[kill me now] Fanfiction.net is weak and Fanfic.me is ready to take over their marketplace

[unjapanologist]

Fanfic.me hasn't done anything new or exciting since it was first discussed, but here's something that may be of interest, or at least extremely amusing. Hidden on Fandom Entertainment's website are three videos that give an overview of Fanfic.me and its aims, introduce the team behind Fanfic.me, and show a demo of how a fic writer would use the site. They're all about two minutes long and very much worth watching.

Favourite quotes, from the overview video:

We are poised to become THE fan fiction site not only online, but across all mobile devices.

There's one site that dominates the fan fiction marketplace [screenshot of fanfiction.net]. But they are weak, due to tech problems and lack of updates, lack of graphic branding, and other problems. Their site ranking of three fifty has been sliding for over a year, and they are weak, and we are ready to take over their marketplace.

...

Giving fans what they want. We're Fandom Entertainment.

I couldn't hear the "site ranking of three fifty" part very well, please correct me if it's wrong. Jacky Abromitis is talking about Alexa rankings here. If you'd like to judge for yourself how ready Fandom Entertainment is to take over the marketplace, based purely on Alexa rankings, here are the rankings for Fanfiction.net, Fanfic.me, and its predecessor MyFandoms.com. If you're a fan of the AO3 and are also a bad person who enjoys gloating, you may be interested in the AO3's rankings. (I don't want to assign any particular importance to Alexa rankings here, but since Jacky brought them up...)

From the team video:

We're about to revolutionize fan fiction across the web, mobile apps, tablets, e-readers, and we're looking for investors.

From the demo video:

Oh em gee, this is so ugly and hard to follow. (user who wants to write fic and ends up on fanfiction.net)

Geez. This ad just took over my screen! (same user, still on fanfiction.net. Note that this vid was made by the company who wants to charge users who built their own wordpress-based fic archives $40 per year to make ads inside stories go away. Fansitepress.com has been offline for a week, by the way, no explanation given.)

Links to these videos feature prominently on demo.fanfic.me, which appears to be a mockup of the main Fanfic.me site with a different layout, fewer stories, and slightly different explanatory content. The site contains no TOS or ownership information, although it does note in the footer that everything on it is licensed under a Creative Commons license unless otherwise noted. I suspect that this site and these videos are what Fanfic.me showed potential investors at the New York Web 2.0 startup showcase on October 12. (The showcase seems to have been a non-event for Fanfic.me as far as I can tell - they didn't win anything, and weren't mentioned on Twitter at all.)

There's much in these videos that's worthy of analysis, but it's getting late and my sides hurt. The rest of this post will be mostly copy-pasted material from Fanlore about Fanfic.me's marketing tactics and exciting upcoming censorship feature.


Marketing tactics

Fanfic.me seems to be using the following marketing tactics:

• Aggressive search engine optimization. Constant repetition of terms "fanfic", "fan fiction", "fan site" and similar on various websites, Twitter, and YouTube

• Marketing through showcase sites and SEO related to new or unreleased media. When Fanfic.me's new design went online on October 10, 2011, its main page contained blurbs for several TV series and films that had either just been released or were about to be released. (Grimm, premiere on October 28; Once Upon a Time, premiere on October 23; American Horror Story, premiere on October 25; Terra Nova, premiere on September 26; RA.One, release on October 26; Real Steel, release on October 7.) Fanfic.me doesn't contain any actual fanworks based on these TV series and films, but is the top result for Google searches on these titles and "fanfic". Separate Fansitepress.com-hosted sites for American Horror Story and Terra Nova contain several short blog post that are all tagged or categorized "fanfiction", although the posts have nothing to do with fanfic. Nearly all of the blog posts on these sites are reviews from other sites or standard advertising blurbs for the two series, repeated verbatim, sometimes without attribution. All posts on the American Horror Story site are made by fspadmin, who is also an admin on Fanfic.me's forums, and all posts on the Terra Nova site are made by terranova, identified as Jacky Abromitis in the site's own forum. Neither site contains a TOS, privacy statement, or copyright information, and neither identifies itself as being owned by Fandom Entertainment.
  
  My personal interpretation of this is that Fanfic.me is attempting to establish itself as the go-to place for new fans of new media properties, before a fan community for these new properties can develop "naturally" elsewhere. This tactic isn't forbidden or anything, of course. But I feel that setting up fannish hubs for unreleased shows or movies that nobody has even seen yet deviates rather strongly from the "we're doing this because we're fans of these things ourselves" rhetoric.

• Twitter marketing. Fandom Entertainment-owned sites seem to follow each other and recommend each other on Follow Fridays. Every time a new story is posted to the showcase sites, Jacky Abromitis tweets about it.

• Simulating site activity. A significant portion of early site activity on the main Fanfic.me site and new "fanfic plugin"-powered showcase sites seems to consist of one or more Fanfic.me-affiliated users posting and commenting on self-written fics under a variety of different pseudonyms. This creates the impression that the sites have an active user base. One example is the story "Don’t Cry for Me, American Idol". It was posted to Gleeklub.com by user Ringmaster, then appeared on Fanfic.me as posted by user gleeklub, and received comments there from users called Fanfic.me and Ringmaster. User Ringmaster, identified on Gleeklub.com as the author of the story, told user gleeklub on the story's Fanfic.me entry that Ringmaster was "Looking forward to the next chapter – hurry up :-)".

In case you come across them anywhere, the following user names can be traced to Jacky Abromitis or to other members of the "fanfic team" such as Chad Horton: Ringmaster, fspadmin, terranova, Brittana Fan, gleeklub, ffslash, ffmeadmin, Fanfic.me, phxvyper, Fan Site Press, jerome, and ffme. There are probably others; I'll update the Fanlore page if more turn up. While names such as Fanfic.me are easily recognizable to any user as administrator accounts, others such as Brittana Fan seem to be sockpuppet accounts.

In brief, Fanfic.me appears to be generating pretty much zero buzz outside of Fandom Entertainment's own web of sites. At least half of the few new users that are active on Fanfic.me and its other wordpress-powered sites are admin accounts, socks, or elf.

(By the way, elf, the demo.fanfic.me site says that stories about real people are okay. These "fan fiction rules" that haven't been published on Fanfic.me (yet) don't mention RPF either, so I guess you should be able to go ahead with the Biblefic after all?)


Censorship coming soon

Speaking of unpublished things: meet dev.fanfic.me, which seems to be a sandbox for Fanfic.me features still in development. (Again, like back when we stumbled over the contents of the Wordpress plugin, I should note that everything linked in this post was found through simple googling. It's all right in the open. From the "team" video, it sounds like these people know a lot of impressive tech things that I've never even heard of, but they seem incapable of keeping development stuff out of a search engine. Xing Li must be shaking.)

The most obvious unreleased feature I can spot is age verification and filtering for R- and NC-17-rated fics. Trying to access those fics on the dev.fanfic.me site results in the following message (screencap): 

Enter your current age into the field provide above. Stories with a rating of R or NC-17 may contain material not suitable for children. Fanfic.me requires that all individuals wishing to read these stories confirm they are of at least 17 years of age. Fanfic.me uses the MPAA rating labeling system for all stories.
Fanfic.me will also make a best attempt to filter bad words in stories that are not rated R or NC-17 unless the individual confirms they are of at least 17 years of age.

The result of this filtering seems to be that "bad words" are replaced by [censored]. Bad words include "hell", "sex", and presumably a bunch of others. Fanfic.me appears to be testing the filtering system on the story "You were there", posted by user Bittersweet_Memories on October 10. The story is rated PG and includes nothing worse than "hell" in its normal incarnation on the regular Fanfic.me. On dev.fanfic.me, someone added a bunch of bad words in the summary that then got [censored].

Original on Fanfic.me:





Dev.fanfic.me version: (screencap)




I haven't tried to find out if user Bittersweet_Memories is another sock, but I don't think so. S/he might be rather surprised to discover this new version of the story summary. (All this shows up in Google.)

Age verification is nothing remarkable, but the bad words filtering in any content that's not rated R or NC-17 seems like a recipe for censorship and/or unintended hilarity. Here's what it does to Fanfic.me's sole news post to date (screencap):






No further comments.


EDIT 19/10: dev.fanfic.me was just taken offline, briefly resurfaced with the word-blocking feature turned off, and is now completely locked down. All the screencaps I took are here. I haven't tagged the rest of the about 140 Fanfic.me related-screencaps there yet, so please use the search function to find other things for now. I'll do proper tagging later. *waves at Fanfic.me people*

Comments

[cofax7]

They think they're going to take on the single biggest fic site on the net, with millions of stories and tens of thousands of users, built up in over a decade of consistent service?

Yeah, right. Pull the other one.

[unjapanologist]

IT IS WEAK.

[starlady]

God, I needed this laugh.

[unjapanologist]

You mean you don't want to give them some money? I almost want to give them some money, just so they can take a few lessons in Internet and make something nice.

[ithiliana]

I was idly wondering the other day if there had been any more developments, and voila!

I'm not literate in alexa stuff, but even I can tell ff.net is a behemoth. *Death of Rats snigger*

[unjapanologist]

No new developments, the videos were probably there for a while - I only came across them yesterday because cofax7 asked about new developments and I started idly googling around. I swear, every time I search for new combination of "fanfic.me" and some other keyword, some other buried thing comes floating up.

Behemoths have clay feet. They are weak.

[ithiliana]

New in the sense of not talked about before, then!

[stewardess]

I tried to leave this comment a few days ago, but something was wonky. Trying again:

I'm sure there are professional and/or personal ties between fanfic.me and fanlib. Both took money for "fan" websites for The L Word. Both got going around 2003.

Link to FanLib's old content, which they obliterated. It lists the "personalities" and corporate funding.

http://life-wo-fanlib.livejournal.com/50648.html

FanLib's honchos have mostly attached themselves to Disney's Take180, which bought FanLib and put Take180 on the FanLib servers (which is why 100% of FanLib's old content is gone).

But my hunch is FanLib sold/leased their proprietary "my2centences" round robin writing software elsewhere -- perhaps fanfic.me.

[unjapanologist]

The L Word thing and the 2003 date are a really weird coincidence. I've been reading through life-wo-fanlib in search of links between Fanlib and Fandom Entertainment, but nothing so far. I wonder if either of them just got inspiration from the other?

Fandom Entertainment distributed a piece of software they call Fan Fic Fan. It's what MyFandoms.com is built on. Can you tell if it seems to bear any resemblance to my2sentences? Or if any of Fanfic.me's current sites look similar to what my2sentences produced? I wasn't active on LJ back when Fanlib exploded, so I never saw the software up close. But some of the things I've read in life-wo-fanlib, like the cutting stories into more pages so people have to look at more ads, sounds really reminiscent of Fan Fic Fan. Somewhere on MyFandoms.com's forums, Jacky Abromitis says that they have to keep chapters short because they need people to look at more ads, otherwise they won't be able to pay for hosting etc.

[stewardess]

Egad. I just looked at fanfic.me, and it is IDENTICAL to the old FanLib website, including the horrendously bad page-style navigation (1 of 1052 pages to browse stories, WHAT!?), and the stupid star ratings, the dismal messageboards...

Oh! And then there are all the fandoms with just one story, and each of the stories is only 500-800 words, so the "number of fandoms represented" is artificially inflated. Wow. That was FanLib's favorite scam... fake stories.

For instance, take this heap of a tale representing the sole story for "The Hobbit" (which appears in the fandom list under T, by the way):

http://fanfic.me/fan-fiction/story/breakfast-with-beorn/

I CANNOT WEEP ENOUGH.

Pardon me, I just had a horrible FanLib flashback. :p

On the other hand: Fan Fic Fan seems to be something else entirely: a bafflingly clunky fanfiction website management tool.

[unjapanologist]

Oh, wow. You mean "identical" in the sense of "same features", or is it actually the same/similar software?

The hobbit story actually shows up on MyFandoms.com, so perhaps it's a genuine entry? How did Fanlib do the fake story thing? Was it more than just assigning stories to random fandoms? Jacky Abromitis seems to have written a few stories for her company's Gleeklub.com and Terra Nova websites. I hesitate to call it seeding because she might actually be a fan of those shows, but OTOH, she's commenting on those stories with sockpuppets, so...

*hands you cocoa* Thanks for taking a look. Maybe the Fanlib inspiration runs deeper than I thought.

[stewardess]

It appears to be exactly like FanLib except for the graphics. The navigation and structure is identical. I'll have to upload a story to be sure (*shudders*).

FanLib's seeding was done through recruitment of fanfic authors; FanLib offered compensation. They approached authors they found through fan-run archives. Sometimes the compensation was cash. Their first major recruitment drive (in 2007) provided iPod Nanos to authors who met quotas.

There were 2 or 3 fanfic writers who accepted jobs at FanLib; they moderated the messageboards, and answered usage questions. JDSampson was the most prominent.

After FanLib closed down, one fanfic writer said she had received $600. It's unknown how many fanfic authors FanLib paid.

http://life-wo-fanlib.livejournal.com/50374.html?thread=918214#t918214

In some cases, the compensation the writers received was grotesquely trivial, such as promises to highlight their stories in FanLib's "featured" section.

Note: FanLib had three separate "products." First there was my2centences, the round robin writing software which was used to run fanfic writing contests for shows like The L Word. Then there was the fanfiction software introduced in 2007, which was modeled on fanfiction.net (and which now appears to be used at fanfic.me). Finally there was a fanvid hosting product, which is what Disney bought (along with FanLib's servers) and turned into Take180.com. Take180.com incorporates some of my2centence's features. The primary founders of FanLib, the Williams brothers, are now employed by Take180.

FanLib attempted to incorporate fanvid hosting into the FanLib fanfic archive site, but FanLib did not have any desire to defend the rights of vidders, so it went nowhere.

Fanfic.me has the same fanvid hosting feature that FanLib did, before FanLib was cut up and sold off.

[unjapanologist]

Interesting. Do you have any idea what the fanfic software they introduced in 2007 (the one that seems to resemble the one at fanfic.me) was called? I'd like to dig more into this, but I'm not knowledgable enough about software to make good guesses about its origins just by looking at it. Fanfic.me definitely doesn't seem to consist of just wordpress, though. From what you say, this 2007 piece of software may be what we're missing. This software wasn't used by Take180.com, right?

While I'm asking five things -do you know if there are any good screenshots of Fanlib?

Possible seeding of Fanfic.me compared to Fanlib... Hmm. Fanfic.me doesn't seem to have offered compensation to people in return for uploading their fic, like Fanlib did. MyFandoms.com, Fanfic.me's forerunner, apparently went to great lengths to get as many stories uploaded to the site, though. They held contests that were sometimes about uploading as many stories as you could by a certain date, with the winner getting prizes. Also, every chapter of a story counted as a separate story. Fanfic.me still does this (added short description in the fanlore entry).

As far as I can tell, pretty much all the stories currently on Fanfic.me (except for the new ones that the owners have created themselves and are commenting on with socks) have been ported from MyFandoms. It's unclear to me if the writers on MyFandoms are actually aware that this happened. The forums on MyFandoms don't say a word about the site's contents being moved elsewhere. And Fanfic.me's current about page says that the 10000 stories currently there were all ported from MyFandoms "for those who didn’t opt out", but this bit wasn't there on their original about page (screencap). They added it in after people on watersword's post wondered where the hell all these 10000 stories suddenly came from.

I'm not convinced that the authors were actually warned that their fics were being copied to Fanfic.me. Perhaps they were, mind, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. No public announcement on MyFandoms, no talk about it in the forums, nothing. Fanfic.me's forums have 14000 users and not a single post, too.

[stewardess]

FanLib's fanfiction site software never had a name, at least not one mentioned in public documents. It was ripped off from fanfiction.net (pardon me, it was a HOMAGE), and tweaked by one of the Williams' brothers, David Williams. The most informative document is their 2007 press release, together with the Fanlib's board bios.

http://life-wo-fanlib.livejournal.com/50648.html

Later, in posts by partly_bouncy praising FanLib as the greatest thing on earth, it was revealed FanLib intentionally kept things murky regarding their original corporate teat (no offense to teats, which are blameless in this affair) enterprise, my2centences, and their new enterprise, the fanfic archive. My guess is that this is because FanLib wanted to obscure their former role as the "coloring between the lines" people, and because they were running the two enterprises as one company, with assets mixed.

http://life-wo-fanlib.livejournal.com/46404.html

More parallels: FanLib provided an automated script to fanfic authors so fanfic authors could import the entirety of their fanfiction.net entries over to FanLib; this went on until the owner of fanfiction.net blocked the script. What made it creepy was that FanLib asked authors for their fanfiction.net passwords. See the fanlib vs fanfiction.net entries at Life Without Fanlib, such as this one:

http://life-wo-fanlib.livejournal.com/8829.html

At the time FanLib did that, it was rare. Now, I think fanfic authors expect the ability to import (and export!) entries from one site to another (though they do not expect their content to be moved from one archive to another without their knowledge). MyFandoms probably had their "permission," a "we can re-use your content for promotional purposes in any damn way we want" type clause in their TOS, as did FanLib.

[unjapanologist]

Fandom Entertainment has at least two different pieces of software, FanFicFan and the new wordpress plugin with uncertain properties (it certainly doesn't sound like it adds much to WP). They have about a bajillion different sites, though, and I'm really starting to feel that I need a map by now. They're definitely offering both at the same time, separately. If they're using any other software for Fanfic.me (I can't tell), they're not admitting it.

Ah, there seems to be some Fanlib content in the wayback machine, though it's pretty jumbled up most of the time. Will check it out further. Would you be interested in filling in the similarities-to-fanlib section of the Fanlore page? Elf was kind enough to suggest a skeleton for that section, and I'll fill it in if need be, but I'm more comfortable reporting about current events. You're much better placed to talk about Fanlib.

Regarding the porting of stories to Fanfic.me: the MyFandoms TOS was ported directly to Fanfic.me. *glances at Fanfic.me TOS* It's magnificently vague on what content belongs to who, except that Fanfic.me can do pretty much anything they want, I think. But Jacky Abromitis doesn't always seem to be very truthful when users worry about what others can do with their content.

But I should check the TOS over again, they seem to have changed some stuff. That "authors who don't allow fanfic" list definitely wasn't there a few weeks ago.

They turned the censorship thing on, by the way. It's still blocking words in their own news posts. *boggles*

[stewardess]

I will definitely work on fanlib write-ups at fanlore at some point. At the moment my personal life is a shambles (I'm moving, among other things).

Most of my write-ups exist only at livejournal, which I doubt will exist in five years. FanLib stuff needs to find a more permanent home.

[unjapanologist]

Yeah, leaving things at LJ is probably not the way to go.

(ruminating on archiving options) Is it even possible to export the contents of an LJ community like life_wo_fanlib, including all posts and comments? I'm not advocating that the whole shebang should be uploaded elsewhere without posters' consent, of course. Just wondering exactly how much of the stuff can theoretically be backed up and given a permanent home elsewhere, or if it would all have to be preserved page for page, by hand.

[stewardess]

There is no way to export a community at this time, unfortunately. LJ and DW don't do it because of the permission issue, which I understand.

[unjapanologist]

Via elleth: DW is working on a community importing feature now, it seems.

I'm curious if people will have trouble with the permission issue, or how DW is going to handle permissions re: comm importing. To be honest, I personally wouldn't mind LJ comm posts or comments of mine being imported elsewhere. It doesn't feel that different from having one's comments imported when someone imports their LJ onto DW.

And with Tumblr and similar services getting popular, perhaps people will get/have gotten used to their content being recreated elsewhere as long as their name stays attached to it? Although that really may be a case by case thing. I can think of a few places that I wouldn't want my stuff to appear on. Then again, this is the internet, and it's not like I can (or should) stop people from re-posting.

[stewardess]

I think comments posted at a community, or in someone else's journal, are viewed as the property of the community or journal.

But if you post a creative work at a community, such as fanfiction or a work of meta, it's accepted that it's yours. Re-posting without permission is seen as "archiving without permission," and people don't generally archive someone else's work without permission.

There are times when people have an urgent need to remove (permanently or temporarily) their online fandom presence, due to problems with family or job. If their creative works have been archived without their permission, they can't "hide." AO3 came up with a workaround for this, which is "orphaning" work. The creative work remains, but the author's name is no longer attached to it.

It is an unfortunate fact that women are penalized for creating adult works. Adult fanfiction works have been used as evidence of "unfitness" in child custody battles. As a result, I will never export the content of communities I manage on LJ (except when I'm the only person posting at the comm).

[unjapanologist]

Btw, I tweeted DW yesterday to ask about possible concerns from people who might not want their content imported. Will let you know if they reply.

If their creative works have been archived without their permission, they can't "hide."

I know, and I totally understand the concerns. But I suspect that this is one of those things that will evolve as re-blogging and referencing stuff all over the place becomes more common. The idea that you might be able to erase an online fandom presence entirely just by removing or orphaning works is a bit questionable by now. Many people will have bookmarked works, perhaps partially quoting, and definitely attaching the author name to the title. People will have referenced the works elsewhere in recs. Even if the original posting was never cached by Google, some of those references will have been.

And even if most people agree that archiving without permission is extremely bad form and something that will get you slapped around half of LJ/DW fandom, there are very many people who are outside those circles and don't much care. Not sure how advanced this is with fic, but in the case of art, especially adult works, they'll get reblogged or reposted on rule34 or wherever. Dojinshi creators can beg people not to put the books up for auction all they like, it still happens all the time. For many people, "I want to preserve and share this pron" trumps "the creator might not like me spreading this around".

Which is extremely unfortunate, especially in cases when it really does matter for the creator's RL situation regarding family/job/legal battles. But it's also a reality, and I suspect it's risky to give people a false sense of security by letting them assume that they can erase their online presence completely if need be.

Personally, if I owned any LJ comms, I think I'd want to import them into DW for backup purposes and with privacy setting such that only I can see the backup, just in case LJ goes up in flames entirely and people want their stuff back. The idea of importing something completely and visibly without people's permission makes me recoil for the exact reasons you describe. But it's a tricky situation, and I kind of suspect that mores might change on this topic.

ETA: DW's reply is here: http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/31382.html?thread=3811990#cmt3811990

[stewardess]

Thanks for the update! A community I'm desperate to export somewhere else is Life Without Fanlib.

[unjapanologist]

Oh, yes. I'd hate to see the conversations in there go poof.(Not that I have any illusions about DW being the first everlasting internet service or something, but at least there would be a backup of the comm someplace.)

[amireal]

What I find interesting is the use of MPAA ratings which got some sites DMCAs from the MPAA and thus some of the alternative systems. Makes me wonder if there's a side deal there or if they guy has done the usual robust research.

[unjapanologist]

My guess is robust research. If they had a deal with anyone, they'd have mentioned it (and retweeted it a bajillion times across their thirty accounts).

[ciaan]

Well, it'll be interesting to see how fic set in Es[censored] or discussion of clams[censored]s turns out.

[unjapanologist]

Well, if some nasty person want to talk about clamshells, they should rate their fic R or NC-17.

Clamshells. Kids these days, they have no shame.

[elf]

I guess you should be able to go ahead with the Biblefic after all?

No no no... in addition to the "offensive" fanfic, I have been unmutual and am not welcome to post things at their site. Or rather, not welcome to post fic. I can, currently, post comments, and rate things whether I'm logged in or not.

(At this point? I heartily recommend many fans to post crossover drabbles in in obscure fandoms, preferably with half a dozen characters involved. I wanna see what happens when their dropdown has to deal with 500+ characters. Hey, with a bit of work, fanfic.me could be the premier Oglaf fanfic site on the web.)

The censorship thing? Gonna make DCU fanfic crash & burn. See, there's this rather well-known character who goes by Dick.

And I'm always thrilled by policies of "May contain elements not suitable for children, therefore all not-children are banned from those parts of the site." Except, um... are they going to be readable while logged-out? Hint to ff.me creators: you can't build mega-marketing SEO-based sites if you hide substantial draws-in-people portions of them from searches & public view.

The idea of censorware on a fanfic site... of auto-blocking some words or filtering stories based on them... wow, she really doesn't have any idea how this works, does she? Auto-blocking words gets you fics that people have strategically written so the blocked version reads as more racy than the original; auto-filtering gets you (1) screaming unhappy fans who didn't want their stuff hidden, and (2) screaming unhappy fans who can't read their best friends' fic, because their 15-year-old buddy wrote something with the word "hell" in it. (Also. Are they going to let underage writers write R or NC-17 fic?)

[unjapanologist]

How about posting Bible commentfic? (Have you tried registering at Gleeklub.com or one of the other fanfic.me-powered sites? Maybe the Terra Nova site needs to accept biblefic. Terra Nova is about dinosaurs and all that.)

I kind of want to register and post, but it's fun watching them pretend to have an active user base by commenting on their own fics.

The current setup of the age verification thing looks like it's supposed to work for logged-out visitors as well. Except that it doesn't - it just goes back to the verification screen whatever age I put in. Can you go through it while you're logged in? Or does your login not work on the dev site?

I really have no idea how they think people will react to the word-blocking. Maybe it's still on the dev site because they realized it would never work and abandoned it, but I'm not very hopeful. The dev version of "You Were There" has a "yep.fd sa fdsaf asf asd" comment on it from an admin dated October 13, so they seem to be testing it right now.

I have been unmutual

Unmutual? That's nice :) I'd say thank you for teaching me a new English word, but you also linked to Oglaf and ruined all hope of productivity for today, so.

[elf]

"Unmutual" is not technically an English word. (Sort of.) It comes out of an episode of "The Prisoner," in which our hero (or anti-hero, or anyway, our protagonist) is labeled "unmutual" for not participating in his prison-village's social activities. Being too "unmutual" can be cured with surgery.

It's a delightfully *useful* word, and it's caught on in fandoms far beyond its original source.
****

I think I'm still reeling over that "poised to become THE fan fiction site" statement. Because. Um. With a drop-down list of characters? (Anyone got a mobile device to check the site right now? Because from what it looks like, it'd be *awful* on a 3" screen.)

My daughter reads fanfiction.net on her Kindle. FF.net has a *clean* mobile layout.

If ff.me were less hilariously incompetent more socially ept, I'd suggest they look into AO3's early actions: tell FANS, not the media, that you've got a new archive, and run occasional promos to get more fic. Of course, AO3's goal is a long-term archive, not venture capital, so they were able to tell fans, "import your fic here so it has a stable backup location!" I don't think ff.me can make that pitch.

"Import your fic here so each chapter counts as a story and readers have to read your fic on 1/3 of the screen area" doesn't have quite the same compelling ring.

[unjapanologist]

Unmutual does sound useful, I'll keep it in mind.

Fanfic.me has no mobile site as far as I can see. On a 7" screen, it's still barely usable, but I can't imagine it being anything but junk on a smaller screen. (And yeah, they'll have to come up with something pretty damn impressive to beat ff.net on mobile. It's a joy to read.)

Besides "we have pictures", I don't see how fanfic.me can distinguish itself from ff.net in a way that might make some people consider moving. Of course ff.net isn't perfect, but it really isn't as hard to use for new people as they claim in the demo video.

You know, I'm starting to get really curious about exactly what software is running fanfic.me. It seems to be some kind of weird marriage of wordpress and their old fanficfan software. I'm increasingly unsure if the fanficfan thing is really completely gone. What's there right now feels a lot more like fanficfan than like wordpress.