... 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

[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*

[lavvyan.livejournal.com]

I actually left ff.net several years ago because of the entire submission form thing, when they first screwed up the formatting of all the stories I had posted by taking away my beloved "~~~". Returned once, but stayed away since then because, seriously, how often am I supposed to check and re-check the same story, never mind that their guidelines were getting progressively ridiculous and led to the deletion of several stories of mine without giving me the opportunity to adjust them to the new guidelines?

Plus, I'm sorry, but it really is easier to find bad!fic on ff.net than on, say, LJ, though of course a major reason for that is that ff.net has a broader (and I think younger) userbase.

*snatches fruit out of air and eats for breakfast*

[sholio]

At least to some extent, I think badfic on ff.net is just easier to find. In other words, if Jane Fangirl writes some lousy 500-word Mary Suefic on her LJ, most people wouldn't know about it unless they have her friended. Whereas with ff.net, it's all in one place and right there for perusal.

... but. Yeah. Their guidelines are arbitrary and frustrating, their policies are implemented without consulting or informing their userbase ... they make LJ look good by comparison! I didn't actually know that they had a history of retroactively editing fics prior to this (maybe just because I never had any formatting that was the target of their axe before ... at least not that I ever noticed).

Over the last 8 years I've slid from viewing them as the main venue for showing off my fic, to a secondary archive to get more exposure, and I'm wondering if it's even worth bothering to treat it as *that* anymore.

[lavvyan.livejournal.com]

Well, it still is a place to archive your stories, the question is just how permanent that archive is going to be (depending on the rating and all) and where the heck they think they're going with their site.