Warning for purges at FFN

[madeleone]

Aurette has posted a cute little tongue in cheek ficlet called The Warning over at FFN. But rumor has it, according to her response to my comment, it is apparently serious. Word has it that stories and sometimes entire accounts are being deleted, especially anything smutty-ish is getting the cut. I don't know how true it is but just wanted to pass on the info as this is the first I have heard of it (this time at least, I've heard that it has happened in the past). So if you have any smutty fave fics that are only posted at FFN, you might want to download them now just in case.

For easy downloading from FFN, as well as a number of other archives, I highly recommend flagfic.com. It is very simple to download and you can have a choice of formats: EPUB, Mobi pocke, PDF, and HTML.

I have fic there, and some of it smutty, but I post at a variety of archives so I'm not too worried about losing my fic.(although I would probably be pissed off the they did get deleted).  Just wanted to give others a heads up though, in case there are fics they want to save...*cough*...Aurette's...*cough* which I believe was the whole point of her story today. ;) (Being the paranoid bitch that I am, I saved them long ago, as well as a whole list of others!)

Comments

[keladry_lupin]

A lot of Sherlock and Avengers people who have been deleted in the last week are moving to AO3. (I rather like that archive because there are no ads, and it's easy to navigate.) FF.n seems to do these puritanical purges every few years; I wonder what sets them off.

[madeleone]

Aha, so the rumors are true, I suspected they probably were.

FF.n seems to do these puritanical purges every few years; I wonder what sets them off. Who knows, but it is annoying.

I have posted my stuff at AO3 as well and I like it there. But I must admit, I do like to the check the stats on my fics at FFN, I can see how many hits there have been an from what countries. It's kind of neat to know that people in Timbuktu are reading your fics. :D

[keladry_lupin]

Timbuktu? Seriously? That's cool.

[madeleone]

Well maybe not Timbuktu, but places like Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Fiji, Brunei, Serbia, etc. (Well, you get the idea). LOL! They are all listed on my story stats graphs, In May I had visitors from 85 countries, and my May Stats shows: For the month of 2012-05, there have been a total of 19,940 Hits and 7,046 Visitors to all of your stories. Which is all useless trivia, but it's kind of neat to know.

[keladry_lupin]

Even better.

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

One of the many reasons I don't particularly care for Ff.net. I didn't even know about it until months after getting into SSHG fanfiction through TPP and Ashwinder. I find their double standard appalling - it's almost as bad as deviantArt.

It's okay to post the most wretched, un-beta'd crap in the world on ff.net, as long as everyone keeps their trousers on. If they drop me, I will hate it because I have several lovely readers there, but I encourage them to switch to a moderated sight all the time.

[madeleone]

While I agree there is a lot of really bad fic at FFN, there is honestly a lot of good stuff there too, but you have to weed through things to find it. And I love TPP and ASH, but sometimes the moderated sites are a little too much so for my tastes. (Having a multi-chaptered story that takes a month or more for each chapter to go through the queue, means it might take a couple years to get a longer story posted). That is a reason I am liking AO3, but I will admit that I don't get as many comments on my stories there as the other sites.

[delphipsmith]

Wow. I so wish I'd known about this flagfic utility a couple of weeks ago before I spent three hours copy/pasting a bunch of 75K+ fics!! I will be all over this like...um...like something that is all over something else LOL Thank you!!!

[madeleone]

Isn't it sweet?!? It has a bunch of sites besides FFN that it works for, AFF, GE, Dramione, are the ones I read at. It says that it will be compatible with TPP, but that's been up there for awhile. I emailed and suggested they add Ashwinder and they said that was on their future 'to do' list. I love it. I download in EPUB to my Calibre program then I can upload to my Nook e-reader. (Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) is another great free program for organizing your e-book files, BTW. And if you already have stuff saved in other formats, it will convert them to EPUB, or vise-versa.)

[libertyelyot.livejournal.com]

I don't get that you can submit M rated fic to ff.net if they don't want it. What actually is their policy?

Thanks, I've just heard about this earlier tonight, though all I have on ff.net is in The World's Most Obscure Fandom and probably OK, at least for now.

[keladry_lupin]

I think the M rating is for heavy profanity and violence, but when you get explicit depictions of characters shagging, that's going over the line. (Just guessing.)

[libertyelyot.livejournal.com]

Thank you for making that clearer - so, as usual, murder is fine but the act of physical love, not so much. Plus ca change. Sigh.

[madeleone]

I think you've summed it up perfectly: as usual, murder is fine but the act of physical love, not so much Ridiculous isn't it?

[bunney.livejournal.com]

I pulled all my fic from FFN years ago, when they did their initial smut purge (which resulted in AFF being created). For a while they were pretty strict, but over the years their diligence has faded. Then, you have utter busybody assholes like The Literate Union, who have made it their mission in life to target any fic on FFN that doesn't meet their approval. They've managed to get hundreds of fics removed for the most arbitrary of reasons, but one of their primary targets are fics that have sexual or mature content. I don't know how active they still are, but their FFN forum is still getting active hits. It wouldn't surprise me if they're behind this.

[madeleone]

Man, I checked out that link and those people sound like real dickheads. But the kind of people who would gang up on people and do stuff like cyber-stalk them. Scary, scary dickheads!

[bunney.livejournal.com]

I've heard some pretty scary things from them and what's worse is that they feel they have the moral high ground. Ugh.

[mrs-helenesnape.livejournal.com]

Good grief! The LU sound like complete and utter bastards! Encouraging flaming over support and directly targeting "smut" regardless of its quality. It makes me want to flame every signed "LU" review I might see.

[bunney.livejournal.com]

Rumor has it that FFN has deleted over 12% of just Buffy and Dr. Who fic AND preventing members from exporting their fic to other sites.

I'm so glad I've not posted anything to FFN in a decade or more. They suck.

[mundungus42.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent reminder to move All The Fic to AO3. Most of mine is there already. The ones I haven't posted there are those I have ambivalent feelings about. As in, they're good enough for FFN, where I spent my fic-writing infancy, but I don't know that I need them to follow me for always and always.

[madeleone]

Aww... but you might want those early fics someday. *grins* You never know. I've only read your SS/HG fics but one of my faves is 'The Trail of the Black Star' and that looks like one of your earlier ones.

[owlbait.livejournal.com]

Someone on my flist posted she'd had a story taken down. The consensus seems to be it was flagged or reported because she had 'shit' in the story summary.

[madeleone]

Well that could be true. But I've heard of several other instances of fics being pulled for sexual content. It seems to me though that they couldn't remove everything with 'sexual' content, or they would have to delete half the whole archive.

[droxy.livejournal.com]

Thanks FLAG works like a dream.

am pimping your post.

[madeleone]

Isn't it great! I wish I could remember who I got the rec from. I love Flag so much that I even sent them a small donation and I don't do that very often, but if it's something I really like I'm willing to contribute a little to help keep them online.

It works with quite a few sites and TPP is on the to be added soon list, but it has been on there for quite awhile already. I had also emailed them about adding Ashwinder and they said it on their list of sites to be added in the future.

For people who use e-readers, another free program I love is Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/. You can organize your e-books and it will convert files, if you have a file in PDF and want to make it EPUB it will do it for you.

[septentrion1970.livejournal.com]

The information is true. The French fandom has been in kerkuffle for days about it. It seems that fic titles and summaries that are not G rated get fired. FFN is suspected to use a script to get rid of fics that don't respect the posting guidelines.

[madeleone]

Grrr... I was hoping it was a rumor, but I have heard from several sources that it has been happening for the past week or so.

So does that mean if you put something like 'mature content... don't like don't read' as I've seen some writers use a means of warning, in the summary, then they will target your fic? Or threesome fic? Or slash fic? Or is it more if you have curse words in your summary, like owlbait said in a comment above? Just wondering?

[septentrion1970.livejournal.com]

From what I've read, curse words in the summary can do it. There was a French fanfic contest called "holy shit" and every fic that had "holy shit" in their summaries were taken down, even if "holy shit" was the only "offensive" content.

[arynwy.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for the link to FLAG. This is so very cool and ridiculously easy to use. *hugs*

[madeleone]

Isn't it though? I wish I could remember who told me about it. But now that I think about it I might have googled fanfic downloader and discovered it that way. I used to use a program called: FanFictionDownLoader... http://fanfictionloader.appspot.com/, which worked OK too, but not as easy as FLAG, in my opinion, and they would be down a lot of times if things got too busy, I suspect possibly due to too much traffic on their site.

[macaparket.livejournal.com]

It's true and it's serious. My story Gravity got deleted because it contained the word "bitch" in the summary. Apparently there are certain groups on FF net that are reporting more smutty stories.

[madeleone]

Yes, Bunney mentioned one group, which when I checked out the link looks like a really whacked out bunch of nut-cases bent on censoring the fanfic world. *shakes head in disbelief*

[irishredlass.livejournal.com]

OMG thank you so much! I have tried to use caliber and just could not figure it out! This is absolutely fabulous!

[madeleone]

Glad to help. I do use Calibre to organize all my fics and ebooks on my computer and I love it. But I could never get fanfictindownloader to work right, or the site would be down if the volume was too heavy. But FLAG works like a dream, I can still load my EPUB files into caliber or to wherever I want them. ;)

[irishredlass.livejournal.com]

I could never figure Calibre out so this is a godsend for me

[bunney.livejournal.com]

I used to use fanfiction downloader all the time, but suddenly it's not working right anymore. FLAG is the perfect alternative! I just wish you could download more than one at a time!

[dyni.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the Flagfic link! I've been saving fics for a couple of days since I've heard of the big purge :( At least with the downloader it will save loads of time and I can read them on my kindle. Wish it wasn't necesarry though, such a bunch of idiots at ffnet...

[madeleone]

You are most welcome. I love it, it's so simple to use!

[juno-magic.livejournal.com]

I've heard that FFNet managment is using some scripts to scrub the archive off higher than M rated stuff. I think as long as you comply with their rules, you should be just fine.

And of course with AO3 we now have a very good alternative.

[madeleone]

Well, there in lies the problem. A good portion of the fic posted with M ratings really is rather explicit, with much more than just a few coarse words. Like I said if they delete all the smutty fic there, there won't be a lot of stuff left. Apparently 12% of all Buffy and Dr. Who fic have been purged, not sure how the HP fandom has fared.