A Question....

[libgirl.livejournal.com]

Has there been any consideration about age restrictions at the suggested archive?

As a long-time, multi-fandom participant and talking with another one this week over the issue at LJ and with fanlib, two things came up:

1. As long as we're paying someone else to host our things, they can decide not to host specific things. Also, people will attempt to make a profit off of us in any way possible. The best solution is to host our own site with a dedicated server than can house us all.

2. We were talking and we both agreed that if there was a multi-fandom fanfiction hub, we wouldn't want it to be along the lines of ff.net. Everyone I know cringes when a news source goes to ff.net to talk about the "fandom phenomenon". That said, admitting fic.'s based on quality is tricky and subjective. If we create something, for ourselves, then I hope that we would both cover ourselves legally and present ourselves professionally. There is a legal issue involving minors and NC-17 material than can only really be remedied by not allowing minors. The easiest solution seems to be creating a panfandom archive for underage readers either in association with or as part of the larger archive, requiring a age statement to sign up and logged-in-only access to adult material. Also, if there are no underage readers allowed, then there is less likelihood of creating another ff.net.

I know that this will probably not be a popular opinion. I know that many people in fandom, particularly on LJ are underage and "passing" or "socking" in order to read adult material. I'm not saying that some underage readers cannot handle adult material or aren't already participating in adult activities; however, from a legal standpoint, it seems more responsible to take precautions.

Additionally, in light of the recent LJ events, it's obvious that much of what gets archives, websites, journals and fic.'s shut down is a perceived danger to the "childrenz". If this is a site by adults, for adults it's less likely to come under that sort of negative fire. After all, we're going to have to deal with the legal ramifications of intellectual property and copyright laws already.

I'm truly not trying to rock the boat or ignore the many and important contributions of underage fans to fandom. I'm just trying to ascertain how the issues of liability will be dealt with.

Comments

[quivo.livejournal.com]

Say, you submit a fic to the normal pool, where everyone starts out. People rate it/vote it up, and it gets enough votes and comments or whatever to be in consideration for reviewing by people in the fandom.

When I said this, I didn't necessarily mean just the amount of feedback would be taken into consideration, a stark number all on its own. Pageviews and stuff like that would count too, and if the system isn't some monotlithic group of people that aren't representative of fandom, but smaller groups of volunteers within each fandom that are maybe monitored as much as is feasible for relative representation of genres and common themes in their fandom, the size of a fandom wouldn't be as much of a factor. I'm thinking we could adjust whatever measure that was being used after checking it against experiences that both new and established authors in the fandom had had, too.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

That's still assuming there is even enough of a fandom for that. I mean, what if people want to post their Yuletide fics or other rare stuff like that. I just think any system like that would be really heavily biased against anyone doing anything different.

I really can't see this as being something that would encourage authors to post to this archive. I certainly wouldn't, knowing my stuff is practically guaranteed to be labelled crap just because I don't have a big audience. On other archives, I may still not have an archive, but at least I'm not going to be punished because of it.

[libgirl.livejournal.com]

I have, for years, gone to an original fiction site that used a different system, but one that I think might work and would protect rare pairs etc.

They had the fic. searchable by categories, and you could post reviews--pretty much like a standard archive. However, then they also had a section called "Top Lists" and if you clicked that, you could then click on the categories as before, but instead of getting an alphabetical list of all fic in that category, you'd get a list that showed the highest rated fic in that category. It was simple to access and use and it was category specific. That way you'd be able to read what (for example) Harry/Luna readers thought were the best Harry/Luna stories. The fic.'s were ranked by the reviews that had been left (which allowed you to rank the fic. on a 1-5 scale I think).

I think this system requires more backend work when you're setting up the archive, but it would be fairly self-sustaining once the code was written.