BronxWench

I think one of the most overlooked benefits of writing fan fiction is how often it leads to incredible original fiction.

I actually broke all my own personal rules and accessed AFF from my phone the other day. I wanted to see how the Review and Report links at the bottom of a chapter displayed, since I have an inordinate number of reports in Tosmail (largely from iPhones) from people who are either doing the smartphone equivalent of butt-dialing me, or who leave reviews in the staff email which authors never see. I will say, perhaps in AFF’s defense, that my phone is a less-than-cutting-edge Samsung Galaxy S5 , and the screen is not immense. However, unless I held the phone sideways, it was really obnoxious to try and read on my phone. Navigating past what felt like endless menu links to get to the actual story text was not even remotely convenient, and has convinced me never to do that again. :shudders:

It’s very true. Sometimes you need to actually prod the readers into realizing things that should be freaking obvious.

Sometimes, something about a character’s appearance is relevant, and so I mention it. Maybe his eyes are a shade not customary where he’s living, or maybe he has a unique scar. But on the whole, I describe the minimum about a character’s appearance. As a reader, I don’t want an overload of details. I might not growl about it in a review, but I do prefer being able to put my own mental spin on a character.

I totally fucking love you.

Oh, yes! This! Seriously, if I need to zoom to read what you’ve written, I’m just going to click on by.

Bear and bare. Oh, and definitely and defiantly. Really???

I just cringe when I see people editing according to their favorite blog. Honestly, the word lists are brutal, and often flat-out wrong. I’d rather rely on things like the Chicago Manual of Style, and actually read things aloud to hear how they sound.

I’m going to own up to abuse of epithets. My editors tend to want to beat me over the head, I think, and they are teaching me to stop that annoying habit. It started, quite frankly, when one person who was editing a novella of mine took the hard and fast rule that there could only be one “he” in a paragraph. Dude, I write slash, okay? It’s ALL he. If you are clear enough in the context of the sentence, a reasonably sober reader can figure out which male it is. I’m also coming out in support of the correct use of “that” because nothing grates more than seeing people go through contortions in writing to avoid a word someone put on a blog as a “bad” word. There are no bad words. Trust me on this. A good editor understands when you need “that” as opposed to “which” and certainly as opposed to the spate of verbiage required to avoid using either word. I do miss the Oxford comma, however. Apparently it’s going out of style again. ::sigh::

We’re not an e-commerce site, so honestly, I never worry about AFF as far as losing financial data. Chrome flips me hissies every time I log into the staff email server because it can’t authenticate the credentials, and I’ve been ignoring that for years with no ill effects.

I’ve no clue what the additional costs would be, but we operate on a very tight margin as a not-for-profit site. It may very well be a case of the site not having sufficient regular revenue to be able to make that change.

We are not on an https server, as far as I know. However, I’ve never had an issue with my login being compromised. Then again, I also run antivirus and malware protection at all times because I’m paranoid that way.

Do you remember the pen name of the account?

We’ve always had separate databases for each subdomain. That’s nothing new. The new levels of sub-categories and categories within those are something we have been asked to do by many members, who want to be able to navigate to a specific pairing within a subdomain. In the more general subdomains, ie, Anime, you do need to navigate to the specific anime you want to read, such as Pokemon, which has its own sub-category and levels of categories under that, or Ai no Kusabi, which is in the .+ to F sub-category and which gives you 4 pages of stories to look through. Is it slow to navigate? I expect it is, but you need to navigate within FFN in a similar manner. I f I want to read Dragon Age stories on FFN, I would need to Browse to Games, and then to D, and then find Dragon Age on the list which appears. From there, it’s all chronological based on dated published or updated, with 20.6K of stories for me to peruse. On AO3, I need to Browse, which takes me to a page of recent fics from every fandom, and then I have to click the link to take me to fandoms, and from there figure out where my fandom might live. I’m not sure what the difference is between Dragon Age – All Media Types and Dragon Age (Video Games), but I’m sure if I poked, I’d eventually figure it out, but with 46,669 works under Dragon Age (Video Games) I don’t anticipate the search being too quick. I don’t think any fiction archive has managed to find a way to streamline the search process. Certainly, since AFF was founded in 2002, the site has grown considerably, and what was a speedy process has become more time-consuming as we embraced new fandoms. It’s really only a few clicks to arrive at a fandom, and while I personally liked the left-side menus a lot better, they didn’t work for mobile users. But what can help is to navigate once to a fandom you like, and then bookmark that category. It’s faster to click that bookmark, and get to the fandom than to navigate through the menus, or Google a random story and backtrack. Using one of my examples above, you can go to Ai no Kusabi, and bookmark the category url: http://anime.adult-fanfiction.org/index.php?cat=1049 Most browsers let you edit the text for a bookmark, so you can edit it to read something like AFF-Ai no Kusabi, and then you’ll be able to rapidly find your fandom. You can also add specific stories to your Currently Reading section of your profile, which I do to be able to access a specific story with ease. Our FAQ here explains how to do that.

First of all, the staff did not delete the story in question. We do not delete stories without explanation or without having given warnings as to the problem, and ample time to correct those problems. In this case, the story was warned for an invalid disclaimer on 4/13/18. We would not even hide the story until 4/20/18, and if it was hidden, we give at least 30 more days for the author to correct the issue before we would delete it for noncompliance. We state that clearly in our review board warnings and in our emails. Second, I have been in receipt of far too many emails regarding this account. I have at least two people claiming to be the account owner, and offering the most nebulous proof of ownership. Furthermore, if we do have to assume ownership of an account, we do not leave profile modifications such as what appears on your profile. Were I the site administrator, yes, I would delete the account because it is in clear violation of our Terms of Service as has been pointed out by Pittwitch. Account deletion is sadly not my purview, however, although I am recommending it in this case. I have no idea who modified your profile, or what the issue is between you and whoever is making the profile changes, but I strongly suggest you either invest in better security for your computer, or find better friends, because this is not the place to work out your personal issues regarding either of those goals.

Most of the recent changes to the archive code have been to improve site functionality for mobile users, since we were getting a great deal of input from them about difficulties with the archive code as it was and the smaller screen format of mobile devices. To be quite frank, none of our archive updates are driven in any way by FFN, or any perceived issues with that site. We are not, and never have been affiliated with FFN. They are a for-profit site, with a user base from age 13 and up, while we have always been an adult-oriented site with an age-limited membership. We did run into problems with old injections of code when we did an update, which caused one subdomain to experience issues displaying stories. None were lost, and our tech admin and coder worked tirelessly for several days to repair the issue. Certainly, with 22 other databases experiencing no issues, it’s not really accurate to say we lost 80% of the site. Is the site harder to navigate now? We certainly are working to avoid that, although I would say it is somewhat easier for mobile users than for those of us who prefer PCs and laptops. The new menus are less intuitive in some ways, and display awkwardly, in my opinion. It is unfortunate, but we are working with a fairly limited budget since we are not-for-profit. We do not require support from users, although we always appreciate help in the form of donations, or by volunteering as a staff member. We are all, top to bottom, unpaid volunteers who do this because we believe in what AFF stands for—censorship-free fiction. I don’t think you have been weird or rude, but if you can be more specific about the areas which have been less than satisfactory, that is helpful for us as we continue to work to improve AFF for all users. We do listen to our members, and we do pay attention to member comments and suggestions. After all, a fiction archive without authors and readers isn’t much of a fiction archive. If something isn’t possible, we’ll do our best to explain why, or to explain what we’ve done in lieu of a feature. So, let us know, and we’ll be happy to do our best to help.

You’re very welcome!

We don’t have a save feature as a single button click, but you can add stories to your Currently Reading list on your archive profile, which will let you access the link quickly. The FAQ for that is here: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/63427-how-to-manage-your-current-reading-list/

And still a favorite of mine

We do have a FAQ on this topic: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/63121-how-to-use-search/ Basically, you enter the search word or phrase into the appropriate field or fields, and search. It isn’t all that different from before, other than allowing users to search for words or phrases which might be in the story summary.

Involuntary Indebtedness by The_CL

@Desiderius Price I know you tag as conservatively as I do. I figured it never hurts to point out the logical fallacy in the “But I’ll scare off readers!” argument for not using the Rape tag.