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

[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 :)

[jetamors]

Yeah, I would like it if it had some way to update you on new fics posted by authors you want to follow. I know some archives will email you whenever a fic or author you follow makes a new update, but I'm not sure if there are any that have a RSS feed/friends page-like format for it.

I've read some fics on AOOO--mainly Yuletide--but it doesn't really have enough of the kind of fic I like (yet?) for me to spend days wandering through it, the way I have with some other archives. It may become more useful to me as it grows bigger, though.