YMMV / FanFiction.Net

• Fandom Rivalry: With Archive of Our Own. While many writers do cross-post on both sites, there's a strong rivalry between the two because they're the two most popular fanfiction archives and have differing aims (FFN is dependent on ad revenue and as such has more content restrictions, while AO3 is a nonprofit organization with much looser content guidelines). Notably, some fandoms seem to lean towards one site over the other (for example, AO3 has a bigger Yuri!!! on Ice section while FFN has a bigger Naruto section), and Crossover fics tend to be more heavy leaning towards FFN, despite it being more limited than AO3 (FFN only lets users categorize a crossover between two series, while AO3 allows users to tag as many series as they like).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "There are no FFN Mods." ^Explanation The site's moderators are almost non-existent, and there's no real way to contact a specific one directly. Even if somebody does contact one, they rarely respond to what the other person's contacting them about. As a result of this incredibly lax moderation, most of FFN rules (such as no Alternate Reality Games, MSTs, Lemon Fics, or fics with real people in them) are pretty much never enforced, and the rule-breaking fics can stay up for years without issue.
  • Korean adbots. ^Explanation For some bizarre reason, FFN Forums tend to get flooded with the adbots, with the worst cases resulting in the front pages of Forums reading like a Korean website. It's so infamous that the site admins had to remove links from Forums... and that seemed to do absolutely nothing for the situation. To this day, you can still see adbots flooding the Forums.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In June 2015, a measure was implemented that prevented outside links from showing up in forum posts, and any outside links that were on a profile page and didn't link to Fictionpress (FFN's sister site) link back to the original profile page. While this was done to help curb the Korean adbot situation, to say site-goers weren't pleased would be a definite understatement.
  • The site uses the robots exclusion standard (robots.txt) in its programming, which prevented archival sites like the Wayback Machine from working with the site for a long time.^note The Internet Archive no longer follows the standard unless they are specifically requested by a site's webmaster to continue doing so for their site. As a result, this rendered a lot of forums, fanfics, and RPs Missing Episodes. This is especially infamous because FFN's higher-ups like to periodically purge forums, threads, and fics that haven't been touched after a certain point to save on space, even if said threads were unable to be reactivated or the fanfic was already completed. Naturally, bringing up robots.txt is a good way to ignite a bonfire that can be seen from space.

---