farla

Russian overlords, that last post was not meant as a challenge for you to demonstrate even greater fail.

The more I use fanlib, the more evident it gets that it's designed to pass around a small amount of content rather than to allow you to provide it.

Exhibit A: The profile pages. Favorite something, and it goes in a block that sits above your own submissions. People clicking your profile are faced with the list of your favorites, not your writing. Subscribe to a category or other author, and this also goes on top - between the two, your own submissions are now completely out of sight. Can you even imagine FFN setting profiles so that your favorite stories and authors were displayed rather than your own work? The majority of the users are thus content recommenders, not providers.

Exhibit B: Tiered structure. Featured stories aren't just displayed on the homepage. Click any category and the initial story list is the featured stories. In the larger categories, that can mean the entire first page or so. You have to change the sorting method to see new stories, and no, there's no way to tell it to do this for the whole site. Readers checking out categories see the most popular, recommended stories first and foremost. And it's not as if the stories are starred or set off in any way that tips you off - there's no way to distinguish featured from nonfeatured except by the sorting mechanism. It's easy to miss.

Exhibit C: Subscriptions. I just checked this out. You might imagine "subscriptions" to mean that you get sent notification when there's a new entry. No. You might think it means that your subscriptions list will update when there's a new entry. No. If you subscribe to a category, then on your profile, there's a little block taken up by stories sorted by the most views. This is clearly useless to any subscriber, because most views means the oldest stories, the most popular, and the ones you've already seen, and it means it's virtually impossible that any new story will show up there for months, if at all. It is, in other words, not a subscription - it's favoriting a person or category, and then displaying their most popular entries for the benefit of whoever shows up to your profile. It's more channeling to the most popular minority of stories, who will get more hits as a result, preserving their place on the list.

Other things: When you get a review or comment on a forum or anything, you're sent an email telling you, then you click the link to go to the site and see it. (It's not a bug, it's a feature!) The number of comments you get isn't displayed on a story, just the average star rating and hits. There's a similar rating system on the forums for individual posts that makes the entire page reload every time you do it - that must generate a lot of apparent views to their advertisers. I'm not sure how much of the stuff above is just there to force you through three or four page reloads/advertiser views to get to the content you want, and how much is deliberate funneling.

Whatever, it's pretty creepy.

So I wrote my first piece of bible fanfic and just posted it on Fanlib. I'm tempted to give no link, but then interested people would have to click through the site and give them extra hits, so it can be found at http://www.fanlib.com/fanfic/Traditional_Values___The_Daughters__Lot/2edlf7 (best viewed with Adblock or some similar program so they don't get advertising dollars).

I'm planning to alternative posting two story sets, "traditional values" and "contemporary themes". Because fuck them, being gay is not a "contemporary theme" that needs the same rating as small children being raped to death by zombie dogs. You want stuff that's inappropriate for kids? That'd be the actual bible, thanks.

And because I want to be noisy and annoying about it, rather than just post and move along, I toddled off to the forum they nicely set up for spamming about your fanfic, and innocently posted about my awesome new fanfic.