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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[princessofgeeks]

well, i'm not sure how to answer the idea of "how does using this archive benefit me?" except that each archive may have its own audience, so that the audiences for, say Area 52 and AooO overlap some but not completely, so each new archive you use can give you new readers.

So there's that.

I guess for me personally, using an archive, putting my fic there, reading and commenting there, is a way of supporting that part of my fandom. each archives users, posters and readers is a kind of community, a "place" where I participate in fandom and give things of value (fic and feedback) and have communication with my fellow fans.

so there is that too. i love everything about OTW, so using their archive is a way of being part of them. I love the SG1 slash community, so using area 52 is a way of being part of that.

and the whole back up thing, yes, that too.

does that help?

[dani_the_girl]

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that a community benefit wasn't valuable - it certainly makes sense, it's just less immediate :)

I don't get so much of a community feel with AO3 as I do here but I guess that will come as things like subscriptions are implemented.

[damned_colonial]

*nodnod* ... there's a direct connection from those hosted services taking stuff down to OTW setting up the archive. Strikethrough '07 was one of the direct precursors to the foundation of OTW and the rallying cry, "We need to own the servers!" But even before that (2002 says Wikipedia) fanfiction.net banned adult-rated fic... see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net#Disallowed_fanfiction_and_bans for more information. (Interesting that Wikipedia notes that many people fled to Livejournal, heh.)

[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.)

[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.

[littlemousling]

Just wanted to say, this is a fantastic summary.

[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.

[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.

[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]

This is all interesting stuff - thanks! I'm definitely coming from a perspective of someone who hasn't really been in fandom to speak of for 2+ years yet so I'm still feeling my way around the implications of this type of stuff.

As a reader of fic (similar time frame), I've tended to get into fandoms via an author rather than the other way around so finding fic hasn't been so much of an issue, more a case of branching out from person a to person a's flist. Just recently is the first time I'm getting fannish about something I don't already know people who are fannish about (which is partly what's lead to me getting more curious about questions like these).

Anyway, thanks for stopping by and taking the time to write!

[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.

[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.

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.

[torachan]

Right now AO3 is still getting going, but I think eventually it will be better than delicious because it's made with fandom in mind. On delicious, you have non-fandom stuff mixed in, so it can make things hard to search for. Fandom names and pairings might be somewhat easy (though for fandom names you will still come across non-fanfic stuff, and for, say, Supernatural, you could find stuff tagged that which has nothing to do with the show at all), but say I want to find fic about a certain thing, well, that's pretty hard on delicious since if I click on a general BDSM tag, say, it's going to get me all sorts of non-fanfic BDSM stuff.

There's also the fact that delicious tags don't have any sort of order. So if I want to search for Stargate: Atlantis fic about John and Rodney, I'm going to be clicking tags for John/Rodney, Rodney/John, McShep, McKay/Sheppard, Sheppard/McKay, JohnSheppard/RodneyMcKay, John_Sheppard/Rodney_McKay, John.Sheppard/Rodney.McKay, etc. etc. On AO3, those are all wrangled together, so however the author tags their fics, I can just click on the Rodney McKay/John Sheppard tag and see all those other options together.

For readers, I think that's a big advantage.

[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.

[aigoos]

Agreed :) As someone who ran an archive by herself, it was a pain to update it and whatnot, and interests do wane, so having AO3 do something like this is a nice service to have!

[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.