ff.net thing isn't really going anywhere
Apr. 29th, 2015 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wallwalker posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
personalapocalypseIt can be pretty well summed up in seven words: "Still shouting into a void, with captchas."
Things that are good:
- Being able to add four characters instead of just two.
- Being able to make "pairings" of more than just two characters, and filter for whether or not you want to read the pairing fic (which does make it easier to find genfic, in theory. See below, though.)
- Being limited to four characters and two "pairings." Cuts down on search bloat, especially when you're looking for fic that actually features a minor character.
- The review box is more prominent than the "Favorites" links, and require less work.
- Having access to PMs to reply to reviews and such... that's nice, I guess. I do wish other archives had that.
Things that are not so good:
- The Pairing feature must be new, and seems to be relatively unknown. (I read at least one very-much-romantic fic that had the three characters listed, but not "paired." This makes it harder to filter for them and easier for people who just want genfic to stumble onto them.)
- The Character feature suffers from the same issue as the Pairing feature. It wasn't built into the archive. It was added when I was active there at first, but that was years after the site was actually established, and so a LOT of older stories were never actually tagged. This means that if you only search by filtering characters, you will miss a lot of older works that you might enjoy.
- So many annoying captchas, I swear. I can't be the only human being who has trouble reading those, can I?
- Favorites are unlimited now, which just makes it easier for people to use them like Kudos on AO3. (Seriously, why did they do that?)
- You can't just edit a story. You have to create a new document, edit that, and replace the old story.
- The Worlds menu does make it kind of difficult to find particular fandoms; I searched for an MCU-specific category in the Movies section for a while before figuring out that I had to go to Comics, select the comic book series the movie was based on, and select the World for the movies.
- And yes, I'm still unhappy that six separate fandoms are stuffed into one category, without even a Worlds dropdown menu to set them apart. I'm going to try to request that, at least. We'll see if they listen this time, but I doubt it.
So yeah, largely unchanged, still a lot like screaming into a void, only this void has more obnoxious steps to navigate. Maybe if I wrote in more/newer/more popular fandoms, it would be more worthwhile... which is the exact same complaint I've heard about AO3. Really, I can't see why one is better than the other for finding readers, and AO3 is much more user-friendly for writing and uploading stories.
Things that are good:
- Being able to add four characters instead of just two.
- Being able to make "pairings" of more than just two characters, and filter for whether or not you want to read the pairing fic (which does make it easier to find genfic, in theory. See below, though.)
- Being limited to four characters and two "pairings." Cuts down on search bloat, especially when you're looking for fic that actually features a minor character.
- The review box is more prominent than the "Favorites" links, and require less work.
- Having access to PMs to reply to reviews and such... that's nice, I guess. I do wish other archives had that.
Things that are not so good:
- The Pairing feature must be new, and seems to be relatively unknown. (I read at least one very-much-romantic fic that had the three characters listed, but not "paired." This makes it harder to filter for them and easier for people who just want genfic to stumble onto them.)
- The Character feature suffers from the same issue as the Pairing feature. It wasn't built into the archive. It was added when I was active there at first, but that was years after the site was actually established, and so a LOT of older stories were never actually tagged. This means that if you only search by filtering characters, you will miss a lot of older works that you might enjoy.
- So many annoying captchas, I swear. I can't be the only human being who has trouble reading those, can I?
- Favorites are unlimited now, which just makes it easier for people to use them like Kudos on AO3. (Seriously, why did they do that?)
- You can't just edit a story. You have to create a new document, edit that, and replace the old story.
- The Worlds menu does make it kind of difficult to find particular fandoms; I searched for an MCU-specific category in the Movies section for a while before figuring out that I had to go to Comics, select the comic book series the movie was based on, and select the World for the movies.
- And yes, I'm still unhappy that six separate fandoms are stuffed into one category, without even a Worlds dropdown menu to set them apart. I'm going to try to request that, at least. We'll see if they listen this time, but I doubt it.
So yeah, largely unchanged, still a lot like screaming into a void, only this void has more obnoxious steps to navigate. Maybe if I wrote in more/newer/more popular fandoms, it would be more worthwhile... which is the exact same complaint I've heard about AO3. Really, I can't see why one is better than the other for finding readers, and AO3 is much more user-friendly for writing and uploading stories.
