Fanfiction dot Net

There's a thread for Youtube. I noticed that there wasn't one for this site. Luckily I beat the crowd who use Archive.

So, first order of business:

I don't submit anything to F-F for over a year, and come back to find out that people can leave anonymous reviews all they want, and the option to deny anonymous reviews automatically is now removed. Instead, you can now deleted anonymous reviews at your leisure.

Z'uh?

Pity on those who have made enemies that spam their stories, or have reviews numbering in the thousands. The other way was more reliable, and blocked out any unsigned Hate Dumb, if any. They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.

edited 2nd Feb '14 6:06:51 PM by FOFD

I find you generally have to do something special in order to get negative criticism on fanfiction.net.

Lies. You just have to keep posting chapters for long enough. Spam reviews will happen. A while back, I was getting anonymous reviews that were advertisements for Bringer of Death every day. I would delete them, and then I would get more. I actually had to put a note in my profile telling whoever was doing that I already read it before they stopped.

Unless by "negative reviews," you meant reviews stating what the reader didn't like. In which case you just need to get enough readers for your story. If you get enough people to read your story, someone won't like something.

edited 2nd Feb '14 6:54:15 PM by Hyp3rB14d3

Just write het stuff in same gender obsessed fandoms.

I've never considered being able to prevent anonymous reviews a feature. It's a bug.

Ah, FFN. I can't trust that site anymore. Even years later, I'm still bummed out about that time when FFN ran out of space on their servers, so they decided to free up some memory by arbitrarily deleting about half the forum threads across the whole site. They didn't even give people any warning so no one had the chance to back stuff up! *waves fist at the heavens*

So yeah. Screw that site.

Never used their forums, myself.

They HAVE forums? Why would you even want to use them if they did?

There were good forums there. Horrible ones too, but that's to be expected. It worked sort of like Reddit—not the vote up/down aspect, but how anyone can create their own forum (subreddit) and make their own rules, set whatever standards they wanted, appoint their own moderators, etc.

There were some good forums there that were honestly some of my favourites ever.

Then they got deleted because FFN ran out of server space.

Huh. I sort of forgot they had forums.

I never got why we could only have 1 community, but like 10 different forums. I figure it should be the other way around. A community is controlled by one person, easier to manage. A forum should take up a lot of space with dozens, maybe a hundred people participating in it, shouldn't it?

There's a limit on how many communities you can make probably due to space issues. I'd think a forum would take up more space than a community.

My writing is greatly improved because I'm in a Mass Effect forum on ff. Quite seriously, having the people there reviewing my stuff, and reviewing theirs, made a great difference to me a year ago when I was getting back into writing after a ten-year stretch of not writing anything fiction aside from the occasional PC background for roleplaying.

The whole anonymous review thing is bogus. All of the Hate Dumb reviews I've gotten have been from signed-in profiles with reputations for extra-level flaming, so I can't delete them and the "report" button apparently does absolutely nothing.^note As opposed to here on TV Tropes, where the report button is almost immediately pounced upon by a moderator will and able to beat someone into submission. I love that.

Honestly though, I prefer fimfiction's style. Reviews/comments are easy to get rid of, tracking stories you want to read but haven't is easy, keeping up with the ones that just updated is even easier, and the groups and blogs (that I've read anyway) are helpful and informative. I don't know how much effort it would be to convert fanfic.net over to something a little more modern, but I think it would be well worth it for them.

Way I figure it, you post at the forums for the same reason you'd post a fic on the site at all. There are so many people on the site you're almost guaranteed to reach someone. For older fandoms, there might not be any other active forums, and most of the forums were active when the feature was first introduced. They died down later, but they are still pretty organized. It's more frustrating to search a general interest forum for threads relating to your fandom than to check FF.net's forums.

I have a Tsundere relationship with it. Some of my favorite authors are on that site.

edited 3rd Feb '14 11:07:24 PM by HeirophantsFool

As long as FF.net is the only fanfiction site which on the one hand allows me to post all my stories, no matter what fandom, and on the other hand doesn't allow (at least officially - there are always people who ignore the rules, sadly) adult stories including a handy little function to filter out the M-rated stories, it will be the place where my fanfictions are. It's not perfect, but what is?

And I had never any problem with spam.

I had one spam review on one story one time. But then again, the largest fandoms I write for have somewhere around 10K fics while the smallest ones have less than 100. It's hard to believe I've now been a member of that site for almost ten years.

I've on occasion been getting these vague reviews that basically say 'Huh? Couldn't follow it.' and then nothing more. I can deal with 'the character would never do/say that', and 'you're overlooking X', etc. These vague reviews are always from a 'Guest'. I've had 'Guests' that elaborate a bit, but usually they are this vague claim of not getting it and nothing specific. I honestly can't recall a signed review that did not say 'Liked A, B, R, S and Y' or 'Hated how you treated T, U, V' and like that.

Also, why is it that the reviews are seen, but your 'Thanks/Explanation/Refutation' is strictly a PM? Not that you can reply to a Guest - how corn-venient for the spammer. I know that the vagueness is not a confirmation of spam, but when the words sound like they could be about any story at all, I wonder.

The fact they could be about any story at all makes them less likely to be spam; spam has a purpose in attempting to sell or advertize something, and if it's not clear what than it's ineffective.

The spam I meant was someone typing a random string of gibberish and posting it as a review. I have gotten unhelpful reviews before but I hardly think people saying things like "it was okay" or "I'm really confused" are spamming. I mostly just ignore them.

I like FF.net a lot and have made at least one good friend through it. I think it's easy to use, and there's some fine works out there if you know how to spot them. I've stopped using the forums (around the time I got onto these forums, actually), and I've even gotten a few helpful reviews that have shaped my writing style. And sometimes I'd get anonymous reviews from fans loudly demanding a third story in my stupid iCarly/HTTYD crossover series, but I just delete those.

...My early years on that site were a dark time.

edited 8th Feb '14 10:29:29 PM by Mort08

Do you guys know what I'd really like? If the FF.net document editor had an autosave feature. Several times in a row I have lost entire hours of work to a string of freak accidents, the last having happened just an hour ago: Windows acted up and didn't notify me about my laptop's low battery levels, resulting in it trying to go to standby from low battery levels without giving me any chance to save my work, only for a driver to act up and crash into a BSOD. Another time, I actually managed to finish my work and clicked Save... only for my browser to redirect me to a wi-fi login page without any warning, not even bothering to preserve the editor field's contents.

I used to have a similar problem. I clung to the Document Manager and wrote up chapters there so that the format wouldn't be messed up when I transferred it from Word. But my ISP was crap at the time, I'd end up with Web Configurator messages, and entire chapters would be lost. Sometimes the connection would "hiccup" and restore itself, but that was right when I'd hit save, and the page would refresh with my last three to four hours of writing erased.

Since then, I've stuck to Word, since Document Manager seems to have gotten better with not wonking up the text and turning every three paragraphs into one big paragraph.

My Document Manager screwed up all the formatted text in my last chapter, so nothing was itallicized or bolded when I wanted it. Now it won't even let me correct it.

edited 18th Feb '14 9:49:34 AM by ScorpioRat

I get around that by writing in Google Drive and using the copy-paste option to upload the text.

I haven't ever had the document manager screw up on me, but I use the program they recommend already.