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... WHAT.
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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.
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.
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Things change. On the internet, they change very fast. Some services manage to get better (or at least not get any worse) - others fail. Hard and fast or slow and over time... With a bit of luck, this process leads to better services being developed, places that are built so solidly that they will last longer than their predecessors, and suck less.
I haven't been following exactly what the OTW are doing, and I'm not involved in any of their projects, but this sort of thing makes me really excited about their proposed archive. Enough that I'll be there to sign up for it on day one! (To nab my username, if nothing else.) I don't think it'll be the archive to end all archives, or that it will be perfect or anything like that. But looking back at the evolution of the internet in general and fandom in particular, I think it will be better. And while that might not be a very cheering thought now that you're faced with having to look like an idiot to your readers because FF.net have decided dashes are a tool of evil... Well. It'll be interesting to see what happens this summer?
(Also, I find your tag for this post to be ridiculously funny!)
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*laughs* This was something that I'd said recently to someone else in regards to this bit of wtf-ery -- "Someone's been eating their crazyflakes this morning!" -- and it seemed appropriate to make a tag out of it. :D
I don't think it'll be the archive to end all archives, or that it will be perfect or anything like that. But looking back at the evolution of the internet in general and fandom in particular, I think it will be better.
Yeah, although I've been fairly pessimistic about the OTW project precisely because of situations like ff.net, where you start out with a really cool project that's by fans, for fans, and fulfills an open niche in the market, and over time it becomes clunky and mired in the past and dogged by bad publicity until it fades away. Not that ff.net is fading away, exactly, but if it keeps up the way it's going, it will. Like I was saying in another comment, it gets to the point where older archives no longer meet the needs of fans -- ff.net is more and more hampered by its lack of searching and tagging features, which is the direction fandom seems to be currently moving.
But that doesn't mean I hope OTW crashes and burns. I'm just not that enthusiastic about it, and the more hyperbole that is associated with it (OMG! best archive in the history of archives!!eleventy!) the more I start thinking, "Y'know, I've kinda heard this before ..." I know that quite a few people involved with it are "fans from way back", people who have seen the archives come and go, so -- I hope they know what they're doing, but I'm not really getting my hopes up.
Having said that, though, fandom is obviously a resilient and fast-moving many-headed hydra, nearly impossible to kill; you knock it down over here, it pops up over there. I'd be sad to leave ff.net because it would be the end of a pretty major era in my personal fannish history, but right now I'm more active and involved with fandom on LJ than I have been since the really early 2000s, so obviously I haven't lost anything important.
(Geocities! You know, I still have a Geocities page that I can't get rid of, because I can't remember my login or even where to go to log in! I don't think I've done anything with it since approximately 2000 or so; I'd love to delete it if I could only remember how. *g*)
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I think the fact that I'm not up to date on anything the OTW are saying, or what people are saying about the OTW is making it easier to be all hopeful. It's like with spoilers! XD No expectations - no disappointment. (Hey, it makes sense to me!)
There will never be a centralized Fandom Archive. It doesn't work that way. Fandom doesn't - people don't. That's why we've got individual LJs and webpages and whatnot, even with FF.net and official forums and everything else that's been developed for fans, if not always by fans. (Official forums. I've never actually participated in one of those!)
Hee. My Geocities page is long, long gone. I almost wish I'd kept it around, just so that I could see what passed for good webdesign back then. On the other hand... it was home to the fic I'm glad has been erased from existence, and I used Comic Sans for it. *shudder* I don't know what I was thinking. About the fic or the font!
You're not going to link to yours, are you? *g*
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There will never be a centralized Fandom Archive. It doesn't work that way. Fandom doesn't - people don't.
Yes! Exactly! And this is why the initial discussion about OTW really turned me off of the project, because I felt like that's exactly what they were trying to be.
On the other hand, I would welcome a sort of ff.net 2.0 -- a new multi-fandom archive that has learned from ff.net's mistakes. That would be a neat thing to see. I don't expect it to be the be-all and end-all of archives and I expect something better will eventually replace it, just as with ff.net ... but I'm waiting to see what they come up with before I do any happy-dancing.
You're not going to link to yours, are you? *g*
Er. No. *g* Though I could if you want me to. But you're not missing much. It's a personal website and not a fan page. There's really nothing to see except a layout that was basically designed in 1997. I'm actually quite surprised that it's still up (at least, I checked it recently and it was), since there has been probably zero site activity and no logins in a VERY long time. I would have expected it to be purged long since.