Sep
19th
2015
What the hell is going on around here? · 12:15am Sep 19th, 2015
Post some pseudoliterary masturbation that nobody has read? Approved, and featured at EQD.
Post a response fic to a popular and controversy-inducing take on a really old idea? Nope, nobody on staff will approve that fic, because, um, plagiarism? No, the "plagiarized" author says that's a bullshit argument. How about "because unoriginal?" Nope, other authors can do it just fine. Well, um, because reasons. And your politics suck too, so nyah.
Maybe we need our own version of the Sad Puppies. Sad Ponies, maybe?
(source)
Or maybe even Rabid Ponies.
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Wild Zontars · 902 views
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Kinda late to the party, but I lost faith in the mods after the Five Score Divided By Four and Red Thrush Private School debates.
Blogged about it. TLDR, story moderation on this site is fatally flawed because it does not have a definite goal toward which it aims.
Re. EQD, it's normal to approve things that haven't yet been read by anybody on fimfiction. The intent is to improve its chance of getting featured. Might not work that way anymore, though.
Wait, that story failed moderation? Why? Who failed it?
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Well, this was after linking to unpublished stories was banned, but in this case the modstaff didn't care. See below.
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OK, reaching back into my memories, because the story and blog posts in question were removed by the author when he packed up and left in disugst:
You remember RealityCheck? He had a habit of writing (reasonably good, IMO) fix-fic recursive fanfiction. If someone wrote a story with a moral or ending that he found particularly stupid, he'd take the same premise and re-write it.
Now, RealityCheck wasn't the most popular guy around. He's an outspoken conservative and Christian. Creationist, even. No fan of things like gay marriage. Not big on lesbian horse sex. You can imagine how well that went over around here. I argued with him a lot on his blogposts.
["Speculation" begins here, because I've been asked not to name names or quote from PMs]
Anyway, RC wasn't the most popular guy with the modstaff, between his opinions and his penchant for attracting drama. He also liked to argue the rules if he saw them as being abused. Here begins the shitfest.
Once upon a time, GaPJaxie wrote a really popular take on the "what if one of the Mane Six was a changeling" idea. It got so popular to write another version of GaPJ's fic with different characters/endings that they started a group just to hold the (*checks*) 62 different versions. RC, disliking the subtext of the story, decided to write his own version, just like everyone else. His take was a Trumpian "ban the
MuslimsChangelings fromAmericaEquestria" sort of deal. He even had Twilight quote Reagan on foreign policy.After the story had (iirc) hit the Featured Box and got quite the storm brewing in the comments, the modstaff retroactively failed it. Said it was "plagiarism" because it used the same idea, same ponies, and similar dialogue at the beginning. Apparently, the other 60 versions were just different enough to be OK. (*eyeroll*) We figured someone bitched to the right mod, and that mod took it down because of the politics.
GaPJaxie told the modstaff some version of "I disagree with RC's take on my story, but this isn't plagiarism, and if it is, so are these other stories. What's the deal here?" So then they decided that RC's story was no good "because jumping on bandwagons", but the several dozen blatant bandwagon-jumping stories written and approved after his were OK "because reasons".
RC said OK, fine, I'll just link to the unpublished version in a blog post.
A little bit later, the blog post was edited:
We went to check, and yep, there's the rule saying "don't do that". Funny, nobody could remember seeing that rule before. We compared the new FAQ to an archived version, and yep, the new rule was added after RC's passive-aggressive routine had started, with no announcement.
We posted links to a bunch of other unpublished stories that authors were sharing, and... nothing happened. Mods said they'd handle it on a case-by-case basis. I even PMed a staff member, and was basically told not to bother reporting authors for sharing unpublished works.
RC said "fine, I'll publish it offsite". We all yelled "shenanigans" and that was that.
But wait, there's more!
Later, shortskirtsandexplosions wrote a sadfic about Starlight Glimmer getting stuck in a reverse-Groundhog Day loop, where she repeated the same day over and over, but the rest of the world went on. Eventually, everypony else died, and SG was stuck floating in complete darkness, with no idea WTF had happened. And it happened again every single day. The end!
RC didn't like that. He wrote his own version.
Eldorado shitcanned it. Plagiarism again. See, RC had quoted a couple of paragraphs from SS&E's story. Quoting is plagiarism. As I noted at the time, "It was less than 1% of the original text, half of which was dialogue from an episode, and much of which was altered, used at the very beginning of the story to mark the point of divergence for an Alternate Universe."
RC re-wrote those paragraphs. Mods approved it, then Eldorado saw it. Retroactively failed again. Paraphrasing is plagiarism.
We asked "what if RC gets written permission from SS&E, puts a big disclaimer and link to SS&E's work, the whole nine yards?"
Nope:
imgtc.com/i/rkGa6BGjwm.png
What about shared-worlds and crossovers, where something happens in two different stories?
Nope:
imgtc.com/i/sa140pLpSp.png
imgtc.com/i/DqjDwYQpl8.png
Oh, and by the way. If RC doesn't stop trying to get the story published RIGHT NOW, he's banned. No more do-overs. Never getting published. Fuck off and die. Additionally, we were told to stop discussing rules in public, because the modstaff refuses to say anything in public that would set a precedent. Case by case basis for everything, you see. Some animals are more equal than others.
I was told in private by a staff member that, while the staff would usually have taken a second look at Eldorado's rulings, they all hated RC by that point and wanted nothing to do with him. The rulings stood. However, to the best of my knowledge, they have never been enforced in the same way in any other case.
Anyway, RC migrated his content elsewhere and deleted the FiMfic copies shortly thereafter. He's still writing, but doesn't have nearly the same exposure. FiMfic is kinda THE place for ponyfic.
3904178 That's terrible. I don't understand who is mod staff and what the relationships are among them as well as a lot of other people do.
imgur images don't work on fimfiction. They block fimfiction.net .
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Funny, they work just fine in Chrome. Must be messing with their hotlink-detection somehow. I'll re-host those and edit my reply; they're screenshots of Eldorado's responses to people's questions.
3905085 They work in your Chrome, probably because you've uploaded them to imgur, or viewed them, in another Chrome tab, so they're in your cache. imgur blocks requests from fimfiction.net.
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Nope, now that I remember it, when the first murmurs of imgur blocking hotlinks came down, a bunch of us tested that. Anyone using either Chrome or Chrome + the right anti-tracking/adblocker plugins can see any imgur hotlink, whether it's our own or not. I had forgotten that imgur blocking them was still a thing, to be honest. I assume that the anti-tracking is foiling the hotlink detection by spoofing the referrer or something.
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Real One: (third pic) Yeah, that mod first said something with certainty of what happens when you quote someone else story then he just proceeds to say "Oh it would be hard to define" about the same thing, which means bias against RC, and a moderator can't have that.
3904178 4412352 For what it's worth, that explanation never really made sense to me coming in after the fact (I didn't hear about his stupidity until months later). After all, "No personal attacks, in public or otherwise." has been a rule forever, and RC definitely violated that one on a regular basis with his commenting habits. I was honestly expecting him to get banned years ago since he seems to be completely incapable of respectfully disagreeing with others or ignoring opinions he doesn't like and tends to respond to everything like it's a personal attack, so it seems strange for the mods to make up rules just to attack him when he gave them just cause on a daily basis.
Do bear in mind that this is in no way a defense of the mods or other site staff because they are some of the worst I've ever seen and manage to make this site a bigger mess than some completely unmoderated communities I have been a part of in the past, just an observation on the situation.
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I may or may not have PMs that back this up (*whistles innocently*), so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make sense if we assume that even the best of mods occasionally get a bit power-trippy. They smack down users they don't like first, and come up with an explanation later (if at all). If you also assume that the mods don't want to air dirty laundry in public, other mods will do bare-minimum damage control when the power-tripper screws up.
Banning RC for personal attacks is something you do before he releases a controversial story, not afterwards, unless you want an uproar from his fans. "The author is an asshole" isn't a valid reason for the story to fail moderation, so (unless he says something really stupid and you can ban him) you need to find some other fig-leaf to cover it with.
All it takes is one mod with a vendetta, and a few others willing to provide cover (in public, at least) rather than pulling the rug out from underneath a fellow mod. No big conspiracy needed.
4412719 Oh believe me, I know. My point was not that the mods were in any way right, just that they didn't need to be stupid to get rid of him (although admittedly stupidity the norm so I'm not surprised they were). His posting behavior has been out of line basically forever, so there was no need to do anything with his stories when they could just ban him for his comments and everyone would go "yep, I saw that coming" and moved on with no real drama. Yes there are always a few sycophants who will defend someone well known like RC, but the bulk of the community would have simply said that his behavior was inappropriate regardless of weather you agree with his views or not because he definitely didn't even pretend to keep things civil even when politics weren't part of the discussion. No need for a vendetta, conspiracy, or covering each others asses, just normal moderation according the the first and most basic rule on the list.
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snip
I mean...can you blame them for not wanting anything to do with someone who still is so vehemently backward thinking?
I can't, but that might be because I'm gay and therefore am an "abomination" in RC's eyes.