... WHAT.

[sholio]

Hat tip from tipper_green -- ff.net (as of March 22nd) has apparently removed all of the "---" and other special characters that people (including me) used to use for scene breaks. (I noticed that my "<hr>" scene breaks are still in there, though.)

Which means that right now, we look like idiots because our stories are just giant blocks of text without transitions between scenes. And those of us who write long stories, or a lot of stories, are in the worst boat ...I'm not sure if it's even worth going back to edit stories that I wrote 6 and 7 years ago, but the alternative is leaving them up in "giant block of text" format.

Grrrrrrrrr.

Comments

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Yeesh! The grammer police are going to have a field day with this.

I've been finding myself kind of drifting away from posting stuff on FF.net (more because, lately, it seems the shippers have been taking over the SGA fandom. Which is exactly what happened to the CSI:NY fandom on FF.net.) Problem is, FF.net, for me, is the easiest place to post. With LJ I have to be careful about the length of the post, and with Wraithbait I keep getting that wierd AEC*bunch of other funky letters* in place of quotation marks and have to manually fix them before posting - which is torture with a chapter fic.

[sholio]

I thought ff.net was great back in 2000. Since then, there have been ever more reasons to drift away from it -- the upload interface getting harder and harder to deal with, the increasing content restrictions and story removals. (I had one of mine pulled 3-4 years ago for disallowed content -- it was a PG13-rated story with a torture scene. I think it would have flown just fine in SGA fandom, but it happened to be in an anime fandom with an apparently more sensitive readership, since somebody reported me.) It's getting where I don't bother posting most of my new stories there, except the ones I particularly liked and wanted to share with a wider audience.

[ratcreature]

Couldn't you disable the curly quotes in your Word Processor and just use the plain " for everything? Surely the they can't mangle that.

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Wait, what? Argh. Well...It's not like I've been writing anything lately, and maybe going back to proofread my old stuff will inspire me again. But wow, did not need to add this to the to do list. Thanks for the heads-up.

[sholio]

I just wish they'd given US a heads-up! I mean, how hard is it to use the messaging system to send out some kind of notification a few weeks before they went live with the new code? Then we'd knew we had to fix or take down our stories.

[greyias.livejournal.com]

I think I can say "WORD", once again. It's the apparent "idiocy" to the readers I think that annoys me the most. I put it a decent effort to try and make things readable and flow for whatever site I post something on, and perhaps it's a failing of mine as a writer, but I scene break like crazy.

Agh, just... agh.

I think what ticks me off even more are the really old stories from authors who have probably moved on to other things will now be permanently marred, and if they're not housed off FFnet, no one will be able to read them in the way they were originally intended.

[sholio]

I think what ticks me off even more are the really old stories from authors who have probably moved on to other things will now be permanently marred, and if they're not housed off FFnet, no one will be able to read them in the way they were originally intended.

I know! And since there was no notification, everyone is just dependent on word-of-mouth to find out about it, which means that even people who are still actively writing might go for months or years without knowing.

One of the big reasons why I archive stuff on ff.net is, well, because I think of it as an ARCHIVE -- websites change and move, but I like having permanent homes for my stories, especially my older stories. Knowing that stories are being modified and edited and even deleted without warning totally removes that benefit.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

What the hell???

"o o o" still works, at least. Since they can't really strip the letter "o" out of it. Which is what I was using for a while. Still...why the hell did they do this??? I'm still trying to figure out why they lost asterixes to begin with, are they really that terrible? I hate the way HR tags look to break scenes...

[sholio]

I assume that it's probably something to do with their coding -- I know that special formatting of various types can make coding more difficult when you're trying to deal with writing an interface for users to upload/modify things. But for pete's sake, if that's what it is, why can't they just SAY so and give us warning so we know we have to take down or fix our stories? And having stories that are already on the site, and have been there for years, modified without notification, really ticks me off.

[sgatazmy.livejournal.com]

*eye twitching*

Argh! I'm this close to taking my stories down and putting them up on my site only... *more eye twitching* Argh!

Oh, I send the turtles to you today. Sorry it took so long. I including a wedding photo of me because I need to get rid of the darned things and have nothing better to do with them. I'm silly like that.

[sholio]

Thank you! No need to apologize -- I've been so busy lately I haven't been watching much TV anyway. And I'll look forward to seeing the picture too! :)

I think at this point, the only reason why I'm not just going and taking my stories down is because I don't want to lose the reviews. Well ... that and I don't want to look like I'm throwing a temper tantrum over it. But I'm damn close.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Gah! That doesn't affect me as I always use HTML line breaks, but jeez! I noticed, though, that they finally did start allowing / in summaries again. It used to take it out and mush the names up, but now it shows.

I defend FFN a lot, because I hate when people act as if the only thing on there is badfic and the only reviews you'll get are chatspeak squeeing. I post there whenever I can and the reviews I get are no different from what I get on LJ; there are literate people there who want to read good fic, and if you post it, chances are they will be thrilled to find it.

But stuff like this is just so stupid and argh, argh, argh.

[sholio]

Yeah, I know -- I find myself defending it too, and getting frustrated by the "You post at ff.net? Ewww!" reaction that you get in some circles. It's just another venue for fic, and there IS good fic over there; just like anywhere, you have to rely on recs and favorites to sort the wheat from the chaff, but that's true on LJ and everywhere else, too.

But this is on the verge of being a "straw that broke the camel's back" thing for me. I've had stories deleted, I've suffered through ever-more-restrictive updates, I've put up with the removal of NC-17 stories and the defaulting to show only PG-13 and under stories and various other STUPID content restrictions, and I've kept working to figure out my way around their upload interface as they get more and more restrictive about what characters you can't include in a file. And now to know that stories I posted years ago can be arbitrarily edited in such a way as to make me look like a moron who doesn't proofread her files when she uploads them ... GAH. I mean, if I hadn't been notified by my flist, I would have gone my merry way for months or years, with no clue what had happened to my old stories.

I don't see myself pulling my fic off the site in a huff, but I'm really not sure if I'm going to be posting new stories there anymore. And that's a big thing for me, especially since once upon a time (circa 2000) I was wildly enthusiastic about ff.net and talking it up to everybody.

[naye]

WHAT.

I have no words. I might be twitching a little, but I don't really have words.

Urge to post to ff.net... almost less than nothing! (Hmmm. Maybe it's about time that I made use of my webspace?)

But this is apparently retroactive? So if you've got a million words posted to the site, they expect you to go back and fix ALL your scene breaks so that it fits with these new rules? Really? Really?

I feel so sorry for those of you who do have long stories up there that used dashes...!

[sholio]

I know! Gaahhhhhhh! It's the retroactive thing that gets to me (well, and the lack of notification). I mean, if they changed it so that future stories couldn't use dashes, that's one thing -- it wouldn't really be any different from a lot of changes they've made in the past (you used to be able to include URLs and asterisks and a bunch of other special characters that the upload interface no longer recognizes). But to apparently reformat all the existing stories to conform to the new standards ... WHY???? It would make it so much better if they'd just EXPLAIN it, like "We migrated to a new database and stories can't include special characters because it screws with our code" or something. But this .... raaargh. And unlike LJ, ff.net doesn't have anywhere you can go to tell them how ticked off you are. You can send an email, but I doubt if that'll help (and actually, the last time I needed to send them an email for tech support, I couldn't even find anywhere to do it!).

I doubt if I'll be pulling down my stories in a huff, but posting new ones ... I really don't feel like doing it anymore! I might move to LJ and website-only, and it makes me sad because I've been posting to ff.net and defending it against its detractors since 2000, but I've really had it.

[ratcreature]

That sucks.

[sholio]

It frustrates me in part because I've defended ff.net to its detractors for years, and they just keep doing stupider and stupider things, with less and less regard for their userbase. Grahhh.

[lavvyan.livejournal.com]

Oh, hmm, stupid changes with no announcement? So, content strike?

*runs away*

[sholio]

ahahaha ... yes, after all my comments about LJ I totally have it coming too. XD

*throws fruit after fleeing lavvyan*

[blade-girl.livejournal.com]

Whew! I just checked about half of my ff.net stories, and it appears that even in my oldest posts, I used some combination of zeroes and lower-case o's to delineate between sections. The best-looking of these seems to be "oo0oo0oo," which looks (to me) like a divider almost as much as something like "----" or "******". Plus I bet it is safer and less able to be coded out in the future.

I tend to defend ff.net too, despite its archaic site and byzantine submission procedures. I wouldn't want it to be my only venue, but I feel safer having fic in at least two places, and it's easy for people to find and easy for readers to use. But to mutilate the external structure of stories with no warning is unacceptable. They should have treated their content providers with a little more respect than that.

[sholio]

I know. *sigh* It's just gotten to the point that their rules are so Byzantine and arbitrary that it's hardly worth trying to figure them out and remember them all.

[(Anonymous)]

*sigh*

What purpose does it serve ff.net to remove codes like ----- and **** and by doing so mess up the format of half their archive? Absolutely none as far as I can tell, and it will just turn people away. I am on ff.net less and less, but it does have some good features, like 'story alert' for WIP's. Too bad.

(On an upnote, the Girl Scout Cookie rec was hysterical and the highlight of my morning. *still laughing*).

[trystings.livejournal.com]

ahum. Anonymous was me.

[wneleh.livejournal.com]

I've never posted to ff.net, and had been contemplating asking you if you thought it was worth the bother. Um... starting fresh, is it?

- Helen

[sholio]

Yeah ... It's still a way of increasing readership, but I'm not sure if it's worth the hassles. I wouldn't necessarily say don't do it, but I doubt if I'll be posting more stories there.

[fitzwiggity.livejournal.com]

I've already posted something on Tipper's page of comments on the subject, but I just thought of something else to add...
Even IF they'd sent us e-mails, we'd still all be in the same boat, and still be pissed off at them because they're changing things (Yet, AGAIN, I might add) and we would still have the same problem of having to go back and do it all over again, fix all the errors, etc.
Still...I would (and so would others) want to here from them about problems like that. Why not use the e-mail and at least forewarn us? Or is that too much to ask for?

[sp23.livejournal.com]

Ah, another reason to stay far, far away from the evil ff.net.

[leesa_perrie]

Stupid ff.net! I'm going to put in a line of 8's as a break. It's not ideal, but I haven't the energy to try and work out their break thingie. Trouble is, as far as I can tell, I either a) delete the story and repost it (losing my reviews) or b) post revised story as a new chapter (or chapters) and then delete the old one(s) and rename the new one(s) (that way I keep my reviews) or c) not bother.

Is it just me, or can you not edit the story once it has been submitted, only the chapter title and summary details? If I use option a) or b) everyone who's asked to be contacted when I add something new gets a 'new story' or 'new chapter added' email, which is misleading and might confuse some people. I have put an explanation on my profile (and a protest), but it's all just so very, very frustrating! (Making an effort here not to swear, 'cos I really do want to!)

Stupid site - but I do have some followers on there so I feel I can't let them down and just delete everything in a fit of pique.

Wish I could email everyone who has fav'ed me to say go look up my stuff on one of the followings sites as I'm leaving ff.net...but I don't think I can.

[sholio]

... oh god, I hadn't even thought of that! Um, isn't there an edit link next to each chapter when you're in the edit story information area, or am I mis-remembering? Because if I'm going to have to re-upload everything, that's really not worth doing.

[leenys.livejournal.com]

I got to where I use an "x" line to mark the breaks. Suppose I need to check. Thanks for the heads up! Course if it's messed up it's gonna stay that way. Heh.

[sholio]

Your x's ought to be all right ... I know that people who used o's and other letters seem to be doing fine (for now). I'm halfway to just leaving them alone ... it hardly seems worth the bother to change everything.

[tipper-green.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to add, except that I love that your tag for this is "crazyflakes" ROFL!

Hey -- maybe we can hire some college kid to reformat the stories for us? LOL!

[drufan.livejournal.com]

Yeah I noticed that one of my stories had the --- taken out...had much the same reaction...people are going to think I'm an idiot. I might just put up on the profile page that the breaks have been removed, so sorry. Ain't going back through and replacing. Too many multi-chaptered fics. Grrr.