Some things about FA

[heiditandy]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: \lila phillips [mailto:southernscotland at yahoo.com] 


> One other thing: I have heard from some that they will
> not come to Fiction Alley any more, because they have
> to go through so much of the slash. I'm sure that some
> of you will say, "Good riddance!" but I think it's a
> shame. They are missing some good general fics that
> way. 

Actually, I just think they're missing something inherent in the
organization of the site, because I can't understand what they'd be
refering to when they say "go through so much of the slash". 

You don't have to go "through" anything to get to a list of new fics.
Simple as that. I mean, the front page of each of the houses
(http://www.schnoogle.com, http://www.astronomytower.org,
http://www.riddikulus.org, http://www.thedarkarts.org) has a list of all
the new fics. You don't have to read the stories themselves at all to
see which ones you might be interested in reading. 

And if one only wants to read fics of certain pairings, there will be
*one* moment when the word *slash* appears in front of your eyes - it's
when you're on the front page of FictionAlley Park, where we have one
specific forum for discussion of slash topics - and one might actually
read the description for that forum on one's way to the CRUISIN' forum,
where people post fics sorted by SHIP. Then, you bookmark the thread
which has the SHIP you're interested in, and check it regularly, or
subscribe to it, and you can then see what new fics feature or include
said SHIP.

I'm not really worried about what happens when OOTP comes out because
we're going to have a completely different "front end" at that point
(presuming the Scholastic site is accurate and the book doesn't come out
before June 1, as I don't think our new setup will be done before
April). We certainly want to make it easy for people to find the fics
they want with specificity, but it takes time to create an entirely new
front end and back end. 

And here's the punchline to all this - even if we *had* separate houses
for romancey slash fics, dramatic/angsty slash fics, novel-length slash
fics and humerous slash fics *they'd all still be on the front page of
the blog and interspersed with the other fics on the reviewboard
anyway*. In part this is because we don't really have the funding now to
cover an additional two reviewboards (which would be pushing $400 in
software owned-license fees). But one of the things about FA is that it
lists *everything* together. Believe me, I know there are people who
refuse to read any fics that have the H/H ship in them - and if they
come to FA, they *still* have to *see* the summaries of those fics on
the front page or reviewboard. And they certainly hate H/H fics of any
rating, with a large amount of "grr, argh!" 

FA is a comprehensive archive - that's what it was created to be, and
what's what it's going to continue to be. By creating more pinpointed
searching tools, we're just acknowledging that the fandom is a lot
larger now than it was when FA started 18 months ago. We've grown from
about 1100 users to over 17,000 in about a year - and all those users
have different needs and things they want to see on FA. We're looking at
all of that as we pull together our new front-and-back-end. But as I
said above, none of these changes are going to be instantaneous. There's
no technical way they could be. 


heidi