Fanfiction.net messed up thousands of fic

[Skydiver]

well, the words were hyphenated when i put them in there. Bear in mind, some of my fic on that site went back to 2001.

IMHO, they should have posted an announcement 'get these symbols out of your fic by......' and given us a month to do so. I coulda done a search and replace easily then, but i can't put page breaks back in when i'm reading every line of a three hundred page fic

[Khentkawes]

IMHO, they should have posted an announcement 'get these symbols out of your fic by......' and given us a month to do so. I coulda done a search and replace easily then, but i can't put page breaks back in when i'm reading every line of a three hundred page fic

I completely understand. You're right. A simple announcement would have been much better.

I had to fix a 40 page story, and that was tedious enough. But I had less than a dozen fics to fix, so I figured it was worth while. Although there are plenty of better ways I could have spent my time... like sleeping.

[Esquin]

We should go and get others to join the boycott. There is no reason for this, no coding reason or anything else. Seriously that explainaition theygave doesn't make sense and they can't jsut get awy with this. They should understand that they've pissed off people and you can't jsut go and piss off the internet like that. It's not a good idea.

[Traveler Enroute1]

Wow, sad. Checking my fics and the longer ones look a bit more condensed than I recall. Thing is, I've never figured out how to edit posted stories; it looks like the chapter has to be replaced, not just corrections added. If that's not the way of it I hope someone can tip me to the right way.

An irritating problem I've noticed of more lately is when words suddenly stick together, esp. after final uploading. I've proofed exhaustively, even tried printing the final edits and manually reading, then correcting and then posting. Only to find other words have stuck together likethis. It gives the reader the impression the writer didn't proofread, but I did, honestly!

Just sayin', I love FF.net, too. It has lots of writer friendly features like the hit count for stories and bio-page (you lookin' at me? ). Still with all the great fic sites around, I've been scouting new publishing prospects and most of the recommendations here look worthy of a try. Great discussion and suggestions, thanks. And thanks for the head's up, Sky.

[smurf]

Wow, sad. Checking my fics and the longer ones look a bit more condensed than I recall. Thing is, I've never figured out how to edit posted stories; it looks like the chapter has to be replaced, not just corrections added. If that's not the way of it I hope someone can tip me to the right way.

AFAIK you can't just hit edit on a chapter. You need to export the chapter, then edit it in the normal way in the documents section before doing a "replace chapter".

[naamiaiset]

but i'm in the process of taking all my fic down. I literally have...had, over 300 fic there. It'd take me weeks and weeks to mess with them.

same here, I'm just removing mine rather than making all the corrections... it'd take too long. nice move FF.net

[Krissie678]

I got really lucky in the fact that I just started posting there more recently and most of my stories are one shots that don't need to be seperated into scenes. I however feel really bad for all those authors I see that have tons of stories, plus it's really annoying to be reading a story and not realize there is a scene change.

[IlluZen]

Not that I'm condoning ff.net or anything, I'm surprised so many people don't keep backup copies of their fics on their computer. It's easier to fix an undamaged copy from on my computer and then re-upload it than to fix a damaged copy.

[Skydiver]

i have backup copies.

but do you have any idea how long it'd take to go go through 350 fic, deleting all my page breaks, inserting something that i THINK they will never strip, then re-uploading them?

or, even worse, editing every single one of them using thier interface which crashes and beign deluged with browser hijacking ads every few pages??

It'd take weeks.

screw em. Our fic is why they have a site and why they get money from thier aggressive ads, without us, they'd be nothing.

I would feel differently had they posted a warning 'dudes, edit your fic and you have a month to do it', but they didn't. they just sat down, ruined all the fic, and won't even say 'oops, sorry about that'. You try to e-mail them and they ignore you.

[HyperCaz]

Most of my fics went unscathed, thank goodness. The only real problem I have is with the double gap thing. Some of my earlier fics survived because I did this to divide scenes:

text

.

text

[iamdragonrider]

Are we sure *** ** *** etc doesn't work? It's just I'm uploading a piece to Helio, and my master copy has that for the dividers, but when I checked the fic on FF it was divider lines. Of course, I maay have edited it on FF before posting, my habits change from story to story it seems.

Anyway, I feel deeply for everyone that had thier hard works screwed up. They should have notified people, they usually do, and it's odd that they didn't. I can see that a search and replace would not have been effective, because there are so many differnt ways people used symbols. A search and replace would have been just as messy in my mind, imagine divider bars appearing where for instance you had a row of symbols to denote cursing ie "%?&*! you FF.net!"

Has anyone written to the site, complained, or recieved a reply?

A Boycott would do nothing without them knowing about it.

Personally though, perhaps it might have been differetn had I been the one with hundreds of fics ruined rather than the 15 or so I have now... But I don't see much use in a boycott. And Boycotts tend to have undesirable side-effects. For instance, alternate fan sites may not be able to support the increased membership and uploads. The increased bandwidth may shut them down if people start leaving FF in droves. Or it may cause FF.net to be more agressive in thier advertising to those that stay, or remove the ad blocker feature. They are after all offering many features you can't get anywhere else for nothing, when there's every reason they shouldn't even offer that ad blocker, but do so anyway.

I'm not saying don't complain. FF.net should hear from thier members and authors about how unhappy they are. I'm just saying that a boycott will affect more than just FF.net, it will affect the alternate sites and those that choose to stay.

I for one will be staying. There's just too many features (all for free) that I can't pass up. That doesn't mean that I won't also post on other sites, but I was more or less doing so before the whole FF.net thing. That and I have a large reader base at FF.net that my not know where to follow me. Almost 200 people have me on an author alert, and almost that many on thier author favorite. For the first time I've been posting a story more or less at the same time on FF, Helio, and the SG-1Littleverse. I'm getting about 15 avg. reviews per chapter at FF. I've gotten 0-3 on the other sites, and only because I threatened after the first 3 chapters to stop posting on the other sites until the story was done because I got plenty of hits, but no responses. Let's face it. I write for fun, but I post it to hear what people think.

And as much as I love Heliopolis, they annoyed the heck out of me by so frequently changing thier domain. I can't tell you how many stories I have in my "awesome stargate keepers" bookmark folder that are nothing but dead links. They also have a tendency to do those major overhauls or downtimes right when the Stargate Fan Awards come out. They may be one of the oldest, but they are far from stable, and honestly I don't trust my fic there as a single source. I've lost more than one story in those crashes or intentional downtime to trust them. They've just been crashed/hacked/or changed too much. And since I don't write true ship, and I tend to write Carter-Centric, and Idon't do slash... there aren't a heck of a lot of other places I can go, and no where with the reader base of FF.net, particularly my core group of readers, the ones that read every story and almost always leave a review. They're the ones I write for, and I'm not going to abandon them.

For myself, I think I will continue as I've done... post fic to multiple sites, and perhaps it's time I got around to finishing myown personal site. But I'll be staying primarily at FF.net, because I don't see much alternative in what else is available to me.

[Skydiver]

i complained and never got a response. Just like i never got a response when i complained about the person that left me signed feedback saying 'after unending i hate amanda and chris with all my heart'...dude, that has NOTHING to do with my fic. I complained and nothing was done.

A coupel of years ago i had to complain three times to get htem to take down someone that plagarized one of my fic.

I complained and got nothing, and, last time i looked, they have never acknowledged that their 'fix' has screwed up thousands of fic and 'we're sorry' or even if they won't apologize, they won't acknowledge that it messesd the stuff up

I have my site and yeah, i do miss the exposure that ff.net got me but how can i trust them? I put my stuff up there and they mess it up and don't care that they're messing stuff up.

i accept that they're paying the bills, but everything has to be done their way and only their way and to heck with you if you don't like it. Fine but...if it wasn't for us writing stuff they wouldn't have a site. My fic alone had hundreds of thousands of hits over the years. That's a lot of money they made off of me. And i've had stuff on that site for the better part of a decade.

my last fic....i've gotten 3 reviews/feedback for it. And i know if it was on ff.net i'd have more than that, but it comes down to respect for me. And, in the way they treat us, ff.net doesn't respect us. so why should i continue to put money in thier pockets wehn i'm not even worth the dignity of a reply?

[iamdragonrider]

I guess I'm just used to dealing with simlar sites. For years, I was an active member in MSN Groups. Consider spending hours if not days or years working on a site, and one day find you've been shut down for breach of TOS. you try to find out why, what triggered it, and you get no-where. Support went through some foriegn country halfway across the globe and you got copy/pasted and usually unhelpful replies. MSN weren't the only ones. I can't think of a free based entity of the size and scope of FF.net that doesn't have awful customer service. Most of the alternatives for stargate fanfic are run by fans for fellow fans, sorta like comparing a complaint to the head of the neighborhood assosciation to letters to the president. And the fan run sites are limited to the fan suddenly deciding they are sick of running a website, or they decide to up and move, or just plain disappear one day.

To me, FF.net had a little bit of immortality... they felt like they've been around and will continue to be that way for a long time to come.

I'm sorry they don't reply, I had hoped they were a little better. But I am glad to hear at least one person has complained. And if one person in the SG universe did so, hopefuly there will be more in other genres.

It may not help, but it was at least worth a shot. I had just wondered because I kept hearing how unhappy everyone was, and talking about boycott... but no one had mentioned if they tried contacting the administrators.

I guess also I've learned over the years that it's not personal. Some places just outgrow themselves. they start out friendly and small... but one day grow huge where you have to wade through pages of FAQ's before you can even figure out how to contact support, and even then half the time you get a bot generated answer that still doesn't answer your question...

I guess what I'm trying to say in the end is I don't support a boycott... but I do support everyone's decision to either continue to use FF.net, either as author's or readers, or to forget them and move on. Good luck to all of you in either case. May Stargate fanfiction live on forever.

[Skydiver]

anyone wants to put thier fic there, that's their business. I read stories off it, i just won't put my stuff there, nor will i recommend them to others.

I would feel differently had they just warned us. All they had to do was send out a mail to everyone and say 'you have until so and so date to fix this'. Then i'd just plug along and fix stuff.

But they have summarily taken out elipses, they've taken out all the symbols, they took out extra page breaks, they basically turned the fic into an endless stream of equally spaced paragraphs.

If it was the symbols that were an issue, they could have notified us, or they could have done a search and replace on their own.

I couldn't even tell people to 'go read it on my site' because they block and scramble every web address you try to put in. Heck, a friend and i co-wrote a fic and i couldn't even link to her part and say 'wanna read the end, go here'


I could deal with the new ratings, i could deal with re-agreeing to the rules every time i uploaded a new fic, i could deal with reviews getting lost, but this heavy handed tactic was just too much for me.

It wasn't that it needed to be changed, it was that they made this drastic change with no notice and have ignored the fact that their actions have messed up peoples' work.

If others want to use it, fine. they do what they want to do. I'll just deal with less people reading my stuff, but at least i'll have a little bit of control over it.

[sbz]

I was just as PO'd when ff.net changed everything and I wrote a rather irate e-mail which got no response. I then decided to throw my series up on an angelfire site and reuploaded the first chpater of the first story to direct new readers to that site. But then one day a reviewer commented that all my scene breaks were back. I checked it out and they were. I used ---. So in defence of ff.net, I think they've changed something back or undone something to fix, at least partially, some of what got messed up. I never looked at it in depth to see if anything other than my scene breaks were screwed up so I don't know if other special characters are back.