Fi3ld Work

Archive Poll II

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:28:54 GMT

Since not all of fandom is on Live Journal, I'm trying something different so that everyone can vote.

First off, I made a post the other day, explaining a few questions from the last poll here.

Now, onto some of the finer details.

It seems from the first poll that the majority of people support locking fic in some way. I think we're going to go the route where only the higher rated fics are members only, while everything else is open to the public.
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(If you can't see the poll, you can go here and vote.)

The other big thing is how we organize the site. As I explained, the site has a search engine and can get really specific, but only as specific as it's set up to be. As a reader of fanfic, I love having a lot of parameters to search by, but as a writer it might get kind of annoying to have too many. I think I'm going to try and start off with a middle ground, and see where that goes, adding some if requested and possibly getting rid of little used ones. But I thought I should ask you guys what kind of parameters you'd like to see.

So to reiterate parts of my last post here are the various levels/types:
Categories I currently have 3, and I think that's enough, but what do you think.
Gen: Stories where there are no romantic couples, or the romantic couples are not the focus of the story.
Ship-Het: Stories where the main focus is a heterosexual relationship(s).
Ship-Slash: Stories where the main focus is a homosexual relationship(s).

Sub Categories
For the Gen category, I just have "Don Centric" or "Insert Main Character Centric"
For the Ship categories I have the various pairings set up. The only thing is, there are a *lot* of possible pairings out there. And putting down a pairing like Megan/Coop might be pointless if there's only one fic out there with that pairing. I was thinking of putting some of the main pairings down, and having the others go under a characters other category, like the previous example would go under Megan/Other (The mods of the site will regularly check these "other" categories to see if we need to add a new sub category).
I'll be the first to admit though, that I don't read all that's out there. So. What sub categories do you think should be up? As a general guideline, if you can think of at least 10 fics out there that are a certain character centric (that isn't in the main cast, I've put those up already), or a ship that should be there, please let me know in a comment (Don't worry if someone has already said that character/pairing, it'll just cement the fact that it should be up).

Characters
Which characters feature prominently in fic? Again, I've already got the main cast covered. Here I'm more looking for secondary characters like Ian Edgerton, or Robin Brooks.

Genres
What types of fic do you see out there. Some common types are Hurt/Comfort, Action/Adventure, Humour, or Episode Tags.

Warnings
Warnings can be used two ways.
-One you can exclude certain warnings when you search for fics, so what kinds of things make you not want to read a fic? Character Death? Rape? Incest? Language?
-Two, you can also search for fics that contain certain warnings, so what you'd like to find, like Kink, or BDSM, Graphic Sexual Content, Threesomes or Moresomes.
What warnings do you think should be included.

So yes, I know that's a lot to think about, but please take a moment and let me know what you'd like to see. :-) I've made sure that the community accepts anonymous comments, so you can still have your say, even if you don't have an account. Or, if you'd rather, feel free to e-mail me at paraka @ livejournal.com

Clarification

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:11:28 GMT

So, I just wanted to take a minute and clarify some of the questions/concerns/points of interest from the last post, if you haven't already, you can express your opinions in this poll.

A topic that was closely divided was whether or not to have "writing standards". I think I should better explain what I mean by that, since some people think that it will be either too time consuming.
First off, the "Standards". The mods who would check fics are already probably going to have to approve fics anyway, since we're going to be checking to make sure that the correct ones are locked. The standards also aren't beyond anyone's reach. We are in no way going to be rejecting the fic because we think your characterization is off, the sentence structure isn't perfect, or we think the plot is stupid. There is *no* *way* to do this, since what I absolutely love, someone else might think is bad, or vice versa. Everyone has their own filters. We're going to be basing our criteria off of some very basic standards:
1. Formatting. No one likes it when a fic appears as one huge paragraph, or a single paragraph can go on past a page (yes, sometimes it's necessary, but if the entire fic is like that, we'll probably reject it and suggest making it a bit more readable).
2. Spelling. We're not going to demand that every word is spelled correctly, everyone makes a typo here and there, but if we throw it into word, and all we see are red squigglies under every word, then we'll suggest a beta.
3. Grammar/other. Again, we're probably not going to read a fic in it's entirety before approving it, just skim and read a few paragraphs to get a feeling. If someone is constantly misusing words (like they spell checked, but weren't paying attention have words mixed up (like dispensary instead of necessary or whatever), or the grammar makes it incomprehensible then we'll suggest a beta.
-We won't insist that people "Americanize" their spelling. Personally, I'm Canadian, and I like my U's. :P
-Members have the option of offering their services as a beta, so any fics that are rejected will, we'll be able to point the author to possible beta's.

Having to approve fics first will delay them being posted, but I don't think it will slow it down all that much. I'm going to set a time line of 24 hours for approval, but I know, personally that I'm a bit addicted and check my e-mail way more than that. Also, quite a few people have offered their help as a mod, so hopefully, we'll be able to work out schedules so that there will be someone available to approve fics all the time.

I've seen quite a few other archives in various fandoms run this way, and it seems to be workable for them, so I think they'll be workable for us. If it does turn out to be too much though, or people are really set against it, I'm willing to change this. That's why I'm asking ahead of time.

I'm going to be basing this archive off of the eFiction script. It comes with a lot of features already built in.
-One of them is to put a rating on a fic that requires membership (and an age statement) in order to read it. I can set it so that all the ratings require membership, which would be the "Closed" archive, that no ratings require membership, which would be an "Open" archive, or that only certain ratings require membership (ie. just incest fics, or any adults only fics).
-Another great feature is how we're able to organize fics. There are a couple different levels:
->Categories. I was thinking Gen, Ship-Het, and Ship-Slash. All fics would fall into one of those categories.
->Sub Categories. I currently have it set up where the Gen sub categories are characters (ie, Don centric), and the Ship sub categories are the main pairing (ie. Colby/David)
->Characters. At first I was thinking just the main cast, but there are quite a few reoccurring characters, too...
->Ratings. Since you can get in trouble for using the G to NC-17 rating system I currently have it set up as "General", "Mature (13+)", "Adults (violence)", "Adults Only (sexually explicit)" and "Incest".
->Genres. They type of fic, like AU, or Character Study.
->Warnings. Like Character Death, or Rape, "Language".
->Completed. Which is a box that is either checked or not.

All of these levels of organization are available when you choose to do an advanced search. You can choose which to include, and which to exclude. For example, I could choose to search for: a Gen (Category), Don-centric (Sub Category) fic, that also features Alan (Character), that is for a general audience (Rating), which is a character study (and/or *not* an AU) (Genre) that does not include character death (and/or does include the warning suicidal overtones)(Warning), that has been complete, is between 2,000 and 10,000 words and has the word "penguins" in the title or summary.
Now you may not get any fics if you specify things that much (or choose things that are conflicting like a "General" fic that contains the warning "Graphic Sexual Content"), but as you can see this allows people to find really specific fics based on what they're interested in reading.

Another note, is that the search is only as specific as the parameters available to authors, but too many can be confusing. I'll be posting a poll asking people what kinds of parameters they'd like.

The last thing I'd like to talk about is the question about having more than fic. I think that maybe I should expand on what I meant when I said "more". I'd like to keep the site mostly an archive, so I'm not planning on putting up sections for meta, or actor information, whatever. I could possibly be talked into forums if that's what people wanted, and someone else was willing to run that part of it.
What I really wanted though, was to offer to archive *other* fan works. Like fan vids, or artwork. There are very few vid archives out there, and wit the appearance of sites like You Tube, and MegaUpload, very few people properly host their vids anymore. I have the disk space and bandwidth, and I was thinking of setting something up so that vidders could host and share their vids on the archive, and again, lend a searching capability for watchers.
Art work is a bit more tricky, since it can be harder to define (do manips count? What about wallpapers or icons? Should it just be original art?), but I'd like to include those eventually too.

The thing is, there isn't an already existing script for that type of feature (at least that I know of, if anyone knows of some, please let me know, I'm lazy :P) so I would have to write the code myself. This means that having those features would only be in the future, and will require quite a bit of work on my part. I'm happy to do it, but if people aren't interested, or actively don't want to have this be a part of the archive, then I don't want to waste my time. I'm going to do a more specific poll for this matter in the future.

As always, comments, questions, suggestions are welcome. Feel free to point anyone you think would be interested in this info here. You have my permission to post links to your little heart's content.

A Numb3rs Archive Poll #1

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:45:23 GMT

So, one thing I've noticed about the Numb3rs fandom is that there doesn't seem to be a central archive for fanfic, there's the CalSci Library but it doesn't allow slash, and isn't searchable. There are also various forums, LJ communities, and Yahoo groups, all of which are great advertising your new fic, but aren't that great for finding them again later.

I really think that this fandom could benefit from an archive, so I'm thinking about building one myself. In order to make it a good one, and open to all fans, I wanted to ask the users of this hypothetical archive what they'd like to see.

View Poll: Numb3rs Archive

If you have any other thoughts or comments, please feel free to leave a comment. If you'd like to keep getting information on progress and continue giving input, please feel free to join the community.