Moving my stories off the site · 11:42pm Mar 15th, 2013
Starting today, I will no longer be publishing updates on Fimfiction. The non-braindead among you will realize this decision is influenced in part by the update that happened to the site today. However, I'd like to make it known that this isn't a kneejerk reaction. This has been a long time in coming, actually.
The update has implemented sweeping UI changes and added content that I not only don't care about, but would really like to disable but can't; in this case, those huge sidebars on the right side of every story page. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. In fact, this has happened whenever there's been a large-scale update. I'm not going to go into any specific complaints I've had since they're ultimately not relevant to this post; but in the past, I've usually said my piece, trudged on, and tried to get used to the things I hated. This time, though, there isn't even a blog post to foster discussion. It's like the site staff realize that they're going to get a lot of complaints, and instead of addressing them in any way they're choosing to ignore them.
I'm not making the decision to stop updating here lightly. I haven't been able to convince myself to write much of anything for months, because I found it a struggle to convince myself to use any more of this site than I absolutely had to, and couldn't get the chapter publisher to accept the formatting of any chapters I tied to write offsite. I realize this is going to be inconvenient for most of you, but I can't continue using a site that I've grown to hate.
I can't continue to read stories when the interface for reading them changes every three months and becomes less inviting and more of a headache to use every time. I can't continue to publish them when I know my readers are probably having just as bad a time as I am.
I can't continue to use a site that doesn't realize that providing a service without demanding money for it is not an excuse to make that service terrible.
I can't continue to let this site's management do whatever they want without talking to their users (e.g. me) about it at any point, or listening to their users when the users contact them.
I can't continue to use a site where the only time my opinion matters is when someone wants to insult me.
I realize that I'm just one guy, and most likely won't be convincing anyone to do anything regarding this site, but boycotting this site is the only action available to me, and I'm taking it.
If you want to continue reading my stories, please subscribe to them or to me on my Fanfiction.net account or (if I can successfully port my stories to it) my Archive Of Our Own account. As partial compensation for this drama you probably don't care about, I will endeavor to update at least one of my stories before the month is out.
Thanks for your time.
Wait, what account are you moving them to?
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Just noticed that a bit ago myself. By astounding coincidence, you posted right as I was adding my links.
hmm - because fanfiction.net and archiveofourown are meccas of Usability and ease of reading.
Your stories, your business - but for readers - this site is nicer to read stories on and has a better system of finding stories and notifiing you of story updates than either of the two sites you are moving to.
I enjoy your stories and wish you luck, but I think you will find your readership much diminished by this move
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Fanfiction.net posts regular logs of the updates they make to the site, avoids sweeping UI changes, rolls back updates if they do bad things, and at least pretends to care about its users' opinions (thus acknowledging that their users are, in fact, people). Fimfic does none of this.
I've not used AO3 much, but it seems to have formatted everything properly, looks decent, and isn't a pain to use, which, again, makes it better than Fimfic.
I've never had a whole lot of readers to begin with, so losing a few of them isn't ultimately a problem to me.
Might be better for you, but it's shit for readers. It is the most user UNfriendly site. Plus it does NOT work with calibre, nor do they support ebook formats. And I really don't know what the complaint is, since I started visiting fimfiction months ago this is the first revamp of the site I've seen. And so far it's actually a LOT better. Other than the color, not too great there. Though not like it really matters since you don't seem to have posted anything since you last complained about the site updating.
Sir I think you are the only one who has a problem. No one else here seems to mind. It's your decision though I find it childish and illogical.
Personally, I don't see the UI on FiMFiction very often good or bad. I use Calibre's fan fiction downloader plugin to get most of the stories I read and read them offline.
The FFDL plugin does work on fanficiton.net, but there isn't nearly as rich a set of metadata over there and the reader/writer interaction is pretty bad. I don't think I've ever commented on a story over there. I'm not seeing the benefit, frankly - I just checked out the UI when reading stories on-the-web here and I don't see a sidebar on the stories themselves. Plus there's a mobile version of the page now, which expands the reading possibilities quite a bit. I don't think that was there before this update.
Knighty just posted a blog post about the changes