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"It's kind of like a Wiki for fanfiction... but less well regulated."
FanFiction.net— Anonymous
 is the biggest archive for FanFic anywhere, offering thousands upon thousands of stories, with a total length somewhere in the range of fifteen to twenty billion words. It's free. It's user-friendly. There are no adverts. Most members have a love-hate relationship with it - while there are some authors who post there who are exceptionally talented, there are quite a few more authors who post there who... aren't.
Started in 1998 by webmaster Xing Li, it soon snowballed into something incredible. Its secret to success is its limited moderation and fully-automated system, meaning posting is very quick and easy and can be done by anyone. Pretty much the ultimate expression of Sturgeon's Law, the site has gotten an exaggerated but not entirely unfounded reputation for representing a lot of the worst excesses of fanfiction.
FF.Net has had such a strong influence on the fan community that it was almost solely responsible for making the Script Fic obsolete - it banned almost all fics written in this form. This was mostly due to quality concerns over people being extremely lazy in their writing from the format. It has also banned Real Person Fic due to the potential for libel suits, forcing the RPF communities elsewhere, such as to LiveJournal. It attempted to ban NC-17-rated material, too (although the site is usually fine with some sex so long as it's not reported) - again, LiveJournal was a haven where those against the vulgarity-ban fled, although AdultFanFiction.net was also born to provide a place to go. In any case, there's still a 'Mature' rating tag that needs to be selected to view adult fics, so most writers put their Lemon and Lime there instead. And if they ever follow through with threats to wipe out that rating, many people speculate that the T-rating will be used for smut instead.
One interesting aspect of the site is that it simply is the reason that the Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls trope exists. While there has always been a decent female representation within fanfiction, this site really brought it to prominence. The vast majority of the members are, indeed, female and this has actually lead to sort of an inverse of the G.I.R.L. trope being used on the forums. Certainly, the male members using it as a social network tend to make a big deal out of their gender. The site is also popular as a social network, with a majority of the members signing up specifically for the forums. Much of the problem with the general quality comes from people that write stories without really caring due to either a sense of obligation or to get their name out there. Of course, this doesn't mean that there aren't many people who do want constructive feedback on their actual writing, but due to the very optimistic outlook of most members, it's not really the best place for it.
The site tends to attract quite a bit of Snark Bait, but like any other large community, that's just to be expected.
The nickname "Pit of Voles" comes from a Google-bombing campaign that succeeded for a while in making FanFiction.net the number 1 Google search result for that phrase. The aforementioned AdultFanFiction.net is known as the Uber-Pit. Currently, FanFiction.net is the second result for this phrase, with the urban dictionary definitions linking to FanFiction.net as both third and fourth. First? This article.
It also has a sister site, FictionPress. It hosts original fiction instead of fanfiction.
As of May 5th, 2012, the following 36 fandoms had at least 20,000 submissions on FanFiction.net *.
Over 100,000 hits
50,000-99,999 hits
30,000-49,999 hits
20,000-29,999 hits
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alternative title(s): The Pit Of Voles; Fan Fiction Net; Ptitle2ugbrwb8sjn 4
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