BelleLaVictorie

Have you considered the possibility of starting a new website from the ground up and "freezing" the old website? That way you can keep all of the old stories nice and safe while taking in new stories through the new website in a new, singular shared archive/table/whatever. This way you won't have to worry about manually porting anything until much, much later. I understand money is tight, but you have a dedicated community. I'm sure with some thought you can find SOME solution that won't require you to "live with what you got." I keep reading announcments from as recently as this month on the front page about how the community is growing. Here in the forums I keep reading that you're struggling to keep this thing afloat. This is sending mixed messages. It sounds a lot like you are working with an outsourced server with all the talk of data limits and hosting costs. Have you considered the possibility of hosting your own server? Terabyte hard drives are not that expensive anymore, and since fanfiction.org is a text-based site, bandwidth is a lot cheaper. I've seen simple servers that go for as little as 400USD (software not included, but linux can get you stuff for free). As a server owner, you would have more control over what you CAN do as opposed to what you are forced to do. Again, you have a dedicated community and you would have to crunch the numbers yourself because I have no idea what things would cost where you live. You know your local companies better than I do. With websites like kickstarter, you could potentially fund a professional upgrade of everything including software. By professional, I mean hire a contractor to do the heavy lifting. 1000 people donating 10 dollars each will get you $10,000. If those numbers on your front page are not just for show, that is. I'm trying to help, here. Running a website isn't easy, I know. However, the problems you are running into right now sounds like a chronic problem that won't go away without a major change in something fundamental. ______________________________________________________________________ As for Bronx, I'm one of those users that actually read all of the FAQs before posting as well as all the TOS and User Guidelines. The fact that I know as much as I do about this website comes from what YOU guys have posted and what I have seen. Your hostility is unhelpful. I reccomend YOU read the stuff YOU write before accusing others of not doing their homework. The one thing I hate more than a broken website is when the staff get hostile when someone points out a problem. It is unprofessional and most of all wrong. The only reason why I KNOW how to submit stories is because I spent an hour SEARCHING for the FAQ. The user interface is a mess, and new users struggle to figure it out. That much is obvious. A broken user interface is the number 1 reason why websites fail. "I know where everything is because I've been here since forever" is NOT a legitimate excuse. If anything, its a sign that the website is in decline when the community and staff say that. Turning away new users because you don't want them in your 'sekrit klub' never works. If anything, it HURTS ad income. You want more hits and clicks, and the only way to do that is new users. Accesibility should always be your number 1 priority.

The whole process seems counter-intuitive for me, personally. I can see how the interface is organized to try and make it easy for people to put a story where it belongs, but I find that it is unusually difficult to actually make the story they want to. I have used other sites to post original content, but have been looking for other places to submit fanfiction. I would personally love to have an editor section and the ability to go back after a story is submitted to make changes and edits to the original submission. It might just my sleepy-brain talking, but I joined this website thinking that it was a bit more... Refined. The category widget thingys on the left side of the screen seems like the second or third step you should take when submitting a story. I was expecting a button chain like as follows: Upload a Story(button) > Name Your Story & Add Summary > Submit Your File/Paste Into Editor > Preview Submission > Assign category and tags > Final Submit > View/Edit/Delete Submission Or something like that. For that particular chain, assigning a category would come as the 5th step. I like submitting stories 80% finished and getting user-feedback on my work before making the final 20% in changes and fixes. That is my personal style as of late and the whole "finalized draft with needing to submit a new file with administrator review for any changes" really intimidates me. I don't mind admin oversight, but I do mind administration bottlenecks. Sometimes I don't notice a simple misspell until after I submit. For minor edits to the submission like that, I want to go in, change a letter or two, and no one notices except for me. I don't want an admin to go and tell me: "It's only one letter. Merging your submission takes too much effort, so I'll just delete your second copy." I'm sure this whole administration method is an artifact from a previous era of the internet when administrator permissions were required to do simple tasks. With modern website programming, this should no longer be the case. Having to rely on administrator intervention every time something little goes wrong should not happen. Right now I'm second-guessing my choice of using this website. It feels like the only reason this place succeeds as much as it does today is because there is literally nowhere else to go. I would reccomend a review of the archive system and a full website rework and modernization from scratch. Clone the archives, user accounts, and all the relevant and salvagable info and port them over. I've seen it done before and all I can say is that it was a hell of a mess. However, the end result was well worth it. Old accounts had missing information, but that was more due to archive incompatibility with the new system. I hope this is partially helpful. I've been meaning to find a place to submit my adult fanfictions for quite some time, but the websites all have debillitating issues. This website has user interface problems with lack of features such as editing existing submissions and retrograde editing/tagging/reclassing. I'm sure there are other things, but this is the deal-breaker for me.