fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3048 ]

[ SECRET POST #3048 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3048 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 057 secrets from Secret Submission Post #436.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Feel free to talk about your experience with this site, good and bad, and ask questions.

For me, I am about to publish a fic with a lot of words with accents and umlauts and I was wondering if you can just put these in or if you have to use html coding to make sure they look nice. (I had the issue with geocities back in the day where it would look nice initially but then turn to boxes a few months later unless I used html codes.)

Does anyone know?

I never quite got used to the format of AO3, and the tags annoy me. (the stupid ones that aren't related to actually identifying the story)

But then again FF.N wasn't the best format either, and even before it banned adult stuff..

It is a mess of a site. It is nigh on impossible to find specific types of fic due to all the tag spam and the inability to exclude crossovers and shipping. Say what you like about the old pit, but at least it has sufficient filters that I have a fighting chance of whittling the results down to what I'm interested in.

I manage to exclude crossovers and ships I dislike with no problem. (Crossovers are a bit trickier, but I at least exclude the huge fandoms that are everpresent.)

I don't use accents extensively, but AO3 has never stripped out the ones that I do use. I just paste my whole fic in from my word processor and everything is good to go.

I enjoy AO3. The tagging system can be a bit annoying but I find things easier on it than on FF. It is also easier to navigate and read.

As far as I know, you don't have to do any fancy html on AO3. You can also add pictures to your story, which is always nice.

As for tags, I'm gonna agree with the anons. They tags are a fucking mess. It's like tumblr where you talk in the tags instead of the author notes, which makes it a bit difficult to browse. My other complain is that when you click on a tag (lets say "bondage"), the site will show every single story within the site with that tag. It's a bit annoying. Still infinite times better than FFNet.

I wrote an LOTR fic and I'm not sure how to tag it. It's based on the extended material where Tolkien fleshed out more of his worldview, specifically the piece he wrote that you can see his Catholic influence. I only followed what he was writing but it does make a character very "religious" and faithful, and I know that can turn some people off. I think some people might not see this character as being very spiritual/religious. The character is only saying what Tolkien says about elves and Eru (the One God). But the text I'm basing this off isn't well known so I could see a lot of casual and/or movie fans feeling like I'm adding unnecessary religion.

What kind of tags are appropriate here? I feel like if I tag it as religious or religion, it would seem the fic would be about elf religion. But the fic isn't about that. It's more about how this character's faith applies to the romance in the fic. I'm just incorporating into the character what I read in Tolkien's story. I will quote some of the passages from his story in the notes but you really have to read the whole thing to understand the philosophical debate in my fic. Also, there is a philosophical debate in my fic and I'm not sure how to tag that either.

What do you guys think?

Don't worry about tagging, just explain in the author's note.

But what if someone wanted to find a fic exploring these issues? If I put "religious" in the tags and explain in the summary, is that sufficient? Or should it be "faith" or something like that?

I guess you have to just describe it, and hope anyone who cares can find it. Some of these might be what you mean?

"Character religion," "fantasy theology," "setting-specific religion," "setting-specific philosophy," "setting-specific theology," something like that?

"Religion" isn't necessarily "theology," it's more about how you live your life.

I love Ao3's set-up. Not their fault that within the past couple years, the tags have become tumblrized and a massive pain in the ass. Can't vouch for accents or anything, though; I already had to HTMLize everything, including apostrophes and quotation marks, due to using Word 97.

--Rogan

If your word processor can save as HTML or RTF, you can upload the actual file (the way you can on FFnet), or just copy and paste in .

Ao3 suffers from "too many tags" but that's due to the influx of tumblrites.

I believe I've seen some site skins that will hide the non-canonical custom tags, which I would think should filter out a lot of that nonsense.

I love AO3. It has its limitations but its the best damn archive we've got these days It could definitely improve, but over all I'm pretty impressed with it.

I prefer AO3. I find it a more pleasant and attractive reading experience and I like the search functions. Granted, I haven't been to ff.net in a long time, so I don't know what their search functions are like now. I've been reading fic since the days of fandom- or pairing-specific archives where there were no filters or ability to search (I think Gossamer was organized alphabetically by author or something) so the idea of having to wade through some fic you don't want to find the ones you do does not phase me. Also, my tastes run towards either small fandoms where I'll read *anything* or really popular pairings where there is always fic of some kind to interest me, even if I have to pick through and reject a lot of stories along the way.

When people claim they can't find fic on either site, I figure

1) the fic you want does not exist or there is precious litle of it,

2) any indexing system is only as good as the people using it - there will always be people not indexing their fic properly

2a) what counts as "proper" for fic tags and warnings is often a matter if opinion,

2b) proper tagging does not guarantee the story will be any good or even present the tagged subject matter the way you would have liked, and

3) some people act like having to scroll past things or back-button out and try again is the worst thing ever.

I pretty much agree with all of this. AO3 is fantastic and its search is really good.

I'd still love to see more powerful search techniques, but realistically, that's mostly because I'm a weirdo who just wants to fuck around with the catalog. In terms of actually finding fics, I think any improvement would really be marginal. It's absolutely fantastic.

Yeah, I haven't had any real problems with it.

I visited ff.net fairly recently to mock Andy Blake's fic, and it was AWFUL. I couldn't copy/paste selections to the friend I was snarking it with; I either had to type it out, or go into the source code and strip out the HTML.

Seriously, what a pain in the ass! And STUPID.

--Rogan

Do you still need an invite to join and post fic?

I've been delaying doing so because I don't have anyone who can invite me but my fic needs to go someplace.

Yes, but getting an invite from the site now takes barely any time at all, I had a friend recently who got in in like a day I think. Gone are the days you would have to wait for weeks on the invite queue

oh good! that's what I like to hear. time to get off my ass and get on it.

thanks!

I've posted to AO3 with words with accents, etc., and it leaves them right there. AO3 is, in fact, amazingly easy to post to, and won't add all kinds of html crap to you stuff.

If you're posting from a .doc or .docx, though, watch out, because Word? Adds *tons* of unnecessary html that will fuck with AO3. I tend to write in goggle.docs and then copy/past to AO3 and have no issues of any kind.

As for tags, well - tag for the obvious (fandom, pairing) and the not-quite-so-obvious (post this comic/movie/plot point, pre this origin story/episode/whatever) and add more if it become necessary (for triggers or whatever). If you just start typing something into the tag box, it'll guess what you want and come up with a bunch of options in use, so that's always nice. Or add your own.

AO3's team of troubleshooters and helpers are super-nice, and always reply within 24-48 hours, and 99 percent of the time have a fix. So that's nice, too.

Good luck!

Let me guess: you've written TF2 fic.

What's TF2?

DA

(Anonymous) - 2015-05-10 02:30 (UTC) - Expand

I don't know much about AO3's code, but are you using Unicode encoding or something else?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3048 ]

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