Archiving

[dani_the_girl]

I remember way back when I was young and green in the ways of web design, I wanted to re-do my website and learn from it at the same time, I started looking at web design blogs and they were all talking about the importance of creating table free designs. I had come in half way through and missed out on the establishing discussion so I was somewhat mystified and I ended up posting to my LJ saying "What is it about table-free design? Why is it good?" People linked me to a couple of posts and I got started from there and was converted pretty quickly.

I feel like I'm in a similar place when I ask the question "What is the point of fanfic archives?" If I've got a DW account with all my fic on it tagged under fic, do I need an AO3 account? What's the motivation behind building AO3. I feel like there are historical reasons for this stuff that I, so far, don't get. Anyone suggest where I can get started finding out? I am asking from a genuine desire to learn - I like the design and I've uploaded a couple of stories, but I'm not sure I have figured out the reasoning behind it yet.

Comments

[adina]

The motive is to make it easier for people to find stories. But honestly the idea makes me very, very nervous, because our current distributed system of stories presents no single, large target to either copyright holders or would-be censors, nor can a majority (or vocal minority) of fans shut out viewpoints or stories they object to, nor can server (or financial) trouble by one archive take out decades worth of stories.

Personally I find almost all the stories I read by searching Delicious.com bookmarks. I'd like to see a more organized database of fan fiction links but I'm not real enthused about a central archive of all fan fiction.

[(Anonymous)]

[i]...nor can a majority (or vocal minority) of fans shut out viewpoints or stories they object to...[/i]

I hadn't heard about [i]that[/i]. I'm guessing that AO3 has some kind of policy about removing potentilly racist/homophobic/sexist/transphobic/ableist content? I'm...not really sure I like that idea, to be honest. I mean, I agree that we need to work with people to try and help them become more aware of their own mindsets, but deleting fic?*

D'you have any links or anything you could give about this? I'd really like to see how it'd be implemented.

*I apologise if this wasn't what you were implying. I suppose you could be talking about some kind of public shaming thing, but that could be done on pretty much any archive, I imagine.

Passing Lurker

[princessofgeeks]

The idea behind archives is that people come and go unexpectedly; people delete their journals or change fandoms or change platforms, lose interest in one fandom or all fandoms, and yet their fanworks would be missed if they were gone as well.

also, the example of geocities -- sometimes the archives themselves disappear.

so AooO committed to being a fan run, nonprofit thing aiming for longevity and can serve as a backup. They are not trying to be or claiming to be the ONLY source for fanfic, but redundancy can be a good thing.

I like single-fandom archives, too, and use them as well as my journals.

I so intend to put all my fic on AooO when I can block out some time to start work on it.

[dani_the_girl]

Interesting. So the benefit is more to the community than to oneself per se? I can certainly see the value in redundancy though - it never hurts to have a backup. Up 'til now I've been thinking of LJ as my backup for here but now that I've taken my content off there, I will need another one.

[damned_colonial]

As I see it... you need to put your fic somewhere, right? Back in the day it might have been a Geocities webpage, or you might have your own web server or one you share with other fans, or whatever. There were also smaller (often fandom-specific) archive websites, usually run by an individual or a small group of volunteers. More recently it's been LJ or similar journalling sites, incl. DW.

The downside to your own webserver (or one shared with friends): you have to maintain it and probably pay for it. If you aren't pretty familiar with web technologies, it can be a big hurdle to learn how to do all the coding and stuff. If you get tired of hosting it and take it down, people will be sad because your fic has disappeared. And people have trouble finding your fic because it's on some obscure little website somewhere.

The downside to a small/fandom-specific archive run by a single person or small group: the same as all the above, except that maintenance is a somewhat bigger pain in the arse, because sometimes the archive software breaks for some reason, or you have to deal with user support for the people who are uploading fic to your site, or whatever. And this is just a hobby for you and your dog just died and augh! Hosting expenses are likely to be higher, because you will need better hosting features and more bandwidth. And, OK, the fic is a little easier to find than one-website-per-author, but unless you host an enormous archive like wraithbait (with all the maintenance overhead that entails), it's still not all that findable.

The downside to commercial hosted services like LJ or, yes, DW: any business offering some kind of hosting facility wants to make money. If at some point they decide that your fic is not making them enough money, or reducing their ability to make money, they will take it down. For example, advertiser pressure might make them decide that they no longer want sexually explicit fic. Even businesses that seem especially fan-friendly at first can succumb to these pressures after years and acquisitions and changes in business plan (since 2007 this has happened to (at least) LiveJournal, Geocities, and imeem). I don't really expect it to happen to DW, but it's something people are wary of, and not without cause. Also, unless a hosting service is highly fan-specific, the search facilities for finding fic may not be all that great.

So AO3 is better than a self-hosted website because:

* saves you the trouble of having your own web hosting
* saves you having to mark up your fic in HTML and know all that web stuff
* won't go away if you get tired of maintaining it/get hit by a bus/etc

It's better than a small archive because:

* all of the above, plus
* findability -- easier to search one big archive than many small ones
* larger pool of volunteers for maintenance/support

And it's better than a commercial hosted service because:

* not subject to commercial pressures (incl. advertiser pressures) to take down fanworks
* run by an organisation committed to defending fic against legal challenges (copyright, obscenity, etc)
* search and other features are specifically tailored to fannish needs

As princessofgeeks said, AO3 isn't trying to be the only archive, but it is a pretty good one IMHO, and for all the above reasons, I'm making it my main fic repository.

[dani_the_girl]

Thanks for this! It's interesting to get that longer term perspective - I think I've not been in fandom enough to be wary in the same way. I can defintely see the value of the searchability - I'm using it to find Spooks fic quite a bit at the minute.

[dodificus]

I can only speak as a reader not an author but I am *loving* the archive. If it suddenly occurs to me that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read all the available fanfic written for *insert obscure movie/book/tv show here* then instead of googling and searching through coms all I have to do is go check the tags at AO3.

It exposes me to stories/fandoms/authors that I otherwise never would have come across, I check what new works have been posted/bookmarked just about every day. It's a fantastic resource, it's like the yuletide archive but all year round:)

[dani_the_girl]

Previously, I've been doing that on delicious, but I have to admit the Archive is much easier on the eye and easier to use for that sort of thing - I've mostly stuck there in my quest for Spooks fic.

[franzeska]

*wanders by*

I take it you've missed the years of people whining about why LJ is a poor platform for fic, boo hoo hoo where have all the great archives gone, etc.? :D

I think part of the attraction is very, very long chaptered stories. I don't much like reading hugely long DW/LJ/whatever posts, and while you can certainly tag and add chapter links, most archives have better built-in chaptering systems. (I think blogs are actually superior for drabbles, especially on those "The first ten people to write me prompts get drabbles of their choice" type posts.)

Archives are attractive if you get into an obscure fandom 10 years after everyone else has abandoned it. If all the fic is on some huge archive somewhere, you can just stumble across it. If it's in a journal or a mailing list, even one with good tags or a search function, it's often pretty hard to find stuff that's older than a year or two. And it feels a bit weird to be pestering someone who has clearly abandoned their journal or who clearly hasn't thought about that fandom in years. Of course, it's nice when archives have a good feedback system, but one of the things I like best about them is that there's much less of a sense that you are necessarily interacting personally with the writer, so there's less of a sense that you ought to be friends or have anything in common with the writer other than liking their story. There's much less of a sense that the space is their space with their rules.

I find that journals lend themselves well to time-specific things like fic written in reaction to last week's episode. They're great for in jokes and fandom activities that are about genuinely being part of the same small community. If what I want is to read epic fic with a plot, there's too much of an expectation that fic = social interaction. If it's novel length, it's not social interaction: it's a novel that I'm reading for my own entertainment. If I love it, I might write a long piece of feedback afterwards, but it might very well be more like fanmail than social interaction between peers, or it might generate an interesting conversation with the author, but that might be the only time I ever feel like talking to them. Many authors are crazy and wanky as hell but brilliant writers. Or their fic is all great, but something about the style of their personal posts just makes my eyes bleed. Or they're one of the many people who doesn't tag properly or use delicious. Or they change fandoms every two weeks. I might want to read any of these people's journals, but there isn't a natural connection between that and me wanting to read their fic. It might be one or the other or neither or both.

Archives are much less personal, but part of that is that you can find things on them without special inside knowledge and that they don't tend to be very time dependent. If RL is hell for six months, I can just ignore an archive and know it will be there when I get back. If finding fic requires keeping up with LJ communities, when I come back six months later, I'm screwed (even aside from the issue of what happens to my online friendships when I stop reading people's journals for that long). Sure, tagging helps some, but I find delicious ugly and hard to use, and most people don't actually tag that well because it can be kind of a time consuming nuisance.

***

Blah blah blah. Ok, that was from the reader's perspective. From a writer's perspective, I tend to prefer the formatting on archives (yes, even fanfiction.net back in the day). I like the chapter functions. Depending on how a fandom is structured, archives might not generate the most feedback the fastest, but I'd often be posting to an archive after discussion has died down on a list or my journal or a weekly mailing list chat anyway. Archives are a way of avoiding crappy ad hoc tagging systems in favor of ones that have a bit more longevity and wider adoption. They're also a way of sharing a fic with readers over the very long term. I still periodically get feedback from MediaMiner where I haven't posted since... 2001? 2002? I certainly get feedback on the Yuletide archive for old fic. The same really isn't true of LJ unless someone on a recs community specifically links to something old of mine.

***

So, uh, in non-TL;DR summary, archives are great if you're thinking in terms of:

1. A lack of gatekeepers. You don't have to know anyone personally to find things.
2. Extreme longevity. Think 5+, 10+, 15+ years, not 2+.
3. Chapter functions, search functions, and (sometimes) formatting.

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of old metafandom posts on this topic if you're curious and you want to go poking around. People were writing about it pretty continuously from when fanfiction.net started banning things to when the AO3 started to look imminent. (And before and after too, of course, but I sense that a lot of LJ/DW discussion of archives is coming from fans who used to use fanfiction.net and are hoping for an experience like that was back in the day only without any of the problems.)

[rodo]

Archives are attractive if you get into an obscure fandom 10 years after everyone else has abandoned it.

On archives, there aren't any dead links either (at least I never noticed them). Which is great if you're looking for stories that were written 5-10 years ago. When you try to use rec lists, you'll end up with a lot of dead links, because the author moved, deleted all their fic or the platform (like Geocities) vanished.

[littlemousling]

Well, here's one: you've written at least one story in a fandom I read, and until I saw this linked on fandomnews, I'd never seen it or heard of you. (Sorry!)

I'm hugely more likely to read something posted to AO3 than something posted anywhere else; that alone is enough to make me post my stuff there. Plus, it's a really really purty archive and I love the features.

Also, I'm more likely to be able to find a fic I loved but failed to bookmark if it's there. I often find myself going, "Wait, who wrote that teacher AU?" I can google all I want, but lots of things will never come up. And I'm just not going to go back through every LJ and DW of every person I read in the hopes of stumbling upon it, you know?

Can't complain about having an advocacy group at my back, either, when I post to AO3.

[dani_the_girl]

The thing is, I saw "linked on fandomnews in this comment and got hung up on that for about 2 days! Someone linked this there?! I feel hugely flattered (and slightly unnerved :)). And I hope you enjoyed the fic :)

I've tended to use delicious for the fic finding thing, but it definitely does have it's problems, not least that the search interface is a pain even for me, a relatively web savvy person. And AO3 is (uniquely for the archives I've seen so far) easy on the eye in a very pleasing way. I guess the killer app for me will be when I can subscribe to fandoms/pairings so that I can find new stuff without remembering to check back.

[yourlibrarian]

One suggestion I'd make is that it allows fic to be more easily found. Just about every news story citing fan fiction mentions fanfiction.net because it's so high traffic. As a result, virtually everyone in every fandom knows about the site as well. That makes it easier to follow authors across multiple fandoms, or to find large bodies of fic on a particular character, pairing or fandom.

FF.net served needs at the time it was launched, but it now bans a variety of types and formats of fic, so it is no longer as inclusive as it once was. Having used the interface, I also find it terribly clunky to use in terms of uploading and utilizing one's account. I believe that AO3 has been better designed for current types of fandom usage.

Also AO3, like DW, has no ads. The LJ clones were well designed for social networking, but make for a terrible archive. DW has made improvements in that area -- improving tag searching, journal and site searching, enabling longer posting limits, etc. But the site is still designed to link people together for discussion purposes, not as an archiving system.

[jetamors]

I don't have any particular attachment to AOOO, but I prefer reading and uploading fics to archives over LJ. My reasons:

- It's much easier to find fics. On LJ, there are (sometimes) newsletters, which aren't easy to backsearch, and (sometimes) communities, which usually aren't easy to backsearch, and (sometimes) reccers who can point you to good fic, but there's no centralized way to get, say, all the SGA h/c fics over 5,000 words.

- It's much easier to follow multi-chapter fics. On LJ, some authors don't link their chapters together at all, forcing you to search through their entire journal for more chapters (or, more often, not bothering). Some people tag their fics, or put them in memories--but do they remember to tag and memory all the chapters? And some people do next/previous links or chapter summary posts, but again, those are subject to human error. There's no good automated solution. And by the same token, it's easier to upload multi-chapter fics, since I don't have to remember to link everything together.

- It's easier to separate fic stuff from personal stuff. Now, granted, it's possible to have separate fic and personal journals (and I do have separate ones in fact), but most people just mix them together. This runs into problems when, for example, someone flocks or deletes their entire journal because of some personal thing going on--maybe they didn't mean to make their fic inaccessible, but it's gone anyway.

Also, frankly, I don't always care about the non-fic thoughts of a ficcer I like. I like being able to follow someone's fic without having to hear about their cats or their thoughts on religion. I have made a lot of very good personal friendships with people through LJ and fandom, but I'm also satisfied with the relationships I have with people on FFN where I've been following them for years, but have no interaction with them outside of reading and reviewing their fic. I don't think either model is better, but I like having both options.

- Standardized headers. I like everything having a rating and a summary and a genre and a list of the major characters in it. This isn't a big deal for me, but I do like it more than the alternative.

- Hit counters. I know there's LJ Toys, but it's a pain to work with and a lot of people block it. I'm not a very comment-focused writer, but it makes me happy to see that 200 people (or whatever) have read my fic. I think it also gives writers more realistic expectations about lurkers, etc. (See for example the recent surprise at the comment:hit ratio on AOOO fics. Nobody who's posted fic on an archive with hit counters would be surprised by those ratios.) With a more elaborate counter, like the one on FFN, you can even see what countries readers are coming from, which can be really interesting.

[dani_the_girl]

Thanks for stopping by with this - it's all really interesting stuff! I think I would find AO3 a lot more compelling if it had a friends page equivalent. I assume the subscriptions feature will eventually do something like that. At the moment, I don't tend to find the serendipitous fic on AO3. The stuff that I'm looking for, yes, but I like the stuff I'm not looking for sometimes. On the other hand, that sounds like an arguement for having both DW and AO3, which is all fine and dandy :)

Here via metafandom delicious

[amaresu]

And since I have that open in another tab I'll link you to their archiving and AO3 tags. Both filled to the brim with answers to a lot of your questions if you want to poke around for a bit. There should even be a really nice meta post on just why LJ and LJ clones really suck for archiving as I believe I read that one through metafandom.

Personally I love archives. I use like 5 or 6 of them, most single fandom ones. I can go on and on about why I think archives are awesome, serve a really important fandom purpose, and why the decline of archives over the past few years has made me really sad, but I won't. To be brief: Archives provide longevity (fic will still be there years from now), they aren't subject to sudden locking and failure to unlock fic (as happens), no broken links (never seen an active archive with broken links), and they hit a lot more people then just posting to your journal does.

From a writers perspective you really are hitting more people. Because not all of fandom is on LJ/DW/IJ, lots of people rely on archives for their fic reading. It's why FF.N is still widely popular even after everything they've done in recent years. AO3 isn't trying to be your primary fic posting location, they would just like to be one of your fic posting locations. You'll hit a lot more people, people on the site will bookmark your fic and people looking at those bookmarks by favorite authors will go and read your fic (near as I can tell this is how pretty much anything of mine is read on FF.N these days as almost no one comes in through my profile), and if you take advantage of the collections and tags features people looking for something really specific might just stumble upon your fic and read it.

From a readers perspective archives are great because you don't have to interact with the writer. Not beyond a comment or two and maybe a bookmark. There's very little social expectation which is great for people with various social anxieties. Fic is often a lot easier to find, especially wrt fandoms one isn't familiar with, as you can follow your favorite author's favorite stories. You can pick out a tag you wanna read all the fic for. You can do various silly searches.

Large multifandom archives are also frequently the place to go to find the highest concentration of fics for small fandoms and rare pairings.

Anyways, just some thoughts.

Re: Here via metafandom delicious

[dani_the_girl]

Thanks for stopping by! I guess, being a newbie, I haven't had much experience of fandom outside LJ/DW yet, having mostly been in pretty large fandoms to begin with. I guess this is my chance to venture further afield :)

[executrix]

Here via metafandom. I'm really, really bad at archiving, but every time I complain about how few readers my fics get, I have to remind myself that if I had them in a convenient central place like AO3, then anyone who is interested in those fandoms (some of which are pretty small!) can find my stories when they're looking for similar stories. In fact, even the more popular writers are like "ads" for me--i.e., somebody says, "Gee, that BNF sure is a great writer...I'll see what she has on A03. Hmmm, now that I'm in the Firefly section, what else is there? Who the hell is executrix? Maybe I'll click..."

Also, if you maintain your own site, and there are technical changes, *you* have to deal with them--if your stories are on an archive (or ALSO on an archive) the archive maintainers have to deal with them.

[dani_the_girl]

That's really interesting - I'd never thought of the "ad" perspective. Thanks!

[pensnest]

Here via Metafandom, too.

I think the best thing about an archive like AO3 is that it enables readers to find fic even though they don't know the authors exist. I mean, most of my own stories were posted either in my LJ or in a suitable community. I have them effectively archived as a collection on my own website. From a starting point of Me, my stories are easy to find.

But what about the reader who's just stumbled into my fandom and doesn't know I exist, or that I've written stories? Once you've got an idea where to look, you can follow links and comms and so forth, but when you're starting out in a fandom, it can take a while to get going. Or, if the fandom's old, there may not be much in the way of active community. AO3 is easy to explore.

[glasshouseslive.livejournal.com]

But what about the reader who's just stumbled into my fandom and doesn't know I exist, or that I've written stories

Amen to this. I agree with all of the other remarks in the thread, and must say I was spoiled by masterapprentice.org.

So when I came into SPN fandom - 4 years late - I had no idea where to find anything. It is a terribly decentralized fandom.

While not everyone is going to go jump to centrally archive their fic, I'm hoping enough people do so to allow newbies a good entry into multiple fandoms.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the short answer would be:

Dreamwidth is a journaling service. This is were blog posts go.

Fic Archives are fic archives. This is were fic goes.

I could also make this post a lot longer and more elaborate and go into the fact that as a reader I absolutely HATE browsing LJ and DW. But I won't;-)

Michelle (http://michelle.fancrone.net)

[katta]

Forgive me while I take a moment to consider how long twelve years of fandom really is...

Anyway. Another voice in favour of archives as a good way of finding unexpected fic by previously unknown authors, especially multifandom archives as a way of finding rare fics. Also, in several archives there's the option to say, "Hm, I want to find fics in fandom X, that has characters Y and Z in them, are longer than 20,000 words, and would genre-wise be called hurt/comfort," and through search function, if there are any such fics in the archive, lo and behold, the fics will be found! Something I've found immensely frustrating on LJ is that I can't combine tags in my search - I can find all fics belonging to a certain tag, but I can't then limit my search further. (I think perhaps delicious is better from that perspective? Except it requires a search in several steps, which archive search often doesn't?)

[dani_the_girl]

Yeah, delicious works OK but has terrible usability. I guess the upside of it is that it requires less community buy in, but it's such a pain in the ass to use.

[the_rck]

I don't post fic on my LJ because my LJ is primarily about my day to day life. Most of my FL isn't interested in fic (and some may be actively repulsed by it. I don't know for sure). I maintain a website, but I'm glad to have AO3 as an archive, too. I tried setting up a fic journal on DW when I first came over here, but I found it awkward and counterintuitive. I'd rather use a site intended for fic.

[dani_the_girl]

Fair enough. I've ended up maintaining 2 separate journals, one for fic and my fan-life and one for my real life but that has it's own problems, so I can definitely see why some people prefer otherwise.

[ilyena_sylph]

I saw your post and wanted to pipe up with my two cents, but I see a lot of people have already said it better.

I'm still talkative enough to want to throw in, though.

I’ve been in fandom in some way or another since-- lord, 1997 or so? ((where does the time go?)) -- and so my answer is: I miss archives with lots of exclamation points all over. Maybe big sparkly text. I quite literally grew up in fandoms that were based in archives – I actually have a post about that over here on my DW. But all of those archives were personally run, and a lot of my old 'home bases' are dead, now. AO3 is set up so that it won't go defunct, which is a delight and a perpetual joy for me.

I didn't start posting fic until I was on Livejournal, mostly because I considered everything I wrote horrible, but it took me ages to get used to the livejournal interface and presentation of fiction. It still feels vaguely unnatural and wrong, despite that I’ve been around LJ (and now DW) for five years or so. It's counterintuitive to me, and especially on Livejournal, it kind of forces a closeness that I'm not actually at all interested in having with a lot of writers.

[dani_the_girl]

Thanks for piping up! I feel like I'm in the reverse position here - I started posting on LJ and my initial reading experiences were all on LJ so it's archive posting that feels vaguely clunky and odd to me. I guess I'll get used to it though :)

[jouissant.livejournal.com]

As an archivist IRL, and someone especially interested in issues of digital preservation and management of digital resources, I have to add the preservation chestnut LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). Issues that apply on the level of individual files (proprietary formats, lack of support for certain formats, etc; what if Microsoft is consumed by a black hole and I can't open my docx anymore) can be extrapolated to issues with fanworks- what happens when the platform (LJ, DW, etc.) is no longer fan-friendly due to financial contraints, changes in mission/ownership/etc? What happens when/if LJ folds? As with Geocities, lots of dead links.

A fan-run, dedicated archive seeks to take some of these questions off the table.

[dani_the_girl]

Interesting - thanks. Backups are always good, it's true

[zing_och]

Heh - I come at this from a very "historical" perspective, and as a reader, not a writer, so it's great to see a completely different point of view!

My completely selfish answer, btw, would be: because it won't disappear and I'll get to read cool fic forever and ever! And basically everything else other people have said. *g*

[dani_the_girl]

I don't expect DW to disappear either, but I can see the value of having backups :)

[amalnahurriyeh]

Let me give an example from my fandom, The X-Files (apologies if someone else's talked about this before, haven't read all the comments). We have a central archive called The Gossamer Project. Anyone who wants can submit their fic, and it will be uploaded; it's also uploaded automatically from our major centralized posting location (Ephemeral). While a lot of fic isn't up there, I'd say that the majority is, probably as much as 80% of the het and gen written during the series's run (less for the slash, as there were slash-specific archives, and also a lot of shipping wars), and at least 50% of what was written post-series.

What it means is that, I, Amal Q. Fangirl, can watch an episode, like it, and then go to Gossamer's sort by episode spoilers function, and get a whole page of fic that is set post that episode. If I find a story I like, I just click on the author's name, and I get taken to the page with all of her fic on the archive. It means if someone mentions in passing that they like work by such-and-such an author, I can go to Gossamer and see if her stuff's there. It means that, although our fandom was pretty hard-hit by the Geocities closure, much of our fic was already safe, because it was at Gossamer.

Archiving your fic is about giving it a bigger audience, preserving it for future generations of fans, etc, etc, etc. I mean, I'm one to talk, since I've never submitted to Gossamer (because it's archetecture really sucks, IMHO, and I'm a relatively new fan who's not so willing to give up things like HTML coding for my fic). The benefit of AO3 is that it's a ready-made archive for any fandom, and that people who write in more than one fandom can archive their fic there all in one place. (I haven't uploaded to AO3 yet, but will, probably, inshallah, at some point.)

[dani_the_girl]

Interesting example - thanks! It's odd - I don't even know what the archives would be for the fandoms I'm in (Torchwood, Stargate), but this makes me wonder if they're out there.

[rusty_halo]

I just got into Farscape, which was canceled something like five years ago.

It took a while to find a rec list of Farscape fic that was 1) written by a reccer with taste similar to mine and 2) listed a lot of stories 3) that were written well.

Alas, something like 3/4 of the links on this list were broken, and 1) weren't at archive.org, 2) didn't show up in a Google search. They were posted on archives that had closed, journals that had been renamed, forums that had shut down, personal sites that had disappeared. They were effectively gone forever.

So even though I could read the title and summary and the reccer's comments about how AWESOME AND BRILLIANT a story was, I couldn't actually read it. SO FRUSTRATING.

If AO3 had existed then and everyone had been archiving there, the links wouldn't be broken and I'd have been able to read all that awesome fic that I missed because I got to the fandom five years late. For fandoms that are happening now, AO3 means that in five years, newbies actually *will* be able to find all the classic fic their hearts desire.

*loves AO3*

[dani_the_girl]

The rec-cing feature is nice. I just have to figure out a way to find rec-cers who's taste fits mine now :)

[cschick.livejournal.com]

A blog/journal is your soapbox, while an archive is a library.

That doesn't mean that your fiction shouldn't be posted to both. But it stands differently in the two places. In your journal, your fiction stands surrounded by other types of writing you have done, while on an archive, it stands surrounded by other pieces of fiction by other authors.

The additional advantage, or disadvantage, to a general archive (verus a personal site) is the strength of outside support to keep work available. Whether you consider that an advantage or disadvantage is based on how you regard your fiction, and what you view your "responsibility" (I don't like that word, but can't currently think of a better one) to fandom and the future of that fandom.

I started out in the 1990s in fandom. There were fandoms that embraced (public/centralized) archiving, and fandoms that shunned archiving. Now, in 2010, a good majority of the fiction that was written in the fandoms that embraced public archiving is still available, and the majority of the fiction that was written in fandoms that shunned public archiving is completely gone. The reality of that situation really hit me hard recently--in the mid to late 1990s, I was heavily involved in two fandoms, one that shunned public/centralized archiving (as well as usage of public forums like usenet) and one that did not. When I want to go back and reread fiction written in the fandom that embraced archiving, it's there. When my personal gift of the full series on dvd got me all fannish about the other fandom . . . it really hit me that the fandom/fan fiction as it existed was 99% gone. I was looking for post-episodes for an episode which was one of the biggest fic "inspirers" back when I was involved, and I found four stories on the whole web. Holy heck, there were more than four stories posted to various mailing lists in the three hours after that episode originally aired!

But the mailing lists were explicitly not archived, the authors who wanted to archive were strongly encouraged to only do personal sites of their own fiction. And it's all gone now--probably thousands of pieces of fan fiction. Centralized archives/archives with support other than an individual author can provide a continuity, a way to keep a fandom alive and available even if there's only a few people interested in it at any particular time. But you need to decide whether you want yourself and your fiction involved in that continuity.

[amalthia]

I lost the entire Pretender section of the Angst Archive because the authors didn't want me to host their fics on the site so I linked to their stories. I normally save everything that goes up on the Angst Archive but for some reason these 6 stories weren't. So when I switched the archive over to efiction I went looking for the stories and poof they were gone. Right now at the Angst Archive I think I have about 20 stories I can't find anywhere else online...

I'm also a big fan of archives because I just recently watched Due South and there were archives of fan fiction to explore when the bug hit me. :)

[azurelunatic]

Discovery is the key point for me, and it benefits me both as a reader and as a writer. I have an easier time discovering stories by more than one author in a fandom I like, on a topic I like, when they're organized in an archive. Recs lists serve a similar purpose, but those are always limited by the time of the curators. As a writer, if I put my stuff on a large archive, or a specific archive, I potentially benefit from anyone coming into the archive who might discover my works, vs. searching via recs and search engines for specifically the topic on which I've written.

I'm looking forward to the point when AO3's reader-bookmarking improves to Delicious-level or better usability, and I hope to be able to synchronize my AO3 and Delicious bookmarking, because I depend on these things for the proper functioning of my brain. Also, there are people who look to me for recommendations, and I want that to be as easy for them as possible.

Organization isn't a small thing either; I write so very little fanfic -- maybe 20 pieces over 10 years? -- that someone looking through my journal is going to have a very hard time of it, even when I do tag things.

Gossamer used to rule my life. It was a one-stop shop for my entire addiction. This was pre-LJ, in 1997, 1998, and before I discovered LJ up to 2001. There were other places to go, but my internet time was limited, and I wanted fic *now*, and not to spend too much time hunting it down.

AO3 could probably win back my attention from literotica.com if it created a voluntary tickbox or something apart from the warning categories, a "is this story intended to be smutty?" category, because "has explicit sex" is different than "this is smut, you may wish to read this from your bunk".

[cesy]

For your last point, could that be done with a tag, if enough people used it when writing or bookmarking?

[viklikesfic]

Looks like you've got plenty of answers anyway, but I'll add my own two cents. I was also kind of sceptical, since I have all my fic on DW and LJ and tagged extensively on delicious. The conclusion I've come to is that AO3 is a good thing mostly for the readers because it's a (hopefully) stable site that's easy to navigate, it'll keep stuff around, and it at least has the potential to be one central repository for all the fanfiction. The tagging system is pretty excellent because though people can tag fic on individual DWs and LJs, there's no one place to say "give me everything with this tag." It's also nice because you can say "show me all the Spock/Uhura fic rated NC-17" or whatever. For writers, I think there can be something of a benefit in that it might bring you a bigger audience through this tagging system. Personally, I'm a prolific author but I don't have a huge fanbase, so AO3 is good in that people stumble upon things through tags. It also has a hit counter so I can see how many read a story, not just who commented. And I find the automatic word counts kind of neat.

[dani_the_girl]

Yeah, this basically sounds very like the conclusions I'm coming to, after reading all these comments :)

[starwatcher]

.
For me, it's a way to keep my stories available even after I'm gone (either left fandom or died). I've given my password and permission to move stories to a younger fandom friend... but what if she loses interest, or dies?

Archives aren't foolproof - look at those we lost when Geocities closed shop - but they're more likely to be stable. And AO3 has been built specifically to host fanworks longterm, to the point of buying their own servers.

(I think that was the impetus behind AO3 - fandom had seen too many people forced to move when their sites' new management decided slash wouldn't be allowed. There was a lot more, but that's the one that resonates.

It's another big plus that authors who are multi-fandom can have all their fic in one archive, instead of spreading it around different specific-fandom archives.)

I've been in the position of hearing about a well-liked story... but it isn't on the web anymore. Not that I think I'm anything special when it comes to fanfic, but my stories are my gift to fandom, and I want them to hang around, dammit! (Expressing my determination to the universe, there; not yelling at you.)
.

[dani_the_girl]

Yeah, I think I'm like the reckless teen who says "hey, but that'll never happen to me!" :) In all seriousness, I do expect DW to be around for the long haul, but it never hurts to have a back up :)

[missdeanna]

Here via metafandom.

A lot of people have brought up things that I can relate to. But specifically:

As a reader:

AO3 is pretty easy to navigate. With fic comms on sites like LJ and DW, not everyone posts to the same comms so you sometimes have to follow several to find new fic. And sometimes it can be hard to spot fic in busy comms. And unlike fanfiction.net, AO3 provides a lot more criteria to find stuff you're interesting.

As others have pointed out, other sites don't always hold up to the test of time. Some older personal or fandom-specific archives have disappeared because, for example, they were hosted on something like Geocities. And having recently gotten into an older fandom, I've been frustrated with how many LJ fic posts have been deleted or changed to friends only. AO3 is still pretty new, so there's no way of knowing what will happen to it five years from now, but it seems like the maintainers are keeping this stuff in mind.

As a writer:

I find it really easy to upload to AO3 for the most part, which I love.

It's also nice to have places that I can just post my fic. My LJ used to be entirely for fic, but over time I've gotten to know people somewhat and I've used it for more personal things, as well.

But mainly, anything that puts my fic out there for people to see is a good thing, I think. I want my fic to get read, and AO3 provides more opportunities for that. I still post my stuff on my journals and use comms, but AO3 is a nice addition.

[dani_the_girl]

Yeah, I take your point. I used to have an obsession with only having feedback in one place but now that I'm cross posting to LJ anyway, I've got over that, so I might as well reach more people.

Here from metafandom...

[marlenanke]

I have not read the other replies because they are long and I have a very simple point I want to make in a lurk-free moment of my existence here. Thus, I will do that and move on.

To me, the future of fandom has always seemed to be in the existence of archives for fan fiction. Journals are not dependable entities, more so after strikethrough and other LJ-related wank/drama. People are, equally, not dependable. Fics gets lost and we are left with broken links. Same goes for personal websites that are devoted to a selection of authors or fic. An archive such as AO3 gives the illusion of security. In a way, it is. Of course, there will come a time when even that will no longer be true, but it strikes me as a good option for the moment, especially for newbies to any fandom who just want to find something to read in a community-type environment.

...and that's kind of my point. I am quite the AO3

Re: Here from metafandom...

[marlenanke]

--supporter. ;)