rthstewart | Pit of Voles Bites Back-- back up your stories!!

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Pit of Voles Bites Back-- back up your stories!!

So apparently FF.net is in the process of massively removing stories. Reasons cited include incorrect ratings, M-rated content, and inappropriate words in summaries. They are also apparently targeting stories with "inappropriate ratings" where the story ~~content~~ summary (at say a T rating) is not deemed appropriate ~~for a G rated fandom/not appropriate~~ for all audiences. See here and related comments.

I also saw that they were deleting stories in the Hunger Games fandom that were too interactive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. It's the pit of voles and what do you expect. I remember the M rated purge of 10 years ago or so, give or take and another one in the last few years centering on Twilight.

This seems very widespread so back up your stories. The sad thing is that it is the largest gen archive out there and for people who are just starting out or who aren't comfortable with all the different places fic can hide and what else might be under the rocks, it's still the biggest and very easy for the reader. I do prefer their feedback and alert options to AO3. I would have never met so many of you were it not for that archive and it makes me sad to see this happen. Still, it's their site and if all they want on it are puppies and rainbows, that's their decision, as stupid and arbitrary as it might be.

I'll keep posting there and I had a few things that were only on ff.net and I've now backed them all up.

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I got a message the other day that one of my fics had been deleted and that there was a hold on my account, only to get another immediately after that it was a mistake and my fic was still there.

Oh lord. I mean, half the fics I have on there ought to be wiped off, but I'll have to check on them to see what's going on. I remember the M-rated purge! Was it really about a decade? I should really stop being surprised with how long I've been in fandom, by this point.

The first story my co author and I posted over there was in 1999 or so, and it was M rated at the time. We were worried a few years later that it might get booted, and it looks like we modified it in 2003 or 2004. I also remember a M-rated purge due to Twilight content a few years ago, so there have been at least 2 purges that I remember.

Yeah, that sounds about the right time frame. I started in fandom 2000/2001 and made my way back to ff.n after getting initially scared off by the LOTR page, and I started talking to Andrea in summer of 2002 or so. Or at least reading her fic then, during the break between s1 and s2 of Alias. :P It was about a year after that when the massive M-purge happened and there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth because everyone's porn was going away. By the time Twilight rolled around though I wasn't spending every day and night on ff.n like I had been. Back in the days when my username was spiderelf. :|

Yeah, I'd ignored ffnet for years but put a few fics up there recently that were probably rated a lot more highly than their TOS specified. When I heard about the latest brouhaha I just deleted them. I had a decent number of reviews and favorites but based on the way people worded their reviews, I suspected many of them were reading my fics at a far younger age than I felt comfortable with. Not that they can't still find the fics, but it's such a young-skewed archive I felt guilty! :)

Make them work for their smut, dammit. I think I started with FF.net when I was 11, back when we learned how to cover our underage tracks well or else get booted. :) "YES I AM AT LEAST 13 YEARS OF AGE LOL" was my motto; still, nothing I read there compared to the articles in the Cosmo magazines I used to get my half-blind great aunt to buy for me. Childhood..

Edited 2012-06-01 03:57 (UTC)

Earliest porn smuggling occurred in middle school with The Sensuous Man, The Sensuous Woman, and some bodice rippers, including one called Love's Tender Fury. Funny, I just advised someone on the childhood online protection act and what to do to screen for under age users and what to do if you find out they are younger. LA LA LA not listening.

Hah, of course we found my friend's older brother's stash of Hustler and Club when we were 11. I just thought they were freaky.

But yeah, as far as online protection, I was so comfortable in my older fandoms (Saiyuki and Hornblower) on livejournal that when I found a new fandom (Hetalia) and then added a tumblr, I was shocked to find out I was following 13-year-olds in Malaysia. I have lately unfollowed and unfriended anyone under 18 whenever I discover they are underage; like we said, they'll find the porn and smut, but I can control my interactions with youngsters.

I usually post to my livejournal (crossposting to appropriate communities, linked back to my LJ), on my personal website, and sometimes to AO3.

Um... I'm so bad, but I haven't been keeping up and don't even know what Origins is. Is that the con in Columbus? ::hides head in Star Wars shame::

Pre-teens are sneaky! Heh. I didn't enter fandom until I was in my 20s so the online smut was a revelation. :)

Where do you normally post? AO3? or private archive? So jealous about Origins, btw. SNIFF. I'm not going to Celebration either. Again.

I also saw that they were deleting stories in the Hunger Games fandom that were too interactive.

As I said on Twitter, that's against their rules - it comes up in that little thing you have to agree to every time you post something.

I mean, I think their rules are stupid, but their site, their rules. And since people go through and report others for every single violation of the rules they can find, like grammar, typos, songfic, author's notes, etc - and that's because people are petty, or are trolls, or think they're doing something good. I just think they're finally looking at their backlog of complaints and just deleting indiscriminately, without actually checking. I admit, I am very amused at all the people saying "Okay, I know I had a swear in my summary but they should have EMAILED ME FIRST." Yeah, like that would happen. :D

The sad thing is that it is the largest gen archive out there and for people who are just starting out

I think that's the point, though. They consider it an archive for young people and they have advertising from sponsors who don't want to be affiliated with anything racy, so they want to keep it young audience friendly. But I don't think I'd characterize it as a "gen archive" in any way, shape or form.

Of course, it's easy for me not to be too worried, since I don't use it as my primary archive - all my stuff is at AO3 and/or my journal. So take my cynicism with a grain of salt.

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Oh, no, I mean that would be grounds for complaint. Unless they explicitly warn at the top. That's just not something a LOT of people want to read without warning (and twisted with Susan of all people.)

I was only aware of the disappearing fic in the Twilight community. That has been traced to a group that massively reports on a story till ff.n removes it. I had no idea that this was occurring across so many fandoms! And I have idea if the same group is crossing fandom lines.

*Shrugs* My stuff is PWP and I knew it broke the rules of posting all along over there, so I can't really be upset if it goes away. (And most days I refer to it internally as 'tripe' anyway. I'm not sure if I will move it or not for this reason. Though it is backed-up... somewhere?!)

Less Hunger Games stories in the world makes me sad.

On the one hand, I like the layout of AO3. On the other hand, I want to beat their upload system to death with a crowbar. And it simply doesn't get the traffic ff.net does. (Also, they allow RPF/RPS, which I think is really just not ever appropriate unless the RP in question has been dead for quite some time. It's creepy, stalkerish, and I fully support public figures who lawyer up over it.)

And honestly, I'm really kind of fine if they lose a LOT of the inappropriate and mislabled stuff--it's annoying to read what are basically fan letters, RPGs in progress, and gibberish, or things that clearly they didn't read the rules. They SAID no smut, they meant it. There's a reason I only put the "missing chapter" of On Her Undying Majesty's Secret Service (ie the one that goes past the average Bond book for smut) on fan_constructs under a lock and not on ff.net with the rest. It's like wading through the self-published Kindle books-there's enough crap to sort through without allowing things that violate the TOS.

Sorry about the above comment -- it's all really common in the fandom and I tend to forget that a lot of the boundaries and warnings observed in other places just aren't followed in the Narnia fandom. It's easy to forget when you see pages and pages of this stuff and the punishment of Susan Pevensie for her apostasy is an acceptable sub-genre touted as redemptive fic.

Anyway, after I wrote my war story recently, I had to closely re-examine my RPF issues. I ended up concluding that if The Longest Day did it, and some other war movies, well, I guess I could too, though I did not use any real person as a point of view character. Otherwise, shrug, your kink not my kink and that's OK. Given how much I've been bashed over the years (Jedi don't drink! You've ruined Narnia! You're doing it wrong!), I'm cool with pretty much whatever someone wants to play with. It's what the back button is for.

From what I've read, ff.net has been really arbitrary (I'm shocked, shocked) and there's probably a bot and then if someone complains they go back and might change it. But I mean really, the story of summary of so many canon properties isn't G-rated -- Harry Potter? Hunger Games? Percy Jackson? You post an accurate summary of those properties and it's sure not going to be G rated. it's all bizarre. It's just their periodic house cleaning an in another year, everyone will move on.

My policy on RP is, if it's someone who's 1. A historical figure and 2. Dead, okay. (Though if you get into the Titanic community some relatives are STILL touchy, so....)

I've never had a problem with T rated fics. I don't think they want G, just not Rs for explicit sex and dubious acts with barnyard animals and kitchen impliments. Isn't that was Adult Fan Fic exists for, anyway?

They've been killing fics for having "non G-rated summaries" on criteria for G that make no sense at all -- "killing" seems to be one of the trigger words the bot is pulling, for instance.

If it's a bot doing it, that's just bad programming. And as anyone can read the summaries, yeah, they're supposed to be clean. (Though I'd prefer if they deleted fics whose summaries are vague, meaningless and/or written in textspeak with a note about how the authors sucks at summaries.)

I cannot for a moment imagine that someone has pulled over 150,000 fics WITHOUT the use of a bot in there somewhere. (Someone over at the ff rants comm has done stats on # of fics). But someone had to tell the bot what to search for, and their notions of what is "G" rated SUCK. "kill" and "dead" are not G-rated? Disney would like a word with you....

yep. It's difficult to think of young adult properties that DO NOT feature death of some sort or another. To say nothing of Disney, the Bible, myths, legends, and fairy tales. BAMBI's MOTHER DIES

I am just waiting for the takedown notice on "Walk Long Enough." If 'kill' is bad, 'ass' must be, right? Nevermind that it is IN CANON in the same sense (donkey).

I here confess to total ignorance of what all these ratings actually are. I suppose it must say somewhere?

Some method of doing a correlation between literary merit and rating would be handy. I will, for instance, happily read about incest if a) the author has devoted many years' thought, and 21 or so books, to exploring the ramifications, and b) that author is Sir Thomas Malory. If the author is some teenager desperate to shock under the impression that this is an easy way of gaining points, then I will run away faster than Sir Robin the Not Quite So Brave as Sir Lancelot.

"OldFashionedGirl95"

Yes. Yes. Yes.

I have very little time to comment right now, much as I would like to, but let me say, this is why I am very, very careful with my ratings on FF. I've never had anyone report me (I don't think); I've never had anyone complain. There's a long list of things that get put under "M" just for being /mentioned/ in my fic, let alone described: homophobia, bullying, bombing, genocide, various kinds of psychological trauma, etc. My one-shot "Touch" would probably not be given an M rating by the majority of readers, but it talks about active bullying and homophobia and its aftereffects. TSOTHF is M because I'm only three chapters in and I've already touched on war, genocide, the Oklahoma City bombing, parental neglect, and (again) bullying issues. (Susan and Blaine have complicated histories. I can't help it.) My motto is "better be safe than sorry" and so far, it seems to work.

Hopefully more later. Fascinating. :)

My instinct is that these aren't the problems, unless you mention killing someone in the summary or have explicit sexual content. I guess a few years ago they banned real person fic too. Song fics are supposed to be forbidden (I think) but there are lots of those. I remember going through this with the first MA rated purge -- which had been triggered by complainers and trolls in the Twilight fandom.

The process appears very arbitrary but really I would be surprised if it were anything but arbitrary. AO3 is the much better site in this regard -- it's not beholden to advertiser interests and doesn't screen for content.

I'm not really sure how to feel about this. On one hand, as was said, we know the rules and ostensibly should follow them (insert trollface here, but still). On the other paw, they tend to be rather arbitrary in deciding what ought be deleted or such. Maybe probation or something. Don't delete from the site, but remove from general view? I don't know. Blerg all around though

It's all very arbitrary, and the part that seems the most troubling, as Lady Songsmith says, is that they are apparently deleting stories that are T rated if they have words like "kill" and "death" in the summary because summaries are supposed to be G rated? Whatever.

It's their site. Snacky had pointed out that it's supported by advertising revenue so that might be part of it too -- pressure from advertisers. They don't have to be fair. They don't have to be just. They can boot everyone off if they want.

It doesn't appear that they are focusing on the bad summaries and badly written stories, though people who are responding to complaints by authors sometimes are saying that in their opinion, the story is bad too. It's the supposed interactive stuff -- the submit your own tributes on Hunger Games, the M rated content that they think is forbidden MA rated material (though the terms are not defined), and the inappropriate summaries that should be G rated and are not. I think.

Sigh. From the looks of things, it does seem like a bot's in on this and that just means that you pretty much can't really depend on any rational decision. On the one hand I appreciate the purge of the submit your own tribute fics in the Humger Games fandom because it can be really annoying trying to find fics in that fandom and wading through them all, but on the other hand, it puts everyone on edge, especially when it seems that for as many fics that deserves to be deleted, the same number of good fics are getting the chop for silly reasons.

To be honest, backing stories is not an issue as I back them all up anyway because I once stupidly accidentally deleted something I didn't mean to, but it can be a pain backing up reviews and even then it's not the same. And you lose favourites anyway. And when you write in obscure fandoms as I do then FF.net is your best bet to a wider readerbase so it's pretty frustrating to see this happening and second guess yourself. Meh.

On a completely unrelated note, I was watching this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH_rIT0juiM&feature=g-u-u) and was giggling the whole time thinking of you (more specifically your Songbirds).

LOVED the Video. I'm going to have to blog that. AWESOME. SO AWESOME. those pesky biologists. I wish he'd addressed same sex pairs, but that's still a pretty recent area of scholarship.

FF.net has done MORE screwy things and in this, they aren't unique. How many times have we suffered through server upgrades and new website versions that will improve functionality that leave us all screaming, "put it back!" I still feel the same way about gmail changes.

Sigh. Tech saavy people who don't like change. There must a name for this...

As you are already aware of, I was a victim of the Hunger Games cleansing. What stinks was I didn't even know SYOTs counted as interactive fics until after mine got deleted and I was suspended for a few days.

SYOTs are popping back up. But most of them are now legal. Apparently there have been new forums and such established so that people can trade of tributes legally and so that their SYOTs can't be reported for being interactive. Others are re-publishing their old fics which had to do with them. We shall have to wait an see what happens.

I wish there was a way I could catalog and archive my reviews so that I wouldn't lose any. I lost over fifty reviews because of the Purge. I'm going to have to archive them somewhere so I make sure to never lose them. Or any other reviews I have for my other stories too.

if you check out the link above at fanfiction rants, http://ffdotnetrants.livejournal.com/ you will find suggestions on how to save reviews. This has all happened before. As you noted, people adjust and in another few months it will all be back to the way it was before. Though boy it's gotten touchy about words in PMs -- it's deleted the name "Dick," as in Grayson, "queer" in "queer idea" and I wrote that the site was "coming down hard on TOS violations" and that was deleted too. Sheez.

"I wrote that the site was "coming down hard on TOS violations" and that was deleted too. Sheez."

I used that expression in that sense as well a couple of years ago and got it deleted. That's automatic/bots, not anyone reading what you're writing. Sometimes Norwegian words get deleted as well, because they mean something in English that I didn't think about while I was writing in Norwegian (last week).

A bot that is deleting Norwegian is waaay too sensitive!

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Pit of Voles Bites Back-- back up your stories!!

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(Ruan Chun Xian)

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