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Much of what you propose is indeed coding issues, and therefore well outside my area of expertise. I will clarify that subcategories within subdomains are added by my admin, and not by members, which eliminates the issue of duplicate categories. Members do not have the ability to create a category on their own, and I don’t anticipate that will change at any point in the near future. Having seen the mess that can be created by allowing members to create tags on their own, and the subsequent need for a dedicated team of tag wranglers to clean up the mess in other fiction archives, we won’t be doing that here. We’re an all-volunteer staff, and I for one would rather not deal with user-created tag insanity. I don’t think I’d have any staff left, honestly.

Chapter Five has gone up. Shit’s starting to get real.

Sure we do, same reason we used to need hangings to be done in front of the courthouse in the public square… “deterrence”

I love the idea of franchise tags, but I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to implement those due to the physical structure of the archive. It’s actually 23 separate databases. Each subdomain is a unique entity. When I’m moderating in a subdomain, I can (and do) move stories to the correct subcategory. I’m not able to move stories from one subdomain to another. We also have a clear rule about not allowing authors to crosspost stories in multiple subdomains, unless the crosspost is a translation. That rule was implemented to conserve bandwidth. We do actually have a separate subdomain for non-English stories, and that tends to eliminate the issue of English speakers being confronted by stories in another language, and vice versa. If you want stories in another language, we have subcategories there for French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and the catch-all Misc subcategory. There are further divisions within those subcategories for the more popular fandoms as well as for original works. Disclaimers will always be an issue, I fear. We have certain subdomains and subcategories with unique disclaimer requirements. Original works require a much different disclaimer than a fan fiction would, and the disclaimer will also differ for original works of non-fiction. Fan fiction involving celebrities is another unique circumstance, as is fan fiction based on titles in the public domain. There really is no single template that would cover every situation. Now, if we were able to apply the franchise tags concept to the individual databases, that might help, but in the case of the Celebrity subdomain, it would require adding a separate database to cover the names of every possible famous person who might conceivably generate a story. That’s a great deal more bandwidth that would be expended, as opposed to saved, and would require constant tag wrangling as celebrities under 18 came of age (we do not ever allow real-person fiction involving anyone under 18), or new bands/wrestlers/actors/Youtube personalities became popular. I fear we’ll have to agree to disagree about the Hall of Shame. We don’t expect users to check there all the time to see if their stories were stolen. Far from it, actually. AFF believes fan fiction authors, who write for nothing more than reviews and the joy of writing, deserve some advocacy, much like any published author whose agent, publisher, and lawyer would be quick to pursue anyone plagiarizing the author. What we want is to make public the pen names of the plagiarists. If every fiction archive were to maintain a list of verified plagiarists, it would be far easier to remove stolen works, especially across platforms. And believe me, we do verify any alleged plagiarism before we act. Plagiarism is a serious offense in any form in which it occurs.