless change? If you don't have a issue with it, or like it then don't jump on anyone else for not liking it. We've had more than enough of that in this thread already.

[tricksie]

Really? Are you going to start complaining at us now for not liking another pointless change? If you don't have a issue with it, or like it then don't jump on anyone else for not liking it. We've had more than enough of that in this thread already.

Ditto. And not only are you complaining, but you missed the point. It isn't about ease-of-use in logging in. It's about giving users who want to keep their anonymity the ability to link their fanfiction preferences to everyone in their rl sphere through facebook, twitter, etc. It's a useless improvement.

Edited by tricksie, 07 July 2012 - 03:40 PM.

[Nick Soapdish]

One thing I will say about the ff.net staff is that it had the reputation (from many years ago, back when nc-17\MA rated stories were first removed; I don't know if this is still the case) of deleting stories that were reported for terms violations without even checking to see if there was an actual violation. For this reason, I've never "assumed it was safe" for anything posted on ff.net. The fact that they won't even tell the author why the fic has been removed (at least, this used to be the case; again, my knowledge is largely from years ago on this issue) is pretty bad, too, considering how frequently people have had their fic removed and had no clue why.

The Anon review issue is pretty bad, but I'm not as concerned about that one. That was a feature that was added later, because authors were being flamed or even serious threats were being made by anonymous review, and adding the ability to turn off anon reviews was an attempt to make it so that the AUTHOR didn't have to deal with them; it had nothing to do with whether other reviewers would have a chance to read them. To change the "feature" so that the author MUST read anonymous reviews in order to "moderate" them eliminates the entire reason the option to turn off anonymous reviews was included in the first place.

FF.net is really one of the WORST sites for a fanfic author out there, in terms of technology and moderation, but instead it's the perfect example of the macroeconomic principle of the so-called "QWERTY Effect" in action: Even though it's a poor standard, the impediments to changing (from) it are so great that it's unlikely a change will ever gain proper traction. It's too large to die (short of the admins themselves pulling the plug), and for many fanfic authors it's the only option they have to give their fanfiction an audience, but between the horrible moderation and maintenance routines, it's actually far, far worse than almost every option presented -- those other options just don't have a large enough audience for these fanfic authors to even know about it. Mediaminer was close, at one point, but Mediaminer wasn't exactly much better (the site was born out of a scandal with them misrepresenting themselves in order to acquire the archives of the old usenet group, Rec.Arts.Anime.Creative, and the people who run it were about as closed off from their author base as the ff.net people were), and has now largely fallen into disuse.

But I like the Dvorak keyboard! Oh well, I guess I'll just console myself by imagining that it makes me a rebel or something.


I gotta agree about ff.net being too big to die. Too many authors have too much invested in it. DA is big enough to give them a run for their money (if they add a better format for written works), but they have their own issues with erratic enforcement. And real moderation of a fanfic site of this size would be an enormous task - particularly implementing it at this time. In just the Naruto section (one of the larger ones admittedly), there were more than 200 updates in the last 24 hours in at least 6 different languages.

[Catwho]

They put back, at the very least, the ability to "screen" anonymous comments before they're put up on the website for the world to see.

This is an opt-in thing, you have to change it under your account settings.

Not sure if you can delete them without reading them first. Haven't gotten any anonymous comments since I switched it to moderate them.

Edit: Just got one, and it's blaringly visible in the middle of the page with a check box. So whoever moderates them has to at least glance at them.

Edited by Catwho, 08 July 2012 - 02:47 PM.

[K9ofChaos]

If you're asking the story behind 50 Shades of Grey, it's that the novel is becoming massively popular now and the fact the author started on FF.net made the admins fear that a lot of people are coming over there to read the Smutty fics for the wrong reasons, I think.

If you seriously want to know...

spoiler --Click here to view--

The novel is a very mature novel with BDSM themes in it.

I think I heard of this through a comedy sketch about a book on type for 50 Shades of Grey narrated by Gilbert Gottfried, it was glorious.



Oh and this fanfiction purge sucks, I blame moral guardians for this.

Edited by K9ofChaos, 10 July 2012 - 12:38 AM.

[tricksie]

So.... Just posted a review and this is the Thank You message that pops up in the window:
"The author would like to thank you for your continued support. Your review has been posted."

I know this is old news, but for some reason I thought it was being emailed to users like a copy of the review gets emailed to the author. So I'm marginally happy to discover that I was wrong (as I didn't like that idea at all). But.... The text itself is clumsy and it is really strange to be assigning the identity of the thanks to the author, when everyone knows it didn't come from the author.

This is one more example of ff.net's erratic culture. Reviews aren't just a pleasant perk of the site. They are the lifeblood. The ability to get feedback is why people come here, instead of posting their stories on their own blogs. Or exclusively on fangroups like this one.

It's not the author who should be thanking the reviewer, it's the site itself. It should just read "Thank you for your review! It has been successfully posted!" without any ownership at all. That's the true message. When someone reviews, mutliple parties benefit.

But it's not out of kindness that ff.net should be encouraging high review counts. High reviews means high user activity. If the reviews sagged, that would mean the community interest was sagging as well.

Thus the clumsy wording is a misfire. FF.net should be thanking the community, not telling users that the author thanks them.

*sigh* Honestly, I'd rather not be "thanked" at all in this manner. I'd rather have ff.net come out as themselves (and say thankyou for supporting the site) or not be thanked at all. To assume how the author feels — "The author would like to thank you...." — is just weird.

[Sakura Blossoms]

Well, among all the wrong that ffnet has done they at least corrected one thing. They've given back anon reviewers the ability to assign a name to themselves, instead of just being called 'Guest'.

[kirabook]

Ah, they took that away? I knew something was strange about that. I was on my phone and forgot my password, but wrote a review anyway and I thought it was just my phone that wouldn't let me type my name out.

Good thing they put it back.

[Sakura Blossoms]

...They're still pushing out 'new features'. Stop does not seem to be a word in their vocabulary -

7/11/2012 On July 12th, 2012, @1AM US Pacific Time, @4AM US Eastern Time, the login area will be disabled for 15 to 30 minutes while an important upgrade is performed. During this time, reviewing and publishing feature will be inaccessible.

We apologize for this short inconvenience. The planned upgrades will allow us to introduce new features slated to be pushed out on July 12-13th.

It just remains to be seen now if these *even more* 'new features' prove to be a further nuisance/hindrance, or they actually prove somewhat fairly useful to the users of the site.

I've been thinking for a while now that perhaps the 'management/admin' team of pre-50-shades-of-gray-purge-2012 were bought out, like how Google bought out Youtube. Because this level of 'new features' being added near constantly, just smells of 'corporate-takeover' and then the new 'masters' beginning a flurry of new 'improvements/facelift' to their new acquisition.

[Nate River]

I've been thinking for a while now that perhaps the 'management/admin' team of pre-50-shades-of-gray-purge-2012 were bought out, like how Google bought out Youtube. Because this level of 'new features' being added near constantly, just smells of 'corporate-takeover' and then the new 'masters' beginning a flurry of new 'improvements/facelift' to their new acquisition.

As if youtube wasn't itself a cooperate interest by that point...

But that was announced anyway. If a new ownership group has taken over why not announce it, especially if it's a known corporate entity. If say, Google, bought you don't think they'd mention it (and have their brand all over it)?

I think it's more likely one of two things (1) a gigantic "I'm sorry" for the purge (they may or may not have been planning this for sometime and chose to roll it now because of that) or (2) they had been planning this and the timing is coincidental. Personally, I believe it's close to the first thing.

[Sakura Blossoms]

As if youtube wasn't itself a cooperate interest by that point...

But that was announced anyway. If a new ownership group has taken over why not announce it, especially if it's a known corporate entity. If say, Google, bought you don't think they'd mention it (and have their brand all over it)?

I think it's more likely one of two things (1) a gigantic "I'm sorry" for the purge (they may or may not have been planning this for sometime and chose to roll it now because of that) or (2) they had been planning this and the timing is coincidental. Personally, I believe it's close to the first thing.

Not necessarily. The 'team' behind FFnet has always been pretty damn secretive. In all the years the site has been up, the people 'behind the scenes' who run the site have never been known. If someone else came in and took over, pushed the old team out, and began 'renovations' why in all the world would they make an 'announcement' about it? Since when has FFnet ever been fond of making announcements, that reveal much of anything besides what they want you to know. And I never said a major group like Google came in and took over. I merely gave the most recent and well-known example of a 'takeover' that I remembered. It could have been a much smaller tech group that saw monetary possibilities with acquiring FF.net.

And the way this looks is that after 50 Shades of Gray came out someone(s) saw a possible lucrative deal for themselves. There was this huge, sudden, kind of national attention/spotlight shone on this book that raced up the reader's chart practically overnight. Suddenly regular 'mainstream' people i.e. people who buy books from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Walmart etc were very interested in this book and its origins. And going back to the example I gave, a group like Google saw the opportunity to take this old website, that hasn't had any kind of truly significant updates in practically a decade, take/buy it out of the hands of the old 'behind-the-scenes' team, and start shoving new changes and features onto the site with little to no regard to the current userbase that's already there. Because the new owners really don't care about who's already there hence the Purge, being unable to block anon reviews, Twitter/Facebook/etc suddenly going up, and all the other inexplicable changes that have taken place. Many have already said that no one who is a true writer/reader/lover of literature could do what FFnet has been doing lately.

And they're absolutely right.

Because the people in charge now don't care. They don't come from a reading background. They just see $$ signs. They are pandering to the new 'mainstream' users who came looking around after the huge success of Shades of Gray. And page hits = money. Ads on every page that gets a page hit = $$

The people who have allowed FFnet to languish for so many years, didn't seem to have the means or resources to do all that's happening on the site lately. That takes some capital and a goodly amount of tech skills. I feel that whoever is now in charge came flush with both. And as I said before you will never hear them announce anything about a possible takeover if one ever happened, because you never knew from the start who was even in charge/running the site for at least the last decade to begin with.


Edit - And I now see what one of these new 'features' ffnet was pushing out today are:

Reviews: 15 - Favs: 11 - Follows: 12

Copied this from beneath a story's summary. As with most of the recent changes, I'm not sure how I feel about this one. To me how many hits/story alerts/faves has always been a private author thing, that you check in your personal Traffic Stats. Now anyone and everyone can see them. It was already hard enough for some stories that didn't have a lot of reviews but were good to get recognition. Now it seems like this new feature will make it doubly hard for stories that are good, but just haven't been fully discovered by the reading crowd, to be fairly treated by those who just read stories with a high review count. Now some stories will have to show a high review/alert/fave count as well.