Story deletions without explanation

[jackrabbit]

I am sorry if this is the wrong forum, but I don't see anyplace else that even remotely fits. This is about violations, and apparently I did one without realizing it.

I joined yesterday and all seven or so stories I put up were deleted. I have no idea why. AFAIK, I did not violate any rules. I looked through them and I don't think I did anything that matches any of them. Could an administrator tell me what I did wrong?

BTW, there appear to be two jackrabbits. I am the one with a displayed name of Faster Jackrabbit

[jackrabbit]

Also, the stories appear to have been completely deleted, rather than just hidden. They do not show up on the Author Panel either. So there is nothing for me to correct.

[DemonGoddess]

Your stories weren't proper stories, but links to another site where the stories are. We do this routinely.

[Guest Jaxxy]

Hello,

Jackrabbit

, Be You Quicker or Cuddly --

If you've got a website to which you would like us to link your readers, we will gladly host an advertising campaign for you. Because most of our community members' websites are simple "Mom and Pop" operations, like ours -- often of few material resources -- we ask but the teeniest contribution in return for our contribution to you (to wit, promoting your projects atop this website). For guys like us, etc., etc., it's still only $20.00 US per slot, per month.

If you dig, please write to my

personal email addy

, and we shall discuss what sort of campaign will most effectively rock your readers. I'll set you up pretty quickly; after a day or two, presto-chage-o and voila!: you should be swathed in veritable scads of new visitors.

So, dude, sweet, bonus and yeah, all is not lost. Either way, best of luck with promotions.

[jackrabbit]

Your stories weren't proper stories, but links to another site where the stories are.

From the viewpoint of the reader, how is this different? Is a single click that costly? The links pointed directly to the story, not to the main page of the site.

I currently have my stories available on five different sites. This would have been the sixth. Whenever I make updates or changes, I have to change only one copy of the particular story, as opposed to going to all five sites and hoping that I make the changes consistently. Then all I have to do is add another link directly to the new chapter on all the sites, so that everyone knows that there is an update. Yet it is still just a single click to get directly to the new chapter.

I have the stories both in html and pdf form already and would have been happy to upload them directly, even though it is unnecessary work. I thought that I would be able to do that when I saw a html upload option. But it turned out to not really be html, but a barebones version with virtually no tags. The stories make heavy use of tags, having navigation and a table of contents. Since most of the stories are long, it would take a tremendous amount of work to reformat all that.

On the other hand, PDF is self-contained. How difficult would it be to allow pdf uploads so that people could download and read on their own computer?

[jackrabbit]

Hello,

Jackrabbit

, Be You Quicker or Cuddly --

If you've got a website to which you would like us to link your readers, we will gladly host an advertising campaign for you. Because most of our community members' websites are simple "Mom and Pop" operations, like ours -- often of few material resources -- we ask but the teeniest contribution in return for our contribution to you (to wit, promoting your projects atop this website). For guys like us, etc., etc., it's still only $20.00 US per slot, per month.

If you dig, please write to my

personal email addy

, and we shall discuss what sort of campaign will most effectively rock your readers. I'll set you up pretty quickly; after a day or two, presto-chage-o and voila!: you should be swathed in veritable scads of new visitors.

So, dude, sweet, bonus and yeah, all is not lost. Either way, best of luck with promotions.

This would do me no good. The actual web page where the stories reside has neither hit counts nor comments, so even if more people did show up, I would never know. I post the links to the story on the other sites for the comments and hit counts. So that I know people are reading the story and what they think of it. Otherwise, why bother posting it on the internet at all?

[JayDee]

From the viewpoint of the reader, how is this different?

Speaking as a reader, reading stories directly from AFF greatly reduces the possibility of encountering malware/trojans and whatnot while hoping to masturbate. The odds of someone saying "Click here for my story! It's fucking hot!" and putting lots of scriptkiddie junk on the linked page are fairly high, based on previous internet experience.

I'm not suggesting this is your aim, of course, just providing a reader's viewpoint for why I - and I suspect other readers - would be unkeen on clicking through to other domains to read stories. Other issues such as authors leaving links to awesome sounding stories, then losing interest so the links are broken by change at linked site or authors linking stories just to try and make their own advertising revenue and whatnot don't really come into it for me as a reader.

[jackrabbit]

Well, that makes sense I suppose, but surely at least some people here have heard of WWOEC. That is where the web pages reside.

As I said, I have no objection to actually uploading the stories, but the huge effort of reformatting an existing large story without introducing errors is daunting, especially for just one site out of many.

At the very least, the rules ought to say that you cannot link to stories elsewhere. I spent quite some time adding those stories yesterday. I entered the first one, then waited a while before the next, just in case something like this would happen. Since it seemed to be allowed, I continued with the others.

Edited May 23, 2009 by jackrabbit

[JayDee]

Hey, I'm with ya there. Clarifying rules is always good if people have confusion. I wasn't having a dig at you personally, as I say, just offering a reader viewpoint on the click through issue. I'm sure the site mods/owner have other reasons.

WWOEC is reasonably well known of course*, I'd probably trust a wwoec link if I knew for sure it wouldn't re-direct elsewhere, but I guess all site users have to be treated equally, and if you were allowed to direct link there, others might start complaining about not getting to link to their sites (...speaking of rules, the wwoec front page states in bold text that "You may NOT link to the URL of any related pages" and that users should link "to http://www.wwoec.com ONLY!!" probably to ensure they are covered legally by making all users read the TOS.)

*I for one am looking forward to spending time back at the wwoec forum once I'm on a connection better able to handle image heavy sites.

[jackrabbit]

I'm not sure how protected they are. The Internet Privacy Act referenced by most such pages doesn't actually exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Privacy_Act

[JayDee]

Yep, most fan works rely more on people not complaining I guess, else dicily arguing protection through parody/freedom of expression and so on, depending on one's jurisdiction.

Still, if you're willing to stick to the TOS rules on wwoec (as you've implied you'd stick by the rules here if it had been clear) it rather renders the question of linking to direct pages from here academic, as the wwoec text suggests wwoec doesn't want people to do so.

[DemonGoddess]

First and most importantly, the archive itself (being very old software) doesn't even have the CAPABILITY of having true links, simply copy/paste links.

Secondly, the primary reason for disallowing outside links isn't because of people like you, where you have something stored elsewhere in a format that is different, but for where people are wanting to redirect to where one has to purchase the rest of the story, for example. THAT is what the banners are for.

Aside from that, there are also (and yes I've run across these too) instances where one will see a user make an outside link to something which is a fanwork, where they make money off the fanwork, generally speaking WITHOUT the original creator's permission; which is something we cannot support here. Things like THAT get fansites and archives like this downed in a hurry.

[jackrabbit]

Okay. I wrote a script that scans my html files and strips out the stuff that won't work here, creating alternate files than I can then upload. I'm testing it now. The html and pdf files are machine generated anyway, from a common source. This would just be an additional step.