Suggestions, anyone?
Jun. 22nd, 2023 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ficarchivedirectoryThis is the suggestions post while I get everything up and running -- if you spot any major holes or issues before I do, please let me know; I'd appreciate it very much.
CONTENT AND MECHANICS SO FAR:
What this community is for:
- Indexing and promoting little-known fic archives, personal fic archives, and other fanwork directories.
What this community is NOT for:
- Promoting individual users on larger fic sites.
- Promoting individual users on platforms where you can directly share other people's content via retweeting/reblogging (e.g. tumblr, twitter, mastodon, etc)
- Promoting any site where content is/can be paywalled (e.g. patreon).
- Promoting archives where content is inaccessible without an account or invite.
- Promoting personal blogs, even if they're fandom-related. Archives must be fic-only and property of the poster.
- Promoting individual rec lists.
- Promoting live action porn, traditionally or self-published writing, art -- anything that's not a fic archive.
Grey areas:
- I'm unfamiliar with forum-based fanfic communities, but might be willing to index those if someone could explain them to me
- Original work is included under the condition that it's free to access in full on the archive, and not a single user on a bigger platform as outlined by the rules.
- If there's an easily-found corner of an unexpected site that's posting concentrated/archive amounts of fic, I can put those down as honorary mentions.
(If you know of directories/promotion comms for any of the disallowed content, let me know and I'll link them here.)
Tagging and categorizing:
Tags so far are divided into fandoms categories, content rating, and posting access.
For posting access, I was going to divide it into:
- personal archive (one person posts only)
- private archive (posting is invitation-only)
- moderated posting (posting is submission-based)
- public posting (anyone is free to post).
For content rating, I was going to divide it into:
- SFW (no porn or gore or anything you'd be in trouble for looking at during work)
- NSFW content (warned) (there may be porn or gore but there'll be an 'agree to view adult work' type screen)
- NSFW content (no warning) (there may be porn or gore and you won't be stopped before accessing it).
I'm unsure about the fandom categories, but that seems like it'd give some semblance of organization without making a new tag for every individual fandom, which... while I don't really expect this to take off so hard it'll hit DW's limit, I would prefer to have a system that doesn't run the risk of it. Also, new tags for everything sounds exhausting.
The categories would be how the index of promotion posts was organized, with individual fandoms listed under each category, and the archives under each fandom, according to the fandoms they list in their promo post. Everything in one post until individual sections grow too big to be contained and then get to move to their own post.
Under each fandom, archives would be separated between those with 5+ fics for the fandom, and those with less than 5. If the archive has so many fandoms it would be ridiculous to try to list it everywhere (especially if anyone with an account can post), there will be a section for 'multifandom'.
This is the list of all the categories I can moderately remember from my time in exchanges and browsing AO3 -- if you have corrections, additions or anything, please let me know! Also if anyone could explain MCYT canons/categorizations, I'd super appreciate it.
- Anime, Manga, Light Novels, Jdramas
- Books
- Cartoons
- Cnovels and Cdramas*
- Comics
- Korean Webtoons, Manhua, and Kdramas**
- Kpop***
- Live Action TV
- Minecraft Youtube****
- Roleplay Fandoms (MCYT, TTRPG podcasts, etc)
- Movies
- Musicals and Theater
- Podcasts
- RPF
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Multimedia (things that would fit in more than one category)
- Multifandom (divided between personal/private archives and moderated/public archives)
- Original Work
- Recursive Fic (fic of other people's fics)
- Other
*Does it make sense to group these two? I grouped the J-media the way I did because ime most franchises will have at least two of the four, and I know at least a couple of cnovels got turned into dramas.
**Same question as the first note.
***Yes, I know K-Pop is RPF, it's just unbelievably massive. If there are other subsets of RPF I should separate out, let me know.
****Help. ðŸ˜
Links to other directories would go in a separate post (possibly in the rules post). No promo posts for those, just drop a link and a short description into the comments of that post and I'll add it.
This was the format I was going to get people to use for promo posts. No images allowed. Queue would be moderated and small html fails would be fixed before posting.
ONLY replace and remove the stuff inside the square brackets ("[ ]"). The rest is important lol.
So that was a whole lot of words. If any of this seems like it could be simplified or clarified or needs tweaking or would crash and burn pretty quick or there are big holes, let me know.
CONTENT AND MECHANICS SO FAR:
What this community is for:
- Indexing and promoting little-known fic archives, personal fic archives, and other fanwork directories.
What this community is NOT for:
- Promoting individual users on larger fic sites.
- Promoting individual users on platforms where you can directly share other people's content via retweeting/reblogging (e.g. tumblr, twitter, mastodon, etc)
- Promoting any site where content is/can be paywalled (e.g. patreon).
- Promoting archives where content is inaccessible without an account or invite.
- Promoting personal blogs, even if they're fandom-related. Archives must be fic-only and property of the poster.
- Promoting individual rec lists.
- Promoting live action porn, traditionally or self-published writing, art -- anything that's not a fic archive.
Grey areas:
- I'm unfamiliar with forum-based fanfic communities, but might be willing to index those if someone could explain them to me
- Original work is included under the condition that it's free to access in full on the archive, and not a single user on a bigger platform as outlined by the rules.
- If there's an easily-found corner of an unexpected site that's posting concentrated/archive amounts of fic, I can put those down as honorary mentions.
(If you know of directories/promotion comms for any of the disallowed content, let me know and I'll link them here.)
Tagging and categorizing:
Tags so far are divided into fandoms categories, content rating, and posting access.
For posting access, I was going to divide it into:
- personal archive (one person posts only)
- private archive (posting is invitation-only)
- moderated posting (posting is submission-based)
- public posting (anyone is free to post).
For content rating, I was going to divide it into:
- SFW (no porn or gore or anything you'd be in trouble for looking at during work)
- NSFW content (warned) (there may be porn or gore but there'll be an 'agree to view adult work' type screen)
- NSFW content (no warning) (there may be porn or gore and you won't be stopped before accessing it).
I'm unsure about the fandom categories, but that seems like it'd give some semblance of organization without making a new tag for every individual fandom, which... while I don't really expect this to take off so hard it'll hit DW's limit, I would prefer to have a system that doesn't run the risk of it. Also, new tags for everything sounds exhausting.
The categories would be how the index of promotion posts was organized, with individual fandoms listed under each category, and the archives under each fandom, according to the fandoms they list in their promo post. Everything in one post until individual sections grow too big to be contained and then get to move to their own post.
Under each fandom, archives would be separated between those with 5+ fics for the fandom, and those with less than 5. If the archive has so many fandoms it would be ridiculous to try to list it everywhere (especially if anyone with an account can post), there will be a section for 'multifandom'.
This is the list of all the categories I can moderately remember from my time in exchanges and browsing AO3 -- if you have corrections, additions or anything, please let me know! Also if anyone could explain MCYT canons/categorizations, I'd super appreciate it.
- Anime, Manga, Light Novels, Jdramas
- Books
- Cartoons
- Cnovels and Cdramas*
- Comics
- Korean Webtoons, Manhua, and Kdramas**
- Kpop***
- Live Action TV
- Roleplay Fandoms (MCYT, TTRPG podcasts, etc)
- Movies
- Musicals and Theater
- Podcasts
- RPF
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Multimedia (things that would fit in more than one category)
- Multifandom (divided between personal/private archives and moderated/public archives)
- Original Work
- Recursive Fic (fic of other people's fics)
- Other
*Does it make sense to group these two? I grouped the J-media the way I did because ime most franchises will have at least two of the four, and I know at least a couple of cnovels got turned into dramas.
**Same question as the first note.
***Yes, I know K-Pop is RPF, it's just unbelievably massive. If there are other subsets of RPF I should separate out, let me know.
Links to other directories would go in a separate post (possibly in the rules post). No promo posts for those, just drop a link and a short description into the comments of that post and I'll add it.
This was the format I was going to get people to use for promo posts. No images allowed. Queue would be moderated and small html fails would be fixed before posting.
ONLY replace and remove the stuff inside the square brackets ("[ ]"). The rest is important lol.
So that was a whole lot of words. If any of this seems like it could be simplified or clarified or needs tweaking or would crash and burn pretty quick or there are big holes, let me know.
Regarding MCYT
Date: 2023-06-23 03:30 am (UTC)Minecraft YouTube mostly takes place on Survival MultiPlayer servers, abbreviated as SMPs. Many content creators (this is the general term for someone who either streams Minecraft or posts videos on YouTube of Minecraft, abbreviated to CCs) have single-player worlds, but nearly all of the fannish content produced uses SMPs as the "canon." Some SMPs are more roleplay heavy than others, but even the ones without much roleplay still get fic and the like. These SMPs are usually private servers (rather than public) where only certain CCs can join.
Most of the fandom differentiates between the person-in-real-life-behind-the-computer CC, and their "characters" in Minecraft, even if their character is functionally the same as their public-facing persona. People will distinguish between the two using cc![name] for the content creator real person, and c![name] to indicate the fictionalized version of them in Minecraft. Personally, I believe all of it to fundamentally be RPF, but this is a hotly contested opinion.
From what I know, most characters are the same name that the CC usually goes by-- often this is their twitch or YouTube handle, sometimes it's their IRL first name. Sometimes specific fictional characters are created with different names, sometimes mobs (animals/monsters/etc in the game) become characters, and sometimes people will make up a character that is neither a mob nor a player.
The most popular SMPs are:
- 3rd Life SMP Series*
- Dream SMP
- Empires SMP
- Hermitcraft SMP
- Origins SMP
- Quackity SMP, aka QSMP
*This is a survivor-like series where the goal is to be the last one standing. Due to this, it's actually 4+ SMPs in a trenchcoat, with different people participating in each one: 3rd Life (the first one), Last Life (the second time they played), Double Life (the third time), and Limited Life (the most recent iteration). It is currently unknown if there will be more seasons. This series is also colloquially known as Traffic SMP, due to the green-yellow-red color theming based on the amount of lives someone has left.Does this all make sense/is this helpful to you? FWIW, the MCYT fandom runs extremely young and AFAIK does not have any external fic archives. I understand why you'd want to make it a category since it has a large AO3 presence, but I suspect that it will not be a very common fandom category for this fic archive directory. But if you have any more questions, please ask! I'm far from an expert on every part of MCYT fandom, but it is one of my fandoms generally.
Re: Regarding MCYT
Date: 2023-06-23 05:03 pm (UTC)That's a good point about them probably not having many fanfiction archives -- I was admittedly less thinking of how many fics there are on ao3, and more of how many complaints there were about how badly organized they were on ao3.
(Also I was assuming that there's a chance personal archives of older fans might have MCYT fics to their name, which would also be indexed.)
Now knowing that it's largely a blend of categorized-as-RPF and fanfic of roleplaying servers, my thoughts are:
a) Leaving the list as-is, for the sake of completion, and because it seems like the fandom grouping wouldn't slide well into any of the existing categories.
b) Putting any that pop up in "Other" and if there turn out to be more than, like, 5 or 10 entries, it could get its own category.
c) Making a "Roleplay Fanfic" category, which would account for different servers under the same umbrella (text, games, whatever) -- however, I'm not sure how common a phenomenon writing fic for roleplay games is outside of MCYT, and this might just get confusing.
Do any of these sound more intuitive than the others?
ETA: It occurs to me that what I've seen of DnD podcasts might fit decently into "Roleplay Fanfic". That's a vote in its favor, imo.
Re: Regarding MCYT
Date: 2023-06-23 05:18 pm (UTC)I agree that "Roleplay Fanfic" is probably a better category, since it does feel similar imo to DnD podcasts and the like. The main difference is that it takes place inside Minecraft instead of on a DnD board (...does DnD use boards?), and people's characters have the same name they do.
Re: Regarding MCYT
Date: 2023-06-23 05:30 pm (UTC)Thank you so much!
no subject
Date: 2023-06-23 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-23 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-06-23 05:35 pm (UTC)The aim of that rule was to try to keep it to primarily-fanfic archives, rather than archives that are primarily something else -- see: the community name.
I think shifting the rule to be "archive must be primarily fanfic; if it hosts other types of media, it must be easy to filter for fanfic, and the promo link must link to that filter or section" might be effective. How does that sound?
no subject
Date: 2023-06-24 12:24 pm (UTC)My ao3 account is about 50% fic, but the other 50% is mostly comics which can also be read as fic via the image descriptions. The ratio of fic: non-fic at
So is that "primarily" fic? Sorry, this reads like a maths problem haha. I'll understand if my account isn't fic-focussed enough to count. But if nothing else, edge cases are good for stress-testing your rules :)
RPF Categories
Date: 2023-06-25 03:52 pm (UTC)For celebrity/music RPF, I'm okay with the way AO3 subdivides it - Music & Bands, encompassing both the musician RPF and individuals works about songs/MVs/albums.
Re: RPF Categories
Date: 2023-06-25 09:50 pm (UTC)