the unbearable agony of fanfiction.net

[amhran_comhrac]

Did you know fanfiction.net is broken?
No, really!
FFnet seems to be working again.  It let me go in and edit the flagged characters on a story I uploaded using the workaround.
However, I'm still waiting on notifications for the new story, and about a dozen review notices (as well as notices for new chapters of fics I follow), so YMMV.  I don't know if the errors and issues are unrelated.

To update your existing story:
Proceed as normal, go to “my stories” in the publish section, and click edit next to the fic in question. 
You get a horrid error message, yes?
Change “property” to “content” in the URL and you’ll see the familiar update screen.  From there you’re all set.

 

If you want to post a new story things get more complex. 
Pick a random category, most have been using “dragon rage” under games since, well, close enough.  Get your description exactly how you want it, and try to include any info about the characters involved.  You can’t tag them, since you’re in the wrong category.

Upload as normal.  Click on edit in the my stories section, and change the category.  You’ll see that same ugly error, but within half an hour or so it should be in the Dragon Age section.  Once it’s there you can’t edit the description or tag characters since, hey, lookie, another fucking error.  (which is why you want to get your description right and name your characters the first go-round).

But it’ll be posted. 

 There are also alternatives if you want to wash your hands of the mess completely.

Livejournal/Dreamwidth...

pros: easy to update thanks to the rich text editor (you can just paste from your word processor), you're already here, communities for fandoms *yo*
cons: smaller reader base, isn't really set up for a fiction archive

DeviantArt
pros: wickedly easy to update if you've already posted the chapter to your documents section in ffnet.  (open it, click the HTML button, copy, and paste into the text section of DeviantArt's update.  Boom.).  Also, decent sized DA community.
cons: not as big a com as ffnet, more geared towards visual arts, no way to give a written summary/description for the search feature.  Wheat to chaff? horrifying.

Archive of Our Own
Pros: you can import from ffnet by pasting your url, additional servers have clearly solved their slow-as-molasses problems, posting new chapters is as easy as ffnet, or easier.  Also supports co-authors, tagging stories as part of a series, and a few other nice features
cons: small community, lack of feedback, importing will require you tweak each chapter since notes invariably come out a hot mess, in beta so you need to sign up and wait to get an invite (didn't take long for me, but with ffnet's issues it may be longer now)

note: anyone want an invite?  Users can apparently request extra invite codes so I'd be happy to give it a shot. 
(FYI, I'm LupusYondergirl over there)


Lunaescence
I admit, I know next to nothing about this, beyond it being 'moderated' for quality.  There's only about 50 DA stories on there now.  Anyone have an opinion?

Anyone have any opinions on these, or know of any I missed?
I know I left BSN off.  There's a reason for that... the DA2 community creation forum allows LINKING to your fan works, as opposed to the posting that was allowed in the DAO forums.  

I'm kind of falling in love with AO3 again, now that it's so much faster.  I've uploaded EVERYTHING there... and it took me maybe two hours.

Comments

[bellaknoti]

i abandoned lj for drama reasons, and currently post here, at ao3, and ff.net. one thing i like about posting at ao3 is that i can just lift the html straight out of my dw post here, and paste it in. boom, done. all the notes and everything, all the page jumps, it all just transfers neatly. the only thing i have to type over again is the chapter title.

i haven't bothered to post anything at deviant art that wasn't actually visual art. i see a lot of people doing that, but like you said, there's no way to put a summary, so i've been leery of it. i certainly haven't read anything that people have posted there.

i'm very wary of ff.net, and only post there to catch readers who don't go other places, and to have a better idea of how many people are actually reading my stuff. for instance, my last chapter of 'wings' got one - count it, one - review here, however it's had 130 hits on ff.net. if it weren't for that, i'd think jannifer was the last person left reading, and just start emailing her the stories, honestly. it's the ff.net traffic stats that are all that keeps me going sometimes. as long as i know people are interested, i'll keep writing, but the dearth of commentary is sad. i wish there were hit counters here, too. or, ideally, more people who just said 'hey, read this, thumbs up' or 'hey, read this, whatevs' or anything else they might want to chime in with. the silence is heavy.

*ahem*

anyway, i worry about posting at ff.net, because they say that they only go up to 'm' and a lot of my stuff is 'ao'. they say that you can't post sex. >.> uh. and there are these people who like to go around being nazi's about it, and have this program to 'clean' fandoms of the smut, of things written like a script, and of things that are grammatically unfortunate. i've been worried they'll get a wild hair up their asses and purge the da fandom the same way, which would effectively gut us. so i don't treat them as my primary posting arena, i just use them as a ruler for how well my fic is actually going over in the community.

so, to sum up, i post here to be amongst my friends and peers, at ff.net to keep track of my traffic, and at ao3 because i can. i didn't know about that last place... wtf is it? i'll have to check it out. maybe we should all storm it and flood the place with awesomeness.

[elysium_fic]

I worried about the rating restriction on ff.net as well, but so far, both Elysium (which, while toned down from RCD still contains a good deal of sex) and my Alistair/Duncan smut-epic, Sixty Days in Jader have not gotten yanked. Yet.

But yeah, it's always a worry there in the back of my mind.

[scarylady]

At least all the stories you have up on FF are smut (as far as I know) so if you get the plug pulled it'll be for the lot.

I'd love to put SS up there, but I won't risk endangering my outlet for T&S - not when I have approaching 400 dedicated readers over there and more ploughing through the chapters every month.

If anywhere else could compete with FF on sheer numbers I'd bail in an instant.

[elysium_fic]

Very true. The only days this month I got less than 200 hits were March 8 and 9 (hmm, wonder why.) Non-posting days days I'm getting between 300-400 hits, and on posting days it's 500-600.

The numbers at ff.net are impossible to beat, even if the feedback doesn't do justice to the hits.

[scarylady]

I ignore my numbers of hits, on chaptered stories. Hits are skewed by the same person reading multiple chapters, and viewers are skewed by people who go and take a quick look at Chapter 1 and then leave.

1.6k unique viewers on T&S for March and 7.3k hits, but the important number is how many people have read a recent chapter. I look at the highest figure for the month amongst the last 3 chapters and take that as my regular readership (as the most recent chapter will only be partially read at this stage). It feels like a more sane way to interpret a rather murky set of stats.

[elysium_fic]

I hadn't dug that far into the figures. Mainly I just glance at the stats now and then to see if anyone is paying attention. I thought I read somewhere that the unique visitors figure is per person, per day, in which case it could be skewed by a single person coming back and rereading a chapter, or stopping and picking up again the next day, so I'm not certain any of the stats numbers are all that meaningful. But they are pretty.

By that method I'm getting a hair over 200 readers per chapter, which seems to be a fairly consistent figure for each of the last six chapters or so.

[scarylady]

And therein lies the problem. FF is a pain in the arse, but who wants to lose 200 readers? Not me, that's for sure.

[amhran_comhrac]

Same... I suspect I may be all right since someone would have to really dig into my stuff to find the smut, it's not in every chapter, or even ever other chapter. But it's definitely there, and definitely beyond the bounds of the M rating.

[zute]

I always download a copy so if anything should happen I'd probably go to AO3. I wished AO3 had the story traffic monitor or even a dedicated audience like FF does, I'd be there in a heartbeat if they did.

[elysium_fic]

AO3 is improving. I'm noticing a lot more feedback in the last month or so, and an inquiry I made recently received a response saying that subscriptions should be available soon.

Looks like they're also getting ready to roll out their multi-media hosting, which means they'll be a good forum for fanart as well.

I'm nervous about posting my stories to DeviantArt, because their rules prohibit stories with descriptive sex.

[aithne]

And at least when I was posting a thing or to on DA, they really did yank things down they thought were too "adult".

I'm noticing the same thing on AO3--I'm starting to get more comments and kudos over there. Once subscriptions come out, I may concentrate on it more instead of just crossposting.

(I also really like the series organization abilities on AO3. I just wish their text editor was a little less quirky.)

[solitae]

Thanks for pointing out AO3!

I requested an invitation after you posted this, and I already got one. That was really quick, and it looks substantially less painful to use than ff.net.

[amhran_comhrac]

Oh good! I was worried it might take a long time now since ffnet was driving people away.

[polytene]

I <3 AO3. It's just easier - I can add whatever tags I like and it doesn't take 4 days to process a change of email request (thanks, ff.net), and you can put in as much sex as you like, and I don't have to go through the make document->upload document->add to story rigamarole. I wish it had subscriptions, but they're in the works.

I have one AO3 invite if anyone is in need.

[scarylady]

Yes please.

I won't post Secret Service on FF, as I don't want my entire account yanked for the sake of one story, so I guess I should shove it up on AO3 rather than relying purely on people coming here and hitting the series tag.

[polytene]

Cool, PM me an email address and I'll send it over.

[scarylady]

Received, and after much agony (importing from FF may be easy, but importing from PoT causes buckets of import errors) my SS series is now up.

Thanks very much for the invite!

[elysium_fic]

I'm not seeing it listed. :( I am planning to bookmark and rec the hell outta that.

[scarylady]

The set of kudos emails I just received suggest that you found it :)

[elysium_fic]

LOL yeah. You dated it so that it didn't appear with the current postings. It's buried back in the archives. I had to go digging.

[scarylady]

I tried over and over to untick 'use original date' and the damn thing insisted on using my PoT posting date.

[amhran_comhrac]

manually change it to something else, that worked for me

[elysium_fic]

Ah.

I've never used the import feature, so I'm not familiar with it's limitations. For me, it's just as easy to c/p the same HTML-formatted text I post to DW into the AO3 editor as it would be to import.

[scarylady]

Yeah, I don't use HTML, I use Rich Text and when I tried to copy from Word, it artrived unformatted.

I suspect all the people who are saying A03 is easy are all importing from FF. Import from here caused a LOT of problems.

[elysium_fic]

Probably. I think I recall seeing something on their "known issues" list about importing from LJ/DW having problems. I think they might have said it was due to a change in the LJ code.

[inquartata]

And now, apparently, FFn is fixed. o_O

Like, right after you posted this. Just saying.

Huzzah!

[amhran_comhrac]

Hells yeah. Characters tagged. Woo!

Still not getting notifications for my new story, though. Never got the new chapter email, and I've gotten reviews so far with no emails.

It kinda gave me a sad since the review count is low for me... and then I realized there was a good chance people who have me on author alert didn't get a notification, either. I hope that sorts itself out since I don't want to delete and repost.

[scarylady]

Pff, it may be fixed, but they still don't have Fenris listed amongst the chars >:

Boo.

[amhran_comhrac]

Did you request it? I had to ask them for Anders back when Awakening came out.
(although they may be behind in things like that since, hopefully, they've been working on getting the site fixed and making sure this shit doesn't happen again.)

[kelcat]

I emailed them a list of all the new DA2 chars that need to be added a couple of weeks ago but none of them are on there yet :(

[scarylady]

Yay for you, and boooo for them.

[inquartata]

Do you use gmail? I was having the same problem with alerts for reviews/new stories/chapters/etc. Then I changed the email that I had FFn sending alerts to from my gmail to another address that I actually have forwarding to gmail. Strangely, that worked and I haven't had a problem with alerts since.

...of course, this now means that I'll never get another alert again, ever, just because I said that. *sigh*

[amhran_comhrac]

I am... but the thing is, I'm still getting them for my old stories. (there's a big rush on any Anders fic at the moment, apparently, since I'm getting a lot of people faving and alerting lately.)
The only one I'm not getting them for is the new fic.

[inquartata]

Then I've... totally got nothing. Damn.

[nithu]

I have gmail and alerts are taking over 24 hours to appear.

[inquartata]

If you have the ability to have FFn send them to another email address (and then have that email address forward them to gmail so you can keep your email still at one place), that might work.

Might. Meaning, it did for me, but who knows why. (Sometimes, it's better not to question it. Sorta like a magic show.)

[sleepyowlet]

I use ff.net primarily, since I get one or two reviews and then deafening silence everywhere else. I seem to suffer from romance-option-disorder, and my favourite couples are always on the very fringe of the various fandoms I'm active in (my most popular story on ff.net is Meg/Hades. Go figure.).

So I don't really think that my stuff would be read much anywhere else. At ff.net I have my six reviews per chapter at least.

There is, of course, adultfanfiction.net, but they were such absolute rude, condescending dicks about a forgotten disclaimer that I yanked all my stuff - only to discover that there was no way I could delete my account. I never went back, not even to read.