Fanfic Rec Comments

A continuation to this Ask The Tropers thread that went over too long.

Basically, the discussion at hand was whether or not the "Comments" section in Fanfic Recs page should be removed, as it is being misused as a "review" platform for tropers to either support the recommendation, or argue against it—the latter of which is not allowed, while the former veers dangerously into Conversation on the Main Page even if they are not explicitly disagreeing with the initial post.

Some has suggested outright mass-purging these "Comments" sections, which I don't really mind effecting. The comments can tedious to read, especially with multiple tropers contributing to it, and I think if other tropers want to second (or third or fourth or whatever) the fic, they can simply add their name on the "Recommended By" section without having to add to the wall of text.

But what do other tropers think? Is it necessary for readers to have a mini-review about the premise, tone, the directions and the whatnots if the fic before they can get into it?

Edited by Adept on Dec 2nd 2019 at 11:57:43 PM

My vote is to purge the Comments sections with extreme prejudice. The only kind of comment that should be in a rec is the Recommended By: line; any other comments should go into reviews.

Edited by Willbyr on Dec 2nd 2019 at 10:45:38 AM

Purge the comment secton.

I have some personal attachment to the fanfic recs sections, but gotta agree with the above. Comments at best attract natter; at worst, lead to people arguing against the original rec.

Edited by nombretomado on Dec 2nd 2019 at 9:47:00 AM

My problem is that without the comments, fanfic recs is little more than a list of fics. There's no place to give an idea of why someone is recommending the fic. And I don't mean "oh this fic is so good" comments, I mean "the fic is dark but stays close to canon" or "this fic is shamelessly off the wall but hilarious" comments. I suppose in theory you could use the synopsis section for that, but most recs just copy/paste the synopsis from fanfic.net or ao3.

Obviously natter and negativity are against the rules, but this feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Historically, we've allowed the troper who recommends a fic to state their reasons for doing so. The kind of comments that are prohibited are comments by other people, especially negative ones.

I'm tempted to say that any rec that directly copies a synopsis from another source should be disallowed due to our zero-tolerance stance on plagiarism. If you can't be arsed to write a decent summary of the fic on your own after reading it, did you really get enough out of it to recommend it?

I could get behind that, and it would likely also make comments unnecessary, but I'm worried about the transition period. Right now, copy/pasting the summary is standard practice, meaning basically all of them would be wiped out. And we couldn't exactly contact everyone who recced a fic to figure out what they meant. In some cases the comment can be swapped in for the synopsis without trouble, but that's not going to work for all of them or even a majority.

I'm still not clear why we have fanfic recommendations at all. It feels like something that grew organically, like the mildew in my shower, and we decided to keep because it was less trouble than dealing with the complaints over getting rid of it.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 3rd 2019 at 11:06:27 AM

Getting rid of fic recs altogether - that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, imo.

Why, though? What value do they add to the mission of the wiki? And why make them wiki articles rather than a forum topic? Like WMG and Headscratchers, they just sort of grew and we never bothered to stop them.

If people want to treat fanfic equally to original works, that's one thing. But why do fanfics get privileged status by having their own dedicated recommendations section?

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 3rd 2019 at 11:45:30 AM

Let's start with the fact that this thread is about the comment sections on these pages, not about whether the whole section should go. Make another thread for that if you want.

It's relevant because policing them for plagiarism is taking up effort that could be better spent elsewhere. But fine.

Anyway -

I think it would be good to have the original synopsis section serve for both a summary and small commentary, and mix follow up comments.

Maybe we could have a "Reasons for recommendation" section instead?

That could possibly work.

As to why we still have them, I personally see them as a kind of Just For Fun thing for their works...they attract interest in both the fics and the work itself, and can be a fertile breeding ground for work pages for the fics themselves. I know the Eva fic rec page has spawned quite a few pages for the fics listed there. That said, when Eddie did the first major site renovation way back in the day, he didn't do a good job of incorporating them and we've had to deal with the issue that's spawned ever since.

That seems like a good compromise, though I do have to ask: May multiple tropers add to that section, or should only the first poster add to that? My concern is that while it may discourage people gushing excessively or arguing against the fic, it may still attract natter, forum-like dialogues and This Troper.

Multiple, but restrict it to one bullet and enforce Repair, Don't Respond and Example Indentation in Trope Lists?

So how much consensus do we need to take action? Can we make crowners for non-TRS/IP threads?