... 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

[sholio]

... wait, HTML isn't supported anymore? Of all their options, it's the only one that I actually can do without a whole lot of converting. *vex*

You could just do a find-replace to the "hr" tag, though. It shouldn't be that hard ... just an extra step.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

The HR tag only works if you are uploading as an HTML doc (which is supported again, my mistake about that.) I've been uploading as a Word doc, which saves me an extra step, except that there is, as far as I can tell, absolutely no way to upload a word doc with the hr tag. You're supposed to be able to put "---" and have it be converted to an HR tag, but it doesn't work. ARGH.

...that's it, I'm using "o o o".

[sholio]

Yeah, but that'll only work until they figure out THAT and start stripping it out ...

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it's going to be hard for them to strip it; it's not like they can just remove all little 'o's from a document! maybe I should just use one...

(I also don't see the point of stripping it. Needing to remove special chars for formatting purposes I get...though dashes are hardly 'special chars'...but why demand that everyone use only HR for scene breaks? It's not like they do any special processing of chapter sections - they don't even have a print story feature anymore! I can't imagine any kind of html encoding that matters for, nor how it would help spammers in any way, so...is it just to make all stories on the site look identical in formatting? Why do they care?)

[sholio]

Well, they deal with it in reviews by stripping out strings of the same letter -- I don't know if you ever noticed that. You can't type "eeeee" or "aaaaagh" into a review because it gets knocked down to "e" or "agh". The only rationale I can think of for that is to stop people from typing very long strings of letters that go all the way across the screen (which I remember you used to get back before they disallowed it), but WHY? I've been trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume that there's some rational coding reason for it, but hell, maybe they're just trying to standardize all the documents on the server, which would just be completely silly.

So I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they might eventually start stripping out more than two o's in a row, especially if a lot of people pick that up as an alternate formatting method (which was exactly what happened with '-----' after asterisks were disallowed.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

I've seen a few people use o0o0o0o, so they might catch on, though my o's are spaced apart (I think in reviews you can still get away with "e e e," though I've never tried?) At any rate, I'm counting on them stripping them the same way they do the reviews - reducing 3 o's to one. Which means I'd still get my scene-break, so no problem! But they might be too wily in their efforts to standardize every document on the site - which has to be what they're going for, I can't see any other reason for this...it's not like there's any web-browser than has trouble reading lower-case o. How very peculiar.