Fanfiction.net messed up thousands of fic

[Skydiver]

To those of you that have fic on fanfiction.net ... go and check your stuff.

In the last few days, the admin of the site has decided to strip ALL symbols out of the stories. Inclluding the ones we've used to separate scenes. so stuff like *** or /\/\/ or anything like that are now gone. To my understanding, special characters are now stripped as well....like the fancy C in facade or the accented e in cafe (so it's now faade and caf)

All of my fic that i've checked are now an unreadable mess. because all the spaces where those symbols were are now gone too so it's just an endless parade of paragraphs....with no idea when the scene breaks.

I don't see how i can fix my fic, i just have too many and it'd take me weeks to reformat them all. But those of you with fewer fic might want to check them out and make sure your stuff is okay.

they quoted the reason for doing this is that some of the symbols were interfering with upgrades they wanted to do...so they went through and stripped ALL non-letters from ALL thier works.

Chances are, the vast majority of hundreds of thousands, if not millions ,of works are now totally frakked up.

Those of you that use letters for your scene breaks XXXXXX or SJSJSJSJ or the like should be okay, but anything that's not a letter or number is now gone.

[sg1psychopath]

Oh dear, that's mine messed up then.

I don't get how it would interfere. I'm not an expert programmer but I program enough to know that to avoid special characters causing problems, all you have to do is escape them. All they'd have to do was use a find and replace script to replace all special characters (ie *) to the character with a slash in front (ie \*). If they don't even store the fic in a database, I don't even see what the problem is!

[prion]

To those of you that have fic on fanfiction.net ... go and check your stuff.

In the last few days, the admin of the site has decided to strip ALL symbols out of the stories. Inclluding the ones we've used to separate scenes. so stuff like *** or /\/\/ or anything like that are now gone. To my understanding, special characters are now stripped as well....like the fancy C in facade or the accented e in cafe (so it's now faade and caf)

All of my fic that i've checked are now an unreadable mess. because all the spaces where those symbols were are now gone too so it's just an endless parade of paragraphs....with no idea when the scene breaks.

I don't see how i can fix my fic, i just have too many and it'd take me weeks to reformat them all. But those of you with fewer fic might want to check them out and make sure your stuff is okay.

they quoted the reason for doing this is that some of the symbols were interfering with upgrades they wanted to do...so they went through and stripped ALL non-letters from ALL thier works.

Chances are, the vast majority of hundreds of thousands, if not millions ,of works are now totally frakked up.

Those of you that use letters for your scene breaks XXXXXX or SJSJSJSJ or the like should be okay, but anything that's not a letter or number is now gone.

As Sheppard would say, 'oh crap.'

[prion]

They even took the '/' out of the descriptions you find on the front page (where stories are listed). Aieeee.... wow. This sucks. Glad I back 'em all up but now to see if I used the < HR > for all my breaks...

[Lauriel]

Thanks for the heads up, Sky.

[Pegasus_SGA]

Thanks for the heads up, Sky. Poor you. I don't blame you not wanting to go back and do all the formatiing again. Nice of them to give us warning. I just checked mine.... thankfully they all seem to have come out unscathed.

*breathes a sigh of relief*

[Esquin]

I know enough about prgraming that the difference between a symbol and a letter as far as coding goes is pretty much nil. That reasoning is them covering up for soemthing they probably didnt need to do.

So, boycott?

[*Erika*]

*grumbles* Now I have to edit all those stories? With all those chaps.... I knew I shouldn't have used *s...

[Lorr]

Thanks, Sky. Yep, they even took out simple dashes ---.

There is a certain place in hell for people that do such things.

[Skydiver]

asterisks won't work either. ALL symbols are gone.

Extra line breaks are stripped...so you can't even do the

scene one





scene two


bit. it gets turned into

scene one

scene two

The only thing i can recommend to folks, check out Heliopolis

http://www.sg1-heliopolis.com/

It's one of the oldest archives out there and accepts everything but slash. gen fic, ship fic, het adult fic and atlantis fic.

For those that want slash, http://www.area52hkh.net/ is the oldest and probably largest slash archive out there.

http://sjalways-forever.jackandsamforever.net/

is a sam and jack archive - be it friendship or smut

www.jackfic.net is for the more jack centric fic - just not adult jack fic

And i know there's some large atlantis archives out there.

Unless they fix this, I'm not going to put anything else of mine on ff.net.


and yeah, they could have done a search adn replace to take out the characters and replace them with their new page breaks or something else. It's like they don't care and are doing everything they can to mess things up.

[Killdeer]

Here's some suggestions about Atlantis archives:

Wraithbait is the largest Atlantis archive that I know of (going on 7000 stories as of this post). It accepts gen, het, and slash (and about half their stuff IS slash), but check the rules. They do have minimum quality standards and other restrictions such as no real person fiction and no character bashing.

The Jumper Bay is a gen only site for Atlantis fic, with almost 600 stories.

Stargatefan, an older SG-1 site that has been inactive for a few years, is recently active again with a new automated archive, and is accepting Atlantis fic. Be aware, however, that Stargatefan's definition of gen is no romantic relationships between the characters (which is why it used to be a favorite site of mine), rather than just no adult situations which is how many other sites define gen.

And there's Atlantica, with over 1000 stories. I know very little about this site except that it apparently accepts gen, het, and slash.

[Lorr]

Thank you for the site recs, Sky and Killdeer. I may do a quick post to let people know my LJ once I get it sorted out, and wherever else I decide to move my stuff, and then say goodbye to FF. For some strange reason, I've had a few people tag me for story alerts (very kind of them!).

[cheese]

Well my immediate reaction was burst of loud colourful language. What the merry hell do they think they're playing at? All my stories are now huge nonsensical paragraphs.

It's such a huge slap in the face to all their users. Where was the warning? Where was the consideration for their own users?

[sg1psychopath]

[shameless plug]For anyone that writes long fic (over 24000) words, you could also check out my new archive. I know it doesn't look that great at the moment, but I'm also working on a non eFiction version that will be tons better, and will still have any stories you upload now. *pokes sig*[/shameless plug]

And if there's a boycott, I'll join. Haven't logged into the place for years anyway, and all my fic that's up there is a load of rubbish. Stupid people, thinking this was a good idea, and that no one would mind them messing up all our fics!

[gater101]

I have only started checking mine... it's my breaks that are away... GREAT fan fic.net. Just great.