Offprint Beta: user experience so far · 7:17pm Mar 5th, 2023
aka "Tween pisses off about two people". But let's start from the beginning.
For those who don't know, Offprint is a writing site started somewhere around 2020, apparently due to its creators becoming increasingly displeased with the way knighty manages this forsaken site (as you may imagine it involved a certain white horse as well as clop stories involving fictional characters being fictionally underage).
The timing probably wasn't coincidental. Art by Pirill-Poveniy
Anyway, unlike the altboorus that popped out immediately after the great derpibooru shitshow (perhaps due to Philomena giving them a framework to work with), Offprint started its life as closed alpha version and stayed that way until 2023. During that time, people came and left, the echoes of drama occasionally reached 4chan and fimfiction, some people got themselves banned, some were outright refused to be let in, someone was accused of conspiracy to commit treason... y'know, the usual stuff that happens when people who leave a website because its owner won't bow to their will try to make something themselves.
At least they admit it (the headline changes everytime you refresh the site, though)
Soon, nearly three years passed and here we are. Open Beta, one doesn't need an invitation anymore, time to check it out. It's apparently multi-fandom, so I assume it's supposed to be AO3 without you-know-what and you-know-whom rather than a direct competitor to fimfiction. Good for them, AO3 is fucking ugly.
Frankly, it could've been worse (and apparently was, back in the alpha version)
Okay, so how is Offprint now? Well, for starters, despite spending 2.5 years in development, it's still amusingly broken. Far too often, the main page will look like this:
No, it doesn't load.
Chapter lists on stories also get that from time to time. Be prepared for a lot of loading. Early after beta dropped, there was an amusing bug when it came to voting: upvoting a story that was already rated 1:0 would boost it rating to 2:0, but clicking again to undo the vote would drop it back to... 0:0, and it stayed that way. One'd think a voting system would be something you'd want to work properly when you open the site to the public (and you have a Discord server with over 200 people to tell you something is wrong). Thankfully, it seems fixed by now.
The features of the site would be useful (like an ability to group chapters in volumes), if they weren't bugged or just shoddily put together – for example, there's no way in hell to tell a published chapter from an unpublished one, aside from a briefly flashing teeny-tiny message that shows when you try to publish a story and tells you that it has to be at least 750 words long (on a side note, various error messages occasionally pop up when you go to the main page). But I guess introducing a goddamn constitution was a far more important step in developing the site. Adding a story seems fine if it wasn't for a small detail: choosing the fandom. This is what it looks like:
It's neither searchable (like on fimfiction) nor it's entirely alphabetical. As in, it looks like someone first started to add franchises alphabetically, but then he went for a lunch and someone added some more in a random order. And then the third guy came to show that he really loves Final Fantasy...
I shit you not. For comparison, Fimfic has one Final Fantasy tag with 46 stories. Total amount of Final Fantasy stories on Offprint? One.
Speaking of adding stories, this brings me to the main point. This website seems fucking dead. Like, seriously, it doesn't need a featured box because everything you post just sits on the main page forever. I added Silver and Diamonds for (You) on 7th February, it good approved, and it still sits on the main page. As in, nearly a month passed and only five stories were added. I wonder if it's lack of authors or story approvers not giving a damn – from what I've seen, there are at least four of them on Discord (perhaps yelling at them there may help, but I'm officially not in the Discord server) and yet nothing new shows up. To check this, I submitted It's Not Easy Being Green and Juniper Montage Makes a Porno on 17th February (both technically comply with the rules, although I expect the former to be rejected). Both are still pending. Make of that what you will.
All in all, I suspect the website spent too much time in development. The times changed since 2020 and people who wanted to leave Fimfic because of a white horse with questionable taste in Austrian art either moved on altogether or came back to our little shithole. Offprint will probably stay what it is now, a buggy, niche project for a bunch of people (I checked: after some 2.5 years of its existence, it hosts 433 stories; "dying" Fimfiction had 471 new stories... in February) rather than the next AO3. Shame.
Update: that was fast:
Also, chapter 4 and mass murder is not okay but chapter 3 with necrophilia is? Huh.
Not surprised its dead. This is literally the first I'm hearing of the site's existence...
5716801
Indeed. Also, literally the whole suicide thing in Juniper Montage Makes a Porno is her mentioning that she faked suicide to check her boyfriend's reaction and broke up with him because his reaction was "thank you, Jesus" (at which point the second person protagonist realized he was about to stick his dick in crazy). No wonder no one wants to put fics in there.