A suggestion for "hidden" stories.

[Sage of Discord]

Over the last few days, I've run into several stories that carry the "this story is hidden until it has been confirmed to meet the conditions of the site" header. According to the header, this is usually because the author forgot to add the required disclaimer.

However, since many of these stories have been orphaned, abandoned, etc., is there some reason why the disclaimer cannot be added in by the admins? It would seem to me that if they have the ability to hide/delete/ban stories, then certainly they should be able to cut-and-paste a simple line of text into the story file itself.

[Danyealle]

Now this would work if all we had to do was worry about disclaimers. We don't. We have to worry about flamers, trolls, minors, plagiarists, people trying to pick fights with everyone else, cleaning up the archive, authors notes as chapters, review whoring... you get the picture. All of this takes time and we have a very limited number of staff to do it with. Not to mention the sweep to check for these disclaimers takes HOURS each week to just do. Some archives alone, the bigger ones, takes hours until themselves (Harry Potter alone took me 4 hours last sweep and that is just ONE archive). We aren't even talking about the time it takes to check those stories we left notices on, check ones that have been hidden and merge the sheets. At any given time we have MAYBE 4 of us doing this for the WHOLE ARCHIVE.

Add to that there is nothing hard about doing disclaimers. The formula to do them is simple and spelled out clearly in the FAQ. I don't think that it is too much for us to ask that people follow that. The majority of those on the site get them right each time they post. it's a small minority that doesn't. We also leave notices every week for people to take care of problems with their disclaimers. Again, the majority get them right and fix the problem. Only a very few don't.

Quite frankly, we don't have the time or people to do this so asking the authors to do it isn't too much to ask. If we started doing that, where does it stop? Fix other problem? Honestly, we don't have the time or people to do this.

[DemonGoddess]

The stories that are hidden for bad disclaimers and the like are CURRENT adds/edits. These are not abandoned stories.

As to fixing a disclaimer in a story, only I have the ability to do that. That has to be done directly IN the database itself. As I have many, many things I do on any given day, there is no way it would be possible for me to go behind these people who don't fix their stuff, and do it for them. I tried it for awhile, and spent HOURS every day fixing disclaimers for people, where they'd been given a warn to do it, had been hidden, and the story was going to be deleted. Turns out doing this task is something that left me NO time whatsoever to do anything else. Which in turn put me very much behind on other things that I need to do here, daily. Needless to say, I will not be doing that again.

As I also have a full time job, house and family; I'll be damned if I'm going to be spending any free time that I have doing that kind of clean up for people who don't feel it necessary to follow rules here. When you have the majority of the users doing exactly that, fixing what needs fixing when it's brought to their attention.

[Sage of Discord]

Oi, what have I done?

Calm down, plsthnx.

Okay, these are all valid points and ones that I must admit I totally failed to consider before posting. But now I have another question.

As a test, I tried to add a new story, giving it a title, summary and category, but leaving the Disclaimer window blank. What this resulted in was that I could not create the story. Is this just a recent development to prevent people from not having disclaimers? Because if it's been there for a while, I'm not understanding how people can even creat a story if it prevents them from doing so while disclaimerless.

[DemonGoddess]

As memory serves, when adding a story, that field is a required field. Of course, the user often puts whatever in there, and then erases it entirely to leave it blank. Or, they put whatever they like without following the requirements that are stated for it.