Archive of Our Own
Nov. 24th, 2009 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
farlaSo after a couple years it's finally semi-open and you can sign up for an account.
I browsed it a bit. The basic setup is rather annoying - in order to get to a fandom, you click on a larger category, then pick what letter the fandom starts with. There doesn't appear to be any way to browse the whole thing. This is even more annoying than usual, because there are entire categories that have virtually no fandoms, so to see what's there, you have to click through 27 subpages that have between zero to five options each. It gets downright stupid when it comes to uncategorized categories - what sort of stuff is found in "Other"? No idea, since I'm not checking each letter of the alphabet to figure out what the pattern is.
See, with a small archive, it's really good for people be able to browse through various fandoms easily, because odds are that if they try to look for any one thing, it won't be there. But if they're interested in checking out the archive, they might click around to a couple places they normally wouldn't, if it's not too hard. It's possible to do something similar with the tags, but personally I'd expect checking out a fandom they aren't really in, but are familiar with the subject matter, to be more likely than picking a tag and getting dozens of fandoms they know nothing about.
It's also got a weirdly visual component, with a huge graphic box next to everything. The only archive I've ever seen with anything like that was Fanlib, so it's a bit wtfy. Ficwad had, I though, a pretty good way of doing it by putting certain warnings in red to stand out. That's about as much of a visual component as I can see needed. As it is, I'm just looking around the box to read the text, and only checking it if I want to know what applies to the story afterward. (To my understanding, that's what just about all people do when confronted with both text and images) And then half the time I have to mouse over to figure out what a particular mark is. I'm not sure if this is a matter of familiarity, or of differing approaches, or what.
The final thing that stood out to me were the reviews, or lack thereof and odd system for handling them. The archive's been up for years. And while it's had extremely restricted membership it seems you can comment anonymously. But no matter where I looked, there were virtually no comments. Didn't matter if I looked in big categories or small ones, or how I fiddled with the dates and length. The few comments there were all fell into the "aw, cute!" category. So it seems that the archive is basically there for the sake of backing up work, because it sure as hell isn't being read. Also, they're formatted like an LJ page - click on the comments, and it loads the whole thing and deposits you at the bottom. No checking out comments before reading the story for you!
I signed up for an account and finally got it today, and the posting interface is even wonkier.
Let's say you've posted stories elsewhere, and want to import them. Well, screw you, sucker! It automatically takes the first line of each chapter and duplicates it as a note, so you'll have to go through each chapter individually, change that and hit a button to confirm, watch it load another page, then hit the YES I DID WANT TO CHANGE THAT button to actually fix it. Moreover, as far as I can tell, you can't do that until after the full story has been posted - otherwise, it'll just keep forgetting what you wrote on the primary story page. It's actually faster to just go through and add the chapters individually.
Speaking of the primary story page, uploading from FFN, and presumably elsewhere, gets your story automatically marked complete. Note there's no tickybox to say if it's complete or not. You have to find where it's saying chapter x out of y chapters, and realize you have to change y to ?.
(And incidentally, the default display shows all chapters at once. Which a) tells you a lot about the average length of a story posted and b) while it's a nice formatting option, why are we even bothering with chapters if it's default?)
Even just looking at the interface gives me the impression this is for some very particular subset of fandom. The first thing it asks you is your rating, then warning, then fandom, then "category" which is what the gender of your pairings is, then the names of your pairings, then your characters, then your personal tag. This is all in one blue box.
Then it goes on to ask, by the way, what your title and summary are.
The warnings themselves are also very much for people whose primary information about a story is the gender of their pairing. There's graphic violence, rape, underage, and major character death. And I'm fluent enough in fandom to know the subtext of this - graphic violence TAKING PLACE AS A CENTERPIECE OF THE STORY, rape IN THE MOST NARROW SENSE, major character death OF THE CANON BUNCH I AM ATTACHED TO. So, if we're warning people for what might upset them, I should really have like all of that on Left Alone, because hey, not nice subject matter. But that would make people assume it was a story where Adalia was beaten, raped, dismembered and then raped again, and also that Adalia was a canon character.
See, the general rating system like on FFN is, yeah, pretty bad. But it's better than all or nothing stuff. I mean, let's say the characters see someone who's been torn in half. Gory! But not violent, because no one did it, and people clicking for violent death gore will be annoyed it's not labeled right. And if I say it's teen, and don't warn for violence, you'll probably be expecting swearing, not torn in half guys. Whereas if there's no warn of violence option, you'll understand it's possible and be more careful, and if there's a warn for sort of violence/gore option, I can actually say something useful. It's basically only useful for describing what flavor your Mature-rated fic is, and frankly, you can generally figure out that out from the tags.
This is all the more glaring given how inclusive this archive's supposed to be. When one of your major selling points is that authors can post hot toddler on toddler action if they really want to, you'd really think that you wouldn't want to class it exactly the same as a seventeen year old getting it on with an eighteen year old.
This would be a bit less weird if it wasn't combined with the tagging system. Why on earth they did a dropmenu instead of a tickybox for a wider bunch of options and add your own I don't know. The tagging system has its own issues, of course, primarily that plenty of it's fandom terms, but there's no move to define what they mean. Quick, everyone: what's the distinction between Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Reality, and Alternative Timeline?
The system also chokes and dies on distinguishing between minor characters, original characters, "main" characters without canon personality, and most gen fic. Ie, anything that doesn't come up when you're writing Supernatural incest. It's not that I don't think writing smut for various Tv shows isn't a valid use of your time, it's just I'd like some way to indicate "the various canon cast show up in a general sort of way" without it looking like an orgy is taking place and cluttering up the results for everyone looking for character-centric fic for particular characters. (Oh, and they have no straight original character designation - it's "original female character" and "original male character". Presumably so people can better avoid the former.)
Really, the more I look at it the more it reminds me of those mary sue tests. You know, there are always those arguments on them being accurate, and what everyone doesn't get is that they're not "is my character a mary sue?" tests, they're "is my female teenage girl character in a basically standard setting a mary sue?" tests. The system works great under a particular set of assumptions for a particular set of stories.
There's also this weird implementation of pseudonyms, where a single account can have multiple names. In and of itself, that's just kind of a "huh, okay" moment. Where it gets odd is that the system seems set up to assume you're using it, so that your profile page and your page-that-has-stories are different. Yet at the same time, there's no way of hiding who your pseudonym belongs to - I could post stories as icemew and Irin, but both would lead directly back to Farla. So it's basically for if you've gone by dozens of different names across fandom, and want to consolidate them all to one master account, but don't have any problem with people knowing they're all the same you.
Oh, and also the thing is buggy. Not laggy buggy, crap coding buggy. Seems tied to the odd formatting, and ends up begging the question of why they did that rather than use an existing stable setup.
And there doesn't seem to be any way of seeing if you're getting hits, which does tie back into the whole "it's not like anyone's reading it in the first place" supposition earlier.
It does have a couple interesting options, and I mean "a couple" in the technical sense of two. It lets you sort stories into a series, which is nice, and it also has the option of orphaning a story, which means taking your name off it but leaving it up. I'm a bit confused as to why they set it up exactly as they did, but anything that discourages authors from deleting their stories every other week is good.
It's not like this is a new archive, though, so "two decent ideas and a mess of stuff" is not that impressive.
I browsed it a bit. The basic setup is rather annoying - in order to get to a fandom, you click on a larger category, then pick what letter the fandom starts with. There doesn't appear to be any way to browse the whole thing. This is even more annoying than usual, because there are entire categories that have virtually no fandoms, so to see what's there, you have to click through 27 subpages that have between zero to five options each. It gets downright stupid when it comes to uncategorized categories - what sort of stuff is found in "Other"? No idea, since I'm not checking each letter of the alphabet to figure out what the pattern is.
See, with a small archive, it's really good for people be able to browse through various fandoms easily, because odds are that if they try to look for any one thing, it won't be there. But if they're interested in checking out the archive, they might click around to a couple places they normally wouldn't, if it's not too hard. It's possible to do something similar with the tags, but personally I'd expect checking out a fandom they aren't really in, but are familiar with the subject matter, to be more likely than picking a tag and getting dozens of fandoms they know nothing about.
It's also got a weirdly visual component, with a huge graphic box next to everything. The only archive I've ever seen with anything like that was Fanlib, so it's a bit wtfy. Ficwad had, I though, a pretty good way of doing it by putting certain warnings in red to stand out. That's about as much of a visual component as I can see needed. As it is, I'm just looking around the box to read the text, and only checking it if I want to know what applies to the story afterward. (To my understanding, that's what just about all people do when confronted with both text and images) And then half the time I have to mouse over to figure out what a particular mark is. I'm not sure if this is a matter of familiarity, or of differing approaches, or what.
The final thing that stood out to me were the reviews, or lack thereof and odd system for handling them. The archive's been up for years. And while it's had extremely restricted membership it seems you can comment anonymously. But no matter where I looked, there were virtually no comments. Didn't matter if I looked in big categories or small ones, or how I fiddled with the dates and length. The few comments there were all fell into the "aw, cute!" category. So it seems that the archive is basically there for the sake of backing up work, because it sure as hell isn't being read. Also, they're formatted like an LJ page - click on the comments, and it loads the whole thing and deposits you at the bottom. No checking out comments before reading the story for you!
I signed up for an account and finally got it today, and the posting interface is even wonkier.
Let's say you've posted stories elsewhere, and want to import them. Well, screw you, sucker! It automatically takes the first line of each chapter and duplicates it as a note, so you'll have to go through each chapter individually, change that and hit a button to confirm, watch it load another page, then hit the YES I DID WANT TO CHANGE THAT button to actually fix it. Moreover, as far as I can tell, you can't do that until after the full story has been posted - otherwise, it'll just keep forgetting what you wrote on the primary story page. It's actually faster to just go through and add the chapters individually.
Speaking of the primary story page, uploading from FFN, and presumably elsewhere, gets your story automatically marked complete. Note there's no tickybox to say if it's complete or not. You have to find where it's saying chapter x out of y chapters, and realize you have to change y to ?.
(And incidentally, the default display shows all chapters at once. Which a) tells you a lot about the average length of a story posted and b) while it's a nice formatting option, why are we even bothering with chapters if it's default?)
Even just looking at the interface gives me the impression this is for some very particular subset of fandom. The first thing it asks you is your rating, then warning, then fandom, then "category" which is what the gender of your pairings is, then the names of your pairings, then your characters, then your personal tag. This is all in one blue box.
Then it goes on to ask, by the way, what your title and summary are.
The warnings themselves are also very much for people whose primary information about a story is the gender of their pairing. There's graphic violence, rape, underage, and major character death. And I'm fluent enough in fandom to know the subtext of this - graphic violence TAKING PLACE AS A CENTERPIECE OF THE STORY, rape IN THE MOST NARROW SENSE, major character death OF THE CANON BUNCH I AM ATTACHED TO. So, if we're warning people for what might upset them, I should really have like all of that on Left Alone, because hey, not nice subject matter. But that would make people assume it was a story where Adalia was beaten, raped, dismembered and then raped again, and also that Adalia was a canon character.
See, the general rating system like on FFN is, yeah, pretty bad. But it's better than all or nothing stuff. I mean, let's say the characters see someone who's been torn in half. Gory! But not violent, because no one did it, and people clicking for violent death gore will be annoyed it's not labeled right. And if I say it's teen, and don't warn for violence, you'll probably be expecting swearing, not torn in half guys. Whereas if there's no warn of violence option, you'll understand it's possible and be more careful, and if there's a warn for sort of violence/gore option, I can actually say something useful. It's basically only useful for describing what flavor your Mature-rated fic is, and frankly, you can generally figure out that out from the tags.
This is all the more glaring given how inclusive this archive's supposed to be. When one of your major selling points is that authors can post hot toddler on toddler action if they really want to, you'd really think that you wouldn't want to class it exactly the same as a seventeen year old getting it on with an eighteen year old.
This would be a bit less weird if it wasn't combined with the tagging system. Why on earth they did a dropmenu instead of a tickybox for a wider bunch of options and add your own I don't know. The tagging system has its own issues, of course, primarily that plenty of it's fandom terms, but there's no move to define what they mean. Quick, everyone: what's the distinction between Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Reality, and Alternative Timeline?
The system also chokes and dies on distinguishing between minor characters, original characters, "main" characters without canon personality, and most gen fic. Ie, anything that doesn't come up when you're writing Supernatural incest. It's not that I don't think writing smut for various Tv shows isn't a valid use of your time, it's just I'd like some way to indicate "the various canon cast show up in a general sort of way" without it looking like an orgy is taking place and cluttering up the results for everyone looking for character-centric fic for particular characters. (Oh, and they have no straight original character designation - it's "original female character" and "original male character". Presumably so people can better avoid the former.)
Really, the more I look at it the more it reminds me of those mary sue tests. You know, there are always those arguments on them being accurate, and what everyone doesn't get is that they're not "is my character a mary sue?" tests, they're "is my female teenage girl character in a basically standard setting a mary sue?" tests. The system works great under a particular set of assumptions for a particular set of stories.
There's also this weird implementation of pseudonyms, where a single account can have multiple names. In and of itself, that's just kind of a "huh, okay" moment. Where it gets odd is that the system seems set up to assume you're using it, so that your profile page and your page-that-has-stories are different. Yet at the same time, there's no way of hiding who your pseudonym belongs to - I could post stories as icemew and Irin, but both would lead directly back to Farla. So it's basically for if you've gone by dozens of different names across fandom, and want to consolidate them all to one master account, but don't have any problem with people knowing they're all the same you.
Oh, and also the thing is buggy. Not laggy buggy, crap coding buggy. Seems tied to the odd formatting, and ends up begging the question of why they did that rather than use an existing stable setup.
And there doesn't seem to be any way of seeing if you're getting hits, which does tie back into the whole "it's not like anyone's reading it in the first place" supposition earlier.
It does have a couple interesting options, and I mean "a couple" in the technical sense of two. It lets you sort stories into a series, which is nice, and it also has the option of orphaning a story, which means taking your name off it but leaving it up. I'm a bit confused as to why they set it up exactly as they did, but anything that discourages authors from deleting their stories every other week is good.
It's not like this is a new archive, though, so "two decent ideas and a mess of stuff" is not that impressive.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 04:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 04:49 am (UTC)I'm still not sure how much of this is interrogating the archive from the wrong perspective, but I can't figure out a reason for half the design choices.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 08:58 am (UTC)I wonder if they'd change this kind of stuff if a few people complained.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 01:08 pm (UTC)I figure that I could mirror everything there just because it seems like they'll never take anything down. (And just ignore the problems from importing, since the main body of the story stays intact) But aside from that I find basically everything about FFN easier to use and easier on the eyes. (And FFN may randomly take stuff down, but they also, on and off, remove crap, while there doesn't seem to be anything in place requiring basic spelling and grammar. The invite system was been screening people out, but they're opening it up now) On top of that, I'm kind of suspicious that critical reviews will go over even worse there - I was actually intending to check that out, since that's step two for me participating anywhere, but the basic interface made me decide to just stop using it.
I wonder if they'd change this kind of stuff if a few people complained.
The thing is, it's been up for years. Either people have complained and they ignored it, or people haven't complained because 99.9% of the users prefer this setup. Either way it seems unlikely to be changed any time soon.
Also, if you go to the FAQ, right near the top there's this bit about
Who built the Archive?
The Archive was entirely built and designed by volunteers from fandom. Many of our volunteers started out with no knowledge of coding / design / documentations and learnt their skills on the project. We think it's a pretty amazing achievement! If you'd like to join in, please volunteer via the OTW's Volunteers page.
So, they had people who didn't know stuff, and instead of using existing setups invented their own. With that much investment, I really doubt any of them would be willing to replace it with an existing system, let alone redo all their coding by hand to change it. And I can understand that, but it doesn't make the archive any more usable that there's a reason it isn't.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 02:02 pm (UTC)The thing is, it's been up for years. Either people have complained and they ignored it, or people haven't complained because 99.9% of the users prefer this setup. Either way it seems unlikely to be changed any time soon.
Well, to be fair, it was a closed beta, with a limited number of users who might have complained and that userbase being mostly from specific corners of fandom - the awkward pairing focus, for instance, would go completely unnoticed in a community where practically all of the fics are about pairings or canon characters. That aspect could easily change with the open beta, and possibly result in at least some additions to accommodate non-pairing-OC-focused fics better. Likewise, if more users with novel-length fics that would be difficult to read stuffed on one page registered, that is quite likely to be complained about and changed. Or I'm just being optimistic.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 03:32 pm (UTC)And yeah, that's one of the reasons I don't pay much attention to review replies. But then, I really preferred replying to relevant reviews on the next chapter, or contacting the reviewer if it was actually important. I kind of prefer a system that revolves more around writing stories than chatting about stories.
Well, to be fair, it was a closed beta, with a limited number of users who might have complained and that userbase being mostly from specific corners of fandom - the awkward pairing focus, for instance, would go completely unnoticed in a community where practically all of the fics are about pairings or canon characters.
Still, it's been around for years. It's possible they didn't notice that other fans exist the whole time, but - well, a look at basically every pan-archive around should have at least hinted it. I mean, if this was supposed to be an archive for pairing based short fic revolving around two+ characters, then okay. But spending years to make an archive that's promoted as for fandom in general, and it's buggy, irritating and crappy at what I write and read? They're probably going to eventually fix some of the things I mention, but I doubt they'll end up overhauling their entire system.
That, and there's this whole "bit off more than they can chew" feel to the place. I mean, the base system doesn't function right, but they spent time coding it so notes could be uploaded in a separate box and you could backdate stories? And they're also working on translating the site into various languages? And also they're dealing with issues by their main audience about the best way to tag threesomes and layer tags? It doesn't suggest fixing this stuff is high priority.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 04:04 pm (UTC)Really what I find most interesting about it is that it's open-source, so presumably if it goes under or generally remains unsatisfying, some other group can fork it and have a base to work off in order to build something better.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-25 05:41 pm (UTC)It does do a great job for character and kink based popcorn-fic, especially in areas with fluid fandom boundaries, so I can definitely see someone reusing the code as is for that.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-29 08:23 am (UTC)"You are currently number 256 on our waiting list!
At our current rate, you should receive an invitation on or around: December 06, 2009"
Wait until December 6 then to hear my complaints about that place. D: