Echoes from the West forums

Domain

2008-06-23T14:00:31Z

Hi all,

Split-infinity.org expired recently; I've submitted a request for renewal and it should be up shortly. *crosses fingers* In the meantime, don't fret if you can't access EftW! It should still be there.

_{I hope :D;;;;}.

New Moderators

2008-05-16T22:41:18Z

A very warm welcome to our awesome new mods over at EftW:

a_mael and rroselavy.

We're very happy to have you both aboard, and look forward to working with you! :)

Anonymous Reviews Disabled

2008-04-17T14:09:19Z

Owing to difficulties with spam reviews, anonymous reviews on the site have been disabled. Please let me know if this constitutes more trouble than it's worth by dropping me an email, or by commenting here. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Spam reviews

2008-03-27T15:01:45Z

Just recently I checked my stats over at the site and was surprised to see that I had gotten 200+ spam reviews on one of my stories. I thought that it might be important for the mods to get a heads up about that since it might mean there's a bug or something in the system.

hello

2007-07-08T07:32:21Z

Hi. New member to the community here ^^ But I've been part of EftW for some time now. I finally managed to get off my lazy ass and join the community. **waves**

eftw @ 2006-08-05T11:24:00

2006-08-05T03:19:13Z

Well, all good things come to an end, I suppose.

I really, really need another co-admin for EftW. I'm still handling the technical aspects and the hosting of the archive, and I don't know of anyone who'd be willing to take that over, but I simply don't have the time or energy left for the entire screening process. Basically, I need someone to give the entire accept/reject decision making over to, someone to determine the policy, get in touch with the mods and recruit more as necessary, that sort of thing. Is anyone interested? I'd hate to pull the plug and close the archive or just turn it into an open one.

Feel free to email me at elvaron at split-infinity.org as well.

Selling Saiyuki manga

2006-06-17T15:57:54Z

Hi guys!

I'm cleaning out the extra copies I have on my shelf, so I'm putting the following up for sale:

Saiyuki #1 - 9 in Chinese (Enix covers)
Saiyuki #9 in Japanese (Enix cover)

Saiyuki RELOAD #1 - 4 in EITHER Chinese or Japanese (I'm willing to sell one set but not the other)
Saiyuki RELOAD #1 in Japanese (this being an extra copy)

Saiyuki Novel #1 and #2 in Chinese

Each volume is going for US $5 per, discounting shipping (estimated at about US $8 per book to the US by normal air mail).

All copies are in excellent condition. If you need more information about the publisher, I'll be happy to check and look for pictures.

Also, would anyone be interested in Salty Dog #1 and #2 and the REQUIEM movie guide ('Visual Companion)? (In Japanese, of course). Those will be going for a slightly higher asking price, but I'd like to gauge response first.

I accept paypal and credit card via paypal ^^;

I'm not an author? Whut?

2006-05-09T21:32:19Z

Well, I've gotten several emails on this question, so I guess I'd better address it here!

As you guys know, EftW switched its code last week or so. Several changes occured.

1. Authors vs members
If you click on authors, it defaults to a page that shows people who have at least one fic on the archive ("authors"). In order to see the names of people without fictions, use the drop-down menu to select "All members".

2. My account vs account info
'My account' has been renamed to Account Info. All the revelant links are still there. The only difference is the addition of 'Add a new series' or 'Edit a series'. Serieses are ... as the name implies ... serieses. I believe they act like standard fictions, except that you can allow other authors to add to it. Otherwise, everything remains the same.

Again, I'm still debugging, so if you encounter any problems (like being unable to upload fics, formatting messed up on your fics, etcetc) please email me or drop a comment here! Thanks!

eftw @ 2006-05-08T00:37:00

2006-05-07T22:37:04Z

New moderators announced on the EftW main page. Welcome aboard!

Moderator applications

2006-05-06T12:15:28Z

All moderator applicants (who actually went through part 1 of the application process), you should have received at least one email from me. Please check your mailboxes. With any luck, I'll be able to announce the new team within a day ^^.

Apologies for the delay. I got eaten by grues again.

Site Upgrade - Apr 29 2006 7pm GMT

2006-04-29T18:16:31Z

The EftW site will be down from this point onwards while I upgrade the script. Thanks for your patience. (Backups are in place.)

Test runs of the new script have shown that it is beautiful, and it will, hopefully, fix all those horrible problems that we're having with the existing one. *smiles* With any luck, the upgrade will go smoothly and incorporate all the new features without a hitch.

If not...

...I'm gonna be at this all weekend. And it's a long weekend in most countries too.

--

ETA: Backbone is up. Pretty layouts are not; however, everything should work just fine. I had a huge scare in the middle where it appeared that the stories had not ported to the new script (I was prepared to delete everything and manually re-upload all 429 fictions + goodness knows how many chapters, and apologize profusely for the lost reviews ^^; ) Fortunately, switchover appears to be fine. Please check out the front page for the technical updates.

Moderator applications

2006-04-25T15:24:00Z

Hi there,

All of you who expressed interest should have received an email from me. Please check your accounts. Hotmail users, please check your junk/spam folders in case you didn't get the mail. This is extremely important, so if you haven't heard from me, please contact me ASAP and leave me your email address!

Has my fic been rejected?

2006-04-18T16:47:54Z

Just a quick question here. I'm new to the site and posted a fic (I write under the name Iron Dog). I understand that it needs to be reviewed for content/technical issues etc. I'm simply wondering what is the typical waiting period for this? I upped this fic Gunning For Sex close to 3 weeks ago.

While it is a self-beta job, it has been looked over by several people and is the first in my Saiyuki Serial (now at 10 chapters). Gunning has won in two different contests, so my thinking is that the spelling/grammar and content is likely okay. Yes, it is very much NC-17 but so are other fics on the site. If this is just because of lack of people available to review stuff, I'll shut the hell up and wait patiently. If there is a problem with the fic, I'd appreciate someone letting me know.

Moderators

2006-04-12T22:26:29Z

Dear all,

Thanks for your enthusiastic response! Rest assured that I've received your emails (or I should have, if nothing's wrong with my mail *grin*). Unfortunately, I'm abroad at this time and I won't have internet access for the next week and a bit, so I'll get back to ya'all on that.

*gloms everyone*

Looking for Staff

2006-04-07T13:19:33Z

April 07 2006: Looking for Staff

Are you crazy about reading Saiyuki fanfiction? Are you a grammar nazi? Do you know the difference between who and whom? Are you, like Sanzo, capable of spotting a Mary Sue from 10,000 meters? Or, heaven forbid, do you like EftW and would like to contribute to its running?

Then we want you!

EftW is looking for a ton of new people to help in the running of the site. Unfortunately, some of you may have noticed the occasional large delays in getting fics vetted, because the mods were all eaten by Grues... I mean, youkai. So we need more!

You don't have to be a grammar nazi. That was a marketting gimmick. We're actually looking for two types of moderators:

1. Technical moderators -- who can ferret out those pesky grammatical errors and stylistic pitfalls; and

2. Consultants who can give their opinion on plot and style, like whether it's witty or breaks the corniness meters; whether it's detailed-to-death, or whether it's interesting. Basically, whether you liked it!

Anyone and everyone is free to volunteer! I'm not looking for the opinions of a certain, elite group of people with Ph.Ds in linguistics -- I'm looking for the opinions of the readers -- the people this archive was meant for. The only requirement is that you must have a rapid turnaround time. Unless you're away or unusually busy, I'm looking for people who won't take more than a day to descend on the fic and tell me yes or no (no need for long, formalistic arguments, though) after the alert goes out.

I'd actually love to have as many people as possible on this team. So if you're an avid reader, please drop me an email.

I'm also looking for volunteers to assist with things like new layouts and running fanfic competitions! If you have some layout making abilities, or just some free time, please drop me a note too!

On the technical side, I am direly in need of assistance with a migration from efiction 1.1 to efiction 2.0, the streamlining of the entire stupid linebreak system, etc. In fact, if someone can recode the entire-- oh well. Nevermind that. Anyway! If you have experience working with efiction and/or you have any knowledge of PHP/mySQL, I need your help!

Smut discourse, contd

2006-02-04T16:08:24Z

Thanks to all those who've been commenting, both on my journal and here. It seems that there's no fixed rule at all, so I've decided to give everyone something a bit more concrete to work with. I randomly browsed through AFF and picked out several fics with different styles. The list is below. I'd be very, very grateful if you guys have time to give it a quick look and tell me which ones you like and which you don't. None of them are bad. Some are somewhat boring. Some are good, imo.

(They're all different pairings and most of them are one-shots with a little bit of preliminary and with most of the focus on the sexx0r. I can't remember if I pulled out anything that's worthy of a warning label, beyond explicit sex scenes, but just to be on the safe side: all of them are NC-17.)

(solaas, and karose if you're reading this, maybe you could also give me a heads up on what you think of some of the four fics in the latter category?)

Something like this gets the thumbs up straight away. Short, simple, to the point, and definitely more than just a sex scene.
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=544210427

This is extremely detailed, but still handled very skillfully, and thus does well:
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=544211112

This I find elegant.
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=544192721

This I like:
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=28785&chapter=3

On the otherhand:

This I don't find so good. It's rather run of the mill.
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=25716

This is kinda... mm, whatever.
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=544204624

This too:
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=544203900

I'm not sure what to make of this one:
http://www.adultfanfiction.net/aff/story.php?no=544202824

Smut, omigosh

2006-02-03T00:38:39Z

Okie, I'm going to start a series of discussion posts on this community centering around fic writing. The idea is to basically iron out a standard that we can use for moderation on the archive, based on only on the moderators' views but also of the general reader on EftW. In other words, stuff you say here may well influence the moderating policies on the archive itself.

After all, this archive is about the readers ^_^.

First and foremost, this is not directed at any one person or any one fic. These are common issues we run into, and so I'd like to clear them out of the way first.

And today's topic is... smut.

There are several kinds of smut, and this is a field where personal preference plays a very, very heavy part. A lot of smut fics get bounced from moderator to moderator, often requiring input from 3, if not all 5 members of the panel. Therefore, I'm wondering: What do people look out for in a smut scene? (Note, this need not be a smut fic. This could be a PWP, or part of a longer fic.)

This is not so much a question of personal tastes in slash/non-slash, kinks, pairings... well, content, basically. Those are individual and are not used as a basis for assessment, usually, unless the characterization is off. What I'm wondering about is style.

Long or short? Graphic or fade to blacks? Pretty analogies, or not? Blow by blow account or key highlights? NC-17 / X fics are by far the most popular on the archive, so do you read them _because_ they're NC-17? If so, is there something in particular you look out for? Can you recommend any smut fics (preferably Saiyuki related, although since we're discussing style here, anything goes) that you think are representative of your preferences or just something that you really, really like?

For writers, do you write smut for a particular reason? For the sake of writing a smut scene? Or to prove/explore a point about characterization?

ATTN: EftW Moderators:

2006-02-02T23:40:51Z

Quick question...besides...this place needs dusting...

Must a fic be uploaded to “Echoes” first or can it be sent off to any of the five moderators in residence for help and/or critiquing?

Really-Really Rusty in FF-land

...and rather desperate for constructive criticism from the younger/faster writer’s set I might add. =)

eftw @ 2005-12-06T23:22:00

2005-12-06T22:22:29Z

EftW authors, please back up your fics if you don't already have a copy on harddisk. Check your email for details.

eftw @ 2005-11-04T16:04:00

2005-11-04T15:04:11Z

The polls said we should, so we did!

Welcome to the EftW forums. Rules and information are under the profile page, of course. Largely, though, feel free to post anything Saiyuki or writing related, including feedback and complaints (uh) on the archive itself.

In the announcement bag, I'm taking suggestions for
#1. Some kind of holiday season challenge or competition, whether theme based or otherwise..
#2. Some kind of celebration when we hit the 400 fic mark (and subsequent 100 increases after that ^^)
#3. A new layout or layout design competition.
#4. Anything else, really.

*curious* Would december be a good time to run a challenge? Would everyone be heartily sick of Christmas / Yule / winter-themed fics by the end of it?

(In the way of introduction, this is your ~~friendly~~ neighbourhood EftW administrator who-doesn't-have-a-Saiyuki-icon-at-the-moment saying hi ^^.)

Mm yar -- just a note. You don't have to use this as a platform to shoutout whenever you upload a new story to the screening queue. The mods get notifications via email everytime that happens.