Fandom Snowflake: Day 2

[thisbluespirit]

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 allbingo is new and looks really useful and fun - you can get bingo cards of your own any time, or use it as a place to still post from previous cards though the official bingo's expired.

2. fic_rush! It's a fic_rush weekend starting midnight GMT tonight, and how can I not mention it when answering this? Fic_rush is a 48 hour bid for galactic domination writing challenge, or more accurately support group. But it's very open, friendly, and it doesn't matter which fandom you're in (or none). If you ever need a place to set yourself targets, grumble about not writing/writing too much, claim icons/tv watching/laundry etc. etc. are totally writing achievements in some way and share some online fun and nonsense, fic_rush is a good place to be. And it's absolutely fine to turn up for five minutes to write five words, or to take part all weekend and finish your epic WIP. (Ninja penguins, alien fish, glowsticks, bonsai giraffes and writerly pasta are entirely optional.)

3. Bit predictable, but I can't do without Archive of Our Own these days. I like that I can post things for any fanworks and don't have to wait for anybody else to make the fandom/character/relationship tags, the way you can just click on the tags for browsing, the searchability, the nifty share feature, and the fact that it doesn't drive me crazy the way ff.net did, the one time I used it to post three fics. (It ate my scene breaks, it didn't cater to obscure fandoms and it was soooo fiddly to upload and I'm still not sure whether editing is possible. And now I don't have to care, thank goodness.) And I do very much like being a wrangler, so I'm biased of late, but I was in love already before I went that far. Also amusing tags are amusing. (I still think Teaspoon is the prettiest archive I've used, though. But it won't do for anything that's not Doctor Who, so... one needs an Archive of Our Own.)

Comments

[justice_turtle]

Ooh, it's fic_rush this weekend? :D I had no idea.

Somebody at FFnet's coding department apparently thinks it eating scene breaks is a feature rather than a bug -- they keep updating the code so it will find and eat more of the workaround markers people start using! I think I went with "oOoOoOoOo" or some such when I was posting there, and then that got eaten. The only ones I've seen survive longterm are, like, actually putting "~ADoctorWhoStoryByVvj5~" or whatever between every scene, and that's just annoying as hell to both writer and reader. ;P

[thisbluespirit]

ff.net was bad in enough in quite a few respects, but once it started eating my scene breaks, that was it between us, and I've never been back! AO3 can be buggy, and it's still a work in progress, of course, but it doesn't eat my scene breaks!!

Why anyone would think that's a feature, I don't know. The mind boggles.

And, yes, fic_rush! You can come and cough all over us, and we won't even catch anything. Unless we do (because someone virtual reality is strange). ;-)

♥

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

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!"

[thisbluespirit]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[thisbluespirit]

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.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[thisbluespirit]

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 it, although not massively, but some font/colour changes and things (there's a skins setting in your account). That bit is more complicated, but I managed it after a bit of poking - I don't mind the layout (the colour background rather than white and the general clarity of it, even if it's not so pretty as Teaspoon, helps me to be able to read things online), but I hated when it lost its margins, so I used the skins for putting the margins back.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[thisbluespirit]

The internet is also interested in cats. :-)

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Good point!

[lolmac]

I still post in both venues because ff.net has way more reader traffic than Ao3. Ao3 is better for writers; ff.net is better for getting read.

I did notice that ff.net has made it even harder to edit now, as part of their effort to make themselves violently incompatible with Ao3. Not only have they blocked the import functions, they've made the already user-hostile interface even more of a mess, if you're trying to maintain copy there. Argh. But, more readers there, even now. For now.

ETA: ff.net also provides a lot more traffic details. Sigh. All ego-boo for me, I guess.

[thisbluespirit]

It's always horses for courses with everything, isn't it? I get along quite happily without ff.net now I have AO3, and I love the tags in lots of different ways, so that suits me. But it's perfectly understandable that for other people it's difficult, or that they like using both. Why not?

But for me, I'm definitely more than a bit in love with AO3, which I never thought I would be when I first became aware of it. :-)

[lolmac]

I should have added: I utterly adore and worship Ao3! The interface is a dream. (I still find Teaspoon awkward, but I've only posted there a couple of times.) I now regard Ao3 as the archive where I keep all the definitive versions of anything, and to which I link when I need links.

I'm really happy that the traffic there has increased! Not to mention the shout-outs from the pro field, especially Lev Grossman. If Ao3 were to utterly eclipse ff.net and cause it to fade away, I would not weep. If ff.net were to actually wake up and realise it needs to frigging clean up its act or be eclipsed, I would cheer. Competition can be a truly fine thing.

But considering that ff.net hasn't even bothered to update its "forbidden authors" list (I actually emailed them after GabaldonGate, with no results), I'm not holding my breath.

[thisbluespirit]

:-D

It hit one million fics last week, so it's definitely growing! It can still be a bit buggy at the moment, though, so probably it's as well for ff.net to hang on for a while longer.

[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)

[thisbluespirit]

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

[thisbluespirit]

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.

Whereas AO3 does the equivalent of putting everything up on the shelf up front for me to browse through. User error, of course, as always, is frustrating - the people who don't tag for characters and pairings, and the people who tag in all the wrong places. But it is quite rare for people not to tag characters and the length is sorted by the word count itself, not by tags.

[clocketpatch]

Really? Apparently I don't understand how to search for length at all because I thought that you had to look for fics that the author had considerately tagged with the wordcount. :/

[thisbluespirit]

There are several ways to do it - this is the real problem with AO3! Always extra options. The length tags are usually from ages ago when the archive didn't have that ability. If authors still use them, we never canonise them now.

I linked to the full search page below (where you can search by length) but you can also just use the sort option in the sidebar - the little drop down filter menu? You can sort by kudos, comments etc. but also by length. Or if you want a specific length, you can use the full search page.

[thisbluespirit]

The search page like this: http://archiveofourown.org/works/search

If you put Avon in "any field", and select B7 as the fandom lower down, you get about 940 fics (a couple of hundred more than by clicking on the Kerr Avon tag). You can filter it by word count there among other things (100-1000 gets you about 300 or so).

(Sorry, I'm not meaning to be annoying here. I just went to check, as I don't often use the full search engine and I was curious - as I said, I'm more of an idle browser!)

[clocketpatch]

I didn't even realize that page existed. face!palm

That does make things considerably easier...

[thisbluespirit]

Heh, that's why we were talking at cross-purposes. (You just click the search button at the top and the works option. :-D)

[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' :)

[thisbluespirit]

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.

[thisbluespirit]

:loL: Well done you! :-)

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[thisbluespirit]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

[thisbluespirit]

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...)

[lolmac]

I love the reading sprees. I love them even more when there are reviews -- it's as if a diner remembers the cook and actually goes to the kitchen and says "Yum!"

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

That's just what it feels like, and as someone who had never, will never get the yum for my non-cokking... reviews on older stories (or kudos on AO3) give me a definite buzz. So I try and remember always to give them as well :)

[lolmac]

Also, I am immeasurably squeeful about the shout-out to fic_rush! This is the first time I've ever gotten a Snowflake mention, so to speak. *beams* (I don't really think of Fic Rush as 'mine', although, yeah, I guess I should, at least to some extent, since it wouldn't still be around without me and all that . . . muttermuttermutterthisishard.)

[thisbluespirit]

I think fic_rush has become something that can't quite belong to any one person - which is good, but a whole big lot of it is definitely yours now! You are Queen Mod, after all! ♥

[lolmac]

Exactly! I kept it from going under, but I didn't create it originally, and I couldn't have kept it going on my own. I wonder if museum directors feel a little like this? Being in charge of something that they didn't start, making sure it stays strong, but knowing that they're only part of the whole story. My goodness, I sound flaily. I probably need a nap.

[thisbluespirit]

Flaily is good, but I hope you had a nap, too, if one was needed. :-)

Heh, you're the Curator! ;-)