JayDee

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.

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. 

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

Spoiler’d it ‘cos character spoilers.
The old tabletop game does sound like it woulda been fun.

Whore of Heaven  – part 3 reviewed!
Thank you for the comments on part 3 also! All done now – at least it’s short
He’s upgrading Megaman style – beat someone, take abilities! Wipe out the body on Earth, he can reform back in Hell. Well, until someone binds him.
The creator: “These assholes doing all the raping are why we can’t have nice things.”
Possibly inspired by some human looking devils in things like Devil’s Advocate and End of Days, though I don’t really remember now.
 Gotta get those soul contracts signed
Spoilerwise I genuinely didn’t think it revealed anything that wasn’t in InBrightestDay’s summary for The Woman in the Statue -
It does spoil parts The Least I Could Do which InBrightestDay wrote based on the original ending. I totally accept the amended ending isn’t for everyone but I still kinda like it, and I am sorry it’s weakened your enthusiasm for InBrightestDay’s far superior story (that’s not me being self-deprecating, it really is awesome). As well as the ending, I made a few other changes to fit in better with the sequel (there was a suggestion that Luzurial was shorter originally, and I think InBrightestDay spotted some other internal continuity stuff!) so I’m gonna take it as a plus that only the ending felt mostly tacked on Technically the only story to read first might be the Zombie Mother story I wrote even before WoH, which explained how Eparlegna got his current body. I stuck a few call backs to it in, such as the reference to Eparlegna is keeping the head of his half-human body’s mother. 
Still taking the reviews as a big plus, as you liked the rest of it I am glad you’re glad you read it Thanks again!

I’d settle for ‘em just letting George add new categories!

I’d settle for ‘em just letting George add new categories!

I’d settle for ‘em just letting George add new categories!

Hi,
Let me start by thanking you for a very thoughtful post. You’ve put a good bit of time into this, and it’s appreciated.
I’m not a coder, so I can’t respond to the Prettier and Easier suggestions, although I will admit that I miss the left side navigation bar, which was sacrificed in favor of making the site easier for mobile device users. I’m an unrepentant PC user, and don’t read or write on my phone, so the mobile-user adaptations did little for me. I’m also hugely fond of dark mode options myself, but again, since I’m not a coder, I have no idea how easily that could be implemented. I do know our site code is largely proprietary, and that does make certain options available on commercial packages harder to implement.
I am, however, qualified to comment on the Quality Control issues as the lead Archive Moderator. We are governed, in our moderation, by the owner’s decisions as to what is or is not allowed. Sadly, the wall-of-text submissions fall under the owner’s no-censorship guidelines for the staff, so as much as I’d love to reject those, I’m not able to. The same applies to story titles. We’re not permitted to exercise quality control on those, either, although I sigh deeply every time I see a title that’s nothing more than a sentence. I’m a slave to my own prejudices, I’m sure, but titles have an accepted format in my ever so humble opinion, which includes capital letters for more than the first word.
Tags and disclaimers are something we do strive to enforce. Every new story and update is reviewed, and we require tags for content as defined in our Story Codes list. If tags aren’t included as needed, we will warn the author via email about the missing tags, hide the story if it’s not corrected within the stated time period, and eventually, if the tags still aren’t added, we do delete the story. The same applies to disclaimers, the most common Terms of Service violation. We leave a review board message, email the author upon hiding the story, and we will indeed delete a story that doesn’t have a proper disclaimer. I find some authors don’t even bother to put a story in the proper subcategory, so an auto-generated disclaimer function would still not be a perfect solution. On a personal level, I don’t mind a slightly creative disclaimer, but I appreciate your call for a consistent format. It would certainly make moderating that area easier.
The Hall of Shame was established to highlight not bad content, but to showcase people who have outright plagiarized stories for the most part. We do think those plagiarists need to be called out, if only to alert authors whose stories might have been stolen, and who were unaware of the theft of their intellectual property. It’s not meant to be a bullying tactic. We are one of the only fiction archives in my experience to actually take action when we are alerted to an instance of plagiarism. We have a zero tolerance policy for theft. What we do not so, however, is publicly call out the many people who troll other authors, who flame other members, or who behave in a manner generally unbecoming. Those discussions take place well behind the scenes, as is appropriate.
I’m always very happy when someone takes the time to let us know what can be made better when it comes to AFF. I’ve been moderating here for over ten years now, so I can safely say I love this site, and think of it as my virtual family. I’d love to see some of the changes you’ve outlined be implemented, in all honesty. So again, thank you for a very well written post, and for taking the time to let us know what you think about AFF.

The trick is to find the site owner on the way to market, offer ‘em a handful of magic beans. There’s not a website owner in the world wouldn’t like their own beanstalk to the kingdom of the giants. Except maybe that Gadget Hackwrench fansite.

Whore of Heaven  – part 2 reviewed!
Thank you for the second part review also! Even more appreciated. I feel like I kinda screwed up the human servants thing with Eparlegna’s bad-boss activity at the end of the third part. I now believe having him use them more would have made more sense – The Dracula/gypsy comparison is cool, how it should have gone for sure. Kinda wish I’d done more with Bernice too, hopeless last stand badassary is something I got a softsport for tho’
Those two bad cops! I started on a story with Molly’s sister one time, never did get it finished. Glad this bit was hot tho!
Haha, nah I’m pretty sure the site had that as one of the earlier codes. S’been part of wholesome fnafiction content for years. Maybe :D. I read a consensual Harry Potter/Narcissa Malfoy scene a few years back that did it phenominally well, much better than I’d managed here.
It doesn’t get answered in the story here, but I think the ultimate answer for them having the sex organs is “ Angels were supposed to fuck,” but there was a bit of a miscommunication along the way from the higher order angels who didn’t have sex organs (gonna burn yer bits off trying it with the Seraphim!) and the closer-to-mortal-sphere types who do.
Thank you again for the reviews

The trick is to find the site owner on the way to market, offer ‘em a handful of magic beans. There’s not a website owner in the world wouldn’t like their own beanstalk to the kingdom of the giants. Except maybe that Gadget Hackwrench fansite.

The trick is to find the site owner on the way to market, offer ‘em a handful of magic beans. There’s not a website owner in the world wouldn’t like their own beanstalk to the kingdom of the giants. Except maybe that Gadget Hackwrench fansite.

@Thundercloud  The sense of entitlement that person had in the subsequent posts, that’s what unnerved me.

The actual concept that anybody think they can purchase an archive hosting fanfiction is rather weird. I mean...they could begin to read the sites disclaimer about not accepting fanfics written for money before they consider to waste everyone's time by posting questions about purchasing the fanfic-archive.

In a rarity, I actually found myself offended, and it’s by the very notion this anonymous “guest” suggested and their unknown ulterior motive.  This website is a large community of authors that have entrusted their IP and stories to the archives in the hopes it’ll get read and enjoyed by others.   It’s appalling to think somebody has the nerve to think they can simply waltz in and try to buy the website out; who knows what they’d do with it?
 

Thank you, @Desiderius Price. I’ve spent over ten years as a moderator for AFF. I wrote and published here before I joined as staff. This has been my online writing family, and I for one would very much like to keep my family intact.

You can’t buy the site. You have to be given the ceremonial dildo by the Lady of the Lake. It sounds bad, but it’s better than the old method of having to pull it from the stone.
You ever hear stone moan? It’s horrific.

Whore of Heaven
Thank you for the review! Appreciated as ever.
Thanks! I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in an anime somewhere Monsters as embodiment of sins is a real old concept, but I guess most sources don’t try and smut it up. InBrightestDay did some really outstanding takes on it in The Woman in the Statue. The Sloth monster there is probably the one I’d have to face.
Seems like good sense to me! Again, I think it’s an older idea of light and dark versions fighting each other so I can’t take the credit for it, but I can for deciding to throw it in!
Not quite Chekhovian foreshadowing there! I think the bad guy probably also likes pillars because they’re vaguely phallic.
Thanks!
It gets a little sleazy! Sleazier. Thank you again for the review.

You can’t buy the site. You have to be given the ceremonial dildo by the Lady of the Lake. It sounds bad, but it’s better than the old method of having to pull it from the stone.
You ever hear stone moan? It’s horrific.

You can’t buy the site. You have to be given the ceremonial dildo by the Lady of the Lake. It sounds bad, but it’s better than the old method of having to pull it from the stone.
You ever hear stone moan? It’s horrific.

You can’t buy the site. You have to be given the ceremonial dildo by the Lady of the Lake. It sounds bad, but it’s better than the old method of having to pull it from the stone.
You ever hear stone moan? It’s horrific.

You can’t buy the site. You have to be given the ceremonial dildo by the Lady of the Lake. It sounds bad, but it’s better than the old method of having to pull it from the stone.
You ever hear stone moan? It’s horrific.

You can’t buy the site. You have to be given the ceremonial dildo by the Lady of the Lake. It sounds bad, but it’s better than the old method of having to pull it from the stone.
You ever hear stone moan? It’s horrific.

And again, we’re not for sale.