BronxWench

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.

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.

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.

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.

And again, we’re not for sale.

Let me start by saying that AFF is NOT for sale. I am, however, extravagantly interested in what gave you the notion that we were open to such a thing. I don’t recall any mention anywhere of the site being offered for sale, and I’m fairly sure I would have noticed any signs on the virtual front lawn. If you are serious about starting a fiction archive, however, that’s a separate discussion.

Or you could read it here, on AFF: Harry Potter and the Real Men of Gryffindor Tower by AryaStarkNaked

10

7

4

Staff handles account deletions. You can email us at tos_team@adult-fanfiction.org with your pen name and/or the email address associated with the account, and we’ll take care of the deletion for you. You can also post a pen name here, but I don’t recommend posting your email address on a public forum.

It’s all taken care of, and you stay safe!

Deletions need to be done by staff. I’d be happy to take care of that for you, though.

I’d need to know your pen name and email address you’re using so I can check. I’d recommend emailing that to me at tos_team@adult-fanfiction.org so the spambots don’t get your email address.

It would be the field labeled “Content Tags” which is directly below the field for “Category.”

When you initially post a story, tags are available from a dropdown menu. You hold the CTRL key and highlight whatever tags you think will be applicable to the story. You can also add tags later on, but you will need to enter them manually, by typing them into the appropriate field. We have a great FAQ on how to do that, right here: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/63419-how-to-edit-the-story-info-including-disclaimers-and-content-tags/

Hm. I can’t reset mine, either. Let’s hope either @DemonGoddess or @manta2g have a solution for that, since they have the level of database access required to see why that function isn’t working as intended. (I’m not a coder, so I can’t poke at it myself.)

The account and story have been deleted. Take care, and all the best!

Just to confirm, is this the account? http://members.adult-fanfiction.org/profile.php?no=11549 You have one story posted under the account. Once the account is deleted, that story will be gone for good, so please let me know if you need to copy that story first.

Only original work can be copyrighted, of course. Fan fiction, due to the very nature of the beast, is not something you can copyright since the copyright belongs to the actual owner of the fandom for which you’ve written. I recall reading somewhere (and buggered if I can remember where) that the copyright on an original work is not necessarily preserved simply by mailing yourself a copy of the work in question, even if you never open the postmarked envelope. As @Desiderius Price points out, filing for copyright registration for an original work is actually quite inexpensive.

The review button isn’t broken, but for some reason, most readers seem reluctant to review. We’ve never had anything comparable to the kudos you find on other archives, although we do have the dragon prints, which is the hit counter, showing how many times your story was accessed. We did away with the old ratings of 1-5 +’s because we found it was being abused. Readers were targeting stories that didn’t have their OTP, or because the story was getting more hits than a friend’s story, or because the author’s posting of a story or update bumped them off the “front” page. We’re all still pretty wary after that, and I doubt we’ll have anything like kudos or likes or thumbs-up anytime soon in the archive. As far as whether or not to keep posting, I have some stories with no reviews. I have others that garner reviews. After an unfortunate incident which resulted in all my stories being deleted, I’m slowly editing and reposting, but all the previous reviews are gone. So… I post anyway because I’m not writing just to squirrel it away on my hard drive. Maybe people are reading, and not reviewing. That’s fine. When I read for pleasure (and not as part of my moderator duties), I try to review because I know I like getting a comment, or even some good constructive criticism. (The key word is constructive here… just saying.) But that’s my choice, to post anyway, even if no one drops a line to comment.

I’m shaking my fist at George R R Martin.

@Desiderius Price was actually correct. It’s the tag for Work In Progress, i.e, a story which is not yet complete. We do have readers who won’t read an unfinished story, and they do appreciate the tag, although it’s not one the moderation staff will insist appear in the story tags. Like the “COMPLETE” tag, we view it as a discretionary tag.