Exactly what it says on the topic.

What events ruined whatever respect you had for EQD?

For me it was two things:

I had seen a certain EQD pre-reader (midnightshadow) behave extremely unprofessionally with regards to the ATCB members. If you don't believe me, ask Warwolf, GUILO or BoredHooman about it.

And the other thing that ruined my opinion of them was that they featured Around the Bend. I read the story; it is a pretentious, vitriolic rant against Season Two and its failure to mesh to the author's headcanon. Technically, the writing was good but plotwise, horrid.

Nothing killed EqD.
That is the problem.

922347 Well, they rejected my story on the basis that the prereader didn't like Discolight shipping, even though he thought it was well written.

So basically, I have a huge grudge against them.

922347 I never knew it even existed till about my 10th or so week here, whenever I started following Regidar. So I never liked it to begin with. I much prefer EQAD, it was the first pony only site I ever been to.

922350, so you're upset that it exists?

------------

One other thing I noticed is the unusual hatred of HiE stories among the pre-readers and commentators.

There are also problems that I find with the organization - namely how updates to fan fiction are treated.

The other thing that I despise is how nearly every post ends up with a flame war in the comments section.

this site. I never found EQD first, this site was my first ever contact with fans and so forth. when I looked at EQD, I saw a inferior product. I don't intend to send my stuff to EQD for the same reason that I don't intend to send it to fanfiction.net. they are both worse than this site.

I don't like the whole idea of it, plain and simple.

I don't disrespect them per say, but I don't have respect for them specifically.
it's like going to wikipedia for a in depth analysis of the entirety of warhammer 40,000. it's not detailed enough. you go to lexicanum. thus I go here for fanfiction, the rest of the stuff I just really come across....

922347
It's the pre-readers and the grammar nazi teachings locked in their brains.
Great grammar doesn't make a story good. Great story telling makes a good story.

922347

Well, nothing really. They have things that I think need improvement, but, I'm only in this group to watch people groan about it. So far, I've sent one story to them. They gave me it back, told me what to fix, and now it's being reviewed. I know it will get denied, but, my friend insisted I send it in. If I get it back being told to change plot or something MAJOR, then I won't bother. If they say "Sorry, no gore." (it's a tad gorey, but, they had a few gore fics on their site with that rule still in effect) I won't submit it again. Honestly, I don't find them to be dicks.
I just feel they need to not rely on one pre-reader to deny a story. But a few. One of the pre-readers can instantly say "I dislike this fic. So, I won't let it go through because of that." Which is off-putting a bit, since that pre-reader just decided the fics entirety. But, again, I don't hate them. I just feel they need to improve some aspects about themselves.

922379, the other problem is that I think that too many of the pre-readers sometimes let their biases influence their decision to let their fics in.

I still use it, but only use it to look at art, comics, and news, since it's a really great place for the archival of these.

However, I never look at the comments. This is why I hate it. The people who use it are fucking retards. They're the "bronys 5 evur xDDD /))))" people, and God, they make me hate this fandom. They're the reason why haters exist for this fandom; it's because they act like Goddamn IDIOTS and never SHUT. UP.

Also, the admins and mods are mostly (key word: mostly, some are moderately cool) jerks who are either like the people above or are pretentious and think so highly of themselves they make themselves seem lowly to others.

tl;dr: They website's cool, the people who use it and the people who run it are the ones who ruin it.

922387

Essentially what I'm getting at. WizardOfWords had a few of his/her story's shot down because the pre-reader compared it to "Sky Pirates". Whatever the hell that fic is.

pretty much everyone there is a hypocrite and a suck up

They died when they rejected my fic three consecutive times for the same reason. I didn't receive any complains about the grammar nor anything like that, so after the first time I got an editor and revised and fixed all the problems we could find. Yet they still managed to find the same damned problems. They didn't even forward it tot he pre-readers! All I got was this reply:

Thank you for your submission. However, due to issues with tense use, comma use, and capitalization, it cannot be forwarded to the pre-readers. This does not count as a strike.

All the best,
The EqD Team

This is the fanfic I sent them, if anypony wants to check if it's really that badly writtten that doesn't even deserve to be forwarded to the pre-readers: http://www.fimfiction.net/story/73406/rainbow-in-the-dark

922362
Nah, just joking.

922433, it's readable but your narration style is a bit strange.

I'd like to say when they shifted their fanfiction standards to be more "family friendly." They still linked stories where ponies died and stuff, so I have no idea what the new rules meant.
The truth, however is nothing really killed it for me; I just outgrew it. My interests are, quite naturally, different from those of the EqD staff, and since I can now find the art, fanfiction, videos and news that match my interests on my own, I don't need EqD holding my hand.
I think it is ridiculous and a little depressing that there are people who are so lazy they need to be spoonfed by a source like that.

922375
They put up things with bad grammar all the time.
Which is only to be expected. I'm pretty sure somewhere close a quarter of the books I've ever read had a typo or some random flub that made it past god knows how many editors, publishers and prereaders.

Honestly, I don't outright hate EQD...but I do disagree with their fanfic proof readers a lot of the time.

Sure this might be me feeling sore because my fics were rejected in the past. But there's been several times before and since I submitted mine that I've seen stories with the same problems (and worse issues) then what they criticised mine for getting featured and 4-5 starred.

I won't deny that my stories need a lot of improvement, but when I get shot down and another author gets a free pass despite the same problems, I tend to feel a bit sore. Plus as others have said, the comments section are a nightmare and half the time the stuff they feature or news they broadcast is just boring as hell...to me.

Its a good site to keep up on current events, but I do not care for it beyond that.

922379
"I just feel they need to not rely on one pre-reader to deny a story." I've mentioned a need for a more democratic process concerning the fate of a story and allowing the return of ratings in the survey.

I just don't like the fact that they think they're like a big-name publishing company.

922504

Sadly, dictatorship takes over in our free world, right?

922347 For me it was their pre-readers. Sometimes they're input is legit, but I've seen peoples stories get rejected on the grounds the pre-reader didn't like it personally. Nothing wrong with the story, it's well written and such, but they just didn't like it. Then I came here and never gave EqD a second glance.

Starman did. He mentioned a particular fic that got in. A very bad one. Kinda left a bitter taste in my mouth.

922519
I'm not that pessimistic, but now that I know about Equestria After Dark, I know where to send my more mature romance novels(I never write sex for the sake of it alone), and Pony Fiction Archive suits me for the other purposes.

Completely immature prereaders who created errors just so they could reject a fic.

922362

Their blind hate towards HIE is discrimination of the highest order. They reject most of them, throwing pathetic reasons at us, the writers.

Mine was rejected purely because of one line out of the (still growing) 160k word novel that showed that a character watches "a show with colourful ponies", being automatically classified as a Brony In Equestria fic.
A fellow HIE writer couldn't get his also popular story posted there because of invalid reasons and small nitpicks that seemed to change every time he re-submitted the story.

Frankly, I'm way over it by now, since the majority of pony fanfic readers are not on EQD anyway. I've seen average-tier fics posted on EQD just because the authors were part of/friends with the pre-readers. When you check their stories here, they barely have a few dozen likes and readers.

922347 The Horrible Pre Readers and the fact that they don't allow HIE stories yet they allow Conversion Bureau stories which is kinda like a HIE ( A horrid HIE mind you).

What did it for me was the idiot who shot down my story and proceeded to tell me what was wrong in I-took-English-101 pretentiousness. I swear, do people know there's more than one style of writing? Just because they teach you Chicago Style (good for writing essays, not for freeform) doesn't mean it's the end-all, be-all of punctuation. And while I'm hanging out in Master of Fine Arts (hi, creative writing!) and I get some guy talking down to me as if I'm some third grader, I find it hugely offensive. I've probably spent more years writing than the prereader has in life and I don't appreciate the tone.

Furthermore, some of the shit they say doesn't even make sense. A friend of mine got his story turned down for "purple unicorn syndrome" and how "amateurish in writing" it is. Yes, because "amateurs" like Tolkien, Asimov, Chandler and the like used it, so God forbid someone else actually does it.

Frankly, it was cathartic blasting them yesterday on that damn survey. I only wish I could do that on a daily basis until the Cult of Trixie actually gets the point.

922631 You took the survey. Thank you. Whether anything changes is beside the point. You made your voice heard. I probably made some suggestions along the same lines as yours, although I will admit I mentioned I wouldn't like seeing human and cross-overs, but I DO love alternate universe. I tried to avoid being abrasive, though. Something needs to change, though. Drastically.
Edit: Scratch that. There ARE some good cross-overs, and I have a cross-over idea for a story brewing in my head. But the good cross-overs are more like taking a broad universe and adapting it into pony instead of, say, cross-overs that did pony like Sonic characters with Pony characters or that ill-fated Naruto cross-over that nobody even remembers.

922347 Mainly their way of letting the prereaders' bias get in the way of judging fanfictions. Also their seeming obsession over Trixie.

922666

For me, the abrasiveness is long overdue. When attempts at politeness have failed - when repeated attempts at politeness have failed, not just from me, not just from you, but from literally dozens of others, then it is time to put down the peace pipe give them a Missouri broadside with all 16-inch guns. There's a saying in law that applies here:

"When the law is on your side, bang on the law,
When the facts are on your side, bang on the facts,
When neither is on your side, bang on the table."

I think we're at the point where table-banging is sorely needed and the survey is just step one.

Many of the pre-readers are fanatical worshipers of English Grammar, which is a laugh. English Grammar is a joke: at best it's a set of guidelines, but they insist on treating it like it was sent from heaven on the wings of angels, every rule carved into the pages of a solid gold book...

I'm not commenting on punctuation and spelling and such- knowing how to use those well is a good thing- I mean the bits where they reject the fic on the basis that they do not like the way words are being used.

'Improper' use of descriptors, or putting descriptors in unusual places is what they knifed me for in the end, thought this after a number of made-up failures that I consequently slapped them for.

Some of these pre-readers seriously believe that every story ever told must be in essay-standard language, with no creativity or poetic use of words whatsoever. They live in a grey world, where everything must be bland...

922631, I gotta hear what you said about them.

Anyways, I honestly think some of the pre-readers need to learn some manners.

--------------

Also, I'm really puzzled as to why the pre-readers hate HiE fics so much.

Finally, inconsistent applications of the rules. Stuff has to be family friendly, yet FoE is there - and highly ranked. As are numerous FoE spinoff stories. Family friendly is not a word that describes FoE or its spinoffs.

In addition, some of the "Drawfriend" postings are pretty raunchy.

They've gotten much better about this in recent times, though.

922800

FoE got in because it was in before EQD became family-friendly. (Same with Cupcakes, but they've since removed it.)

Funny thing is, celebrated fics like "Through the Eyes of Another Pony" and "The Ballad of Echo" would have been auto-rejected nowadays because they have a brony protagonist. And the same people who spit on brony-in-Equestria are the ones who heap praise on TtEoAP.

Nothing about the pre-readers especially bothers me. The people who visit the site are a bigger problem to me.

The website on a whole isn't very story-friendly. Comments on story update roundups are few in number, and are often either people complaining about having nothing to read, or everyone just interested only in the same story--usually something with Lyra or some other background pony in the same tired scenarios.
Comments on the actual story pages there are pretty dead. And with no rating system anymore, there's no way to get a lot of feedback on any stories from there.
Plus, the site even has a setting that lets you remove all fanfiction posts, so take that how you will.

It's really more that FimFiction is better for people interested in finding, reading, and writing stories than EqD. But the lamentable thing is that often times the only way to get significant exposure is to be featured on EqD.

If EQD was just some blog ran by a few guys putting up their favourite fics I wouldn't care so much, but it's touted as the place to find the highest quality fanfics.

I've spoken to many people on this site who've attempted to get on EQD, only to fail for various reasons. My first thought was, wow, if amazing fics like the ones they wrote couldn't get in, the ones that are actually on the site must be absolutely incredible! This was something that I just assumed was the case until I came across people who bad-mouthed EQD. And so I started reading EQD fics. And now all I can do is this:

There have been too many occasions where I see fanfics on EQD accompanied by a little quote from the pre-reader harping on about how amazing the story is, only for me to read it and wonder what in the hell they were smoking. The fics might not be bad, but if I can find more interesting fics by simply browsing fimfiction for a few minutes and randomly clicking on something, that's not a good sign.

Strangely enough, I'm actually working on a one-shot that I've deliberately set up to match the common traits that seem to be required to get the coveted EQD feature. If I get it sent back with a strike I will do everything in my power to adhere to their rules, even if it means butchering the story in ways that I would make me scoff as a reader. And if I manage to get featured and gain some popularity, I will write a blog addressing EQD, one that will expose my true feelings and intentions. Sure, I'll probably have my story taken down from there and be told that I'll never be featured again, but that'll be the point.

922511, I agree. Sometimes, I honestly think the staff let their fame go to their heads.

922993
"Being famous on the internet, is like owning a 7-Eleven in real life."

922785 This. It's like only the Chicago style exists and Oxford, Associated Press, American Institute of Fiction and all the other styles are as made up as the very subjects we write about.

922993 One good example is the use of ellipses (the ..., if you're not familiar with the term, and if you are, congrats, you're ahead of the prereaders at EqD). Chicago style is as so: word ... word (including spaces), but word.... (with no space) at the end of a sentence.

The prereader, who I will refer to as "idiot", because he was one, told me flat out that word ... word was completely utterly and totally wrong, which it is...if you're using the Chicago style. See what I just did? Didn't use spaces. Why? Because creative writers are trained on the Oxford style, which doesn't use spaces. There's historical and (until recently) practical reasons for that, but anyone in college learns the Chicago style. Why? Because there's practical and (until recently) historical reasons for that.

Long story short: Chicago was created for essay writing, just as Oxford is for general writing (not just creative). AP, UPI and other styles are optimized for their own needs. An actual editor would know this - but prereaders aren't, and don't have the skillset for that sort of thing. And to think that they do is Icarian-level hubris.

(Also I should point out that Idiot dinged me on word.... which is correct in Chicago style.)

The bad fics, the crappy search system, and the pure white pages.

Well lets make a list shall we?
1. Most of them are elitist bigots.
2. The higher than thou attitude
3. Sent in artwork (which I believed it is better than a large portion of the vector art they post there) and never even got a reply that it was rejected.
4. A majority of the fanfics that go on there suck while good fics get rejected for arbitrary reasons like the prologue being boring (Turned into one of the best fics in this fandom IMHO)
5. Their extreme prejudice to fanfiction. If it weren't for fanfiction I wouldn't be as into this fandom nearly as much as I am, plain and simple.
6. The amount of praise everyone in the comment section gives the show. Seriously, its just a show with all right/nothing special writing and decent enough characters. It is nothing spectacular. Not to mention, if someone says otherwise it starts a huge flame war.
7. Im tired of trixie.
8. Try to critize the way they run things and you either get a snarky response or none at all.
9. Probably the thing that pissed me off the most: THE DELETION OF CUPCAKES. THIS! THIS was the straw that broke the camels back. Now the story wasn't that great sure and it was gory as all hell, but this one fic practically started the whole grimdark genre (one of my fav genres if you couldn't tell). IDK. It just seems like a part of our history, and they removed it...

923061
Ellipses? Freaking ellipses is what they want to waste time on? I used to have an old style where it was word. . . with a space in between in dot but the first dot not spaced from the previous word. Now I write like word... word where I group all three ellipses together followed by a space then the following word. But why all this attention to arbitrary minutiae about what is correct and technically accurate if the art and fun of reading a story is going to suffer?

923243 That was one example. Add in such "important" things like Oxford commas, one or two spaces between sentences and the like and the reasons to reject start piling up. All of it just excuses for them to turn it down for the most important reason: they, as prereaders, didn't like it, and so as guardians to the gates of elysium (for surely they must be, otherwise they wouldn't have been separated from the riff-raff to become exalted prereaders for EqD) they must turn down the story even if there's a risk that others might actually like it.

This wasn't the incident that stopped me from going to EqD, that faded with time, but it was this incident that made me stop considering them legitimate.

Remember that segment a while back on a St. Louis morning show where some bloke compared Bronies to people who choose to live as babies while living totally on government welfare? (Probably not.) Well, EqD posted that that segment was done by Fox News. Well, knowing that Fox News has a completely show on in that time slot, and remembering something I heard regarding the corporate layout of New Corps, I decided to do a little investigative journalism. I discovered that the station was a purely local channel that had only recently been bought by Fox Broadcasting Company (which is different than Fox News; despite the similar names the only overlap the two channels have in terms of administration is that they're both owned by News Corps, and Rupert Murdoch is a fairly hands off boss if reports are to be believed), and that it had been owned by NBC and CBC as well over the years with virtually no changes. Based on that information I was able to deduce that Fox News had nothing to do with the incident, that the information posted on EqD was wrong, and that said wrong information was slandering a by-standard for producing a slander they were not involved in fabricating.

I e-mailed Seth about this, and his response was to apologize and say that people were already talking about it and that they had to post on it. . . . That's it. No retraction, no "Whoops! Looks like we didn't check our facts," nothing. They were aware that the information they were putting out was false, and they just kept on doing it. They were willingly lying to their readers, and that's simply disgusting. To a news agency there should be no higher calling than the truth, but for all its news style EqD doesn't care about the truth, all they care is getting the story out first whether it's right or wrong.

That, folks, is simply unacceptable.

922631

The LUS bullshit pisses me off to know end. The only reason people do it is because it's to avoid repetitiveness. I'm sure you know that readers don't want to see "Twilight x" over and over and over again, correct?

923258 I've published before. It doesn't seem out of reach, but the bar seems to be readjusted every day or so. I've had three during the old days, one of which is undergoing a change in themes so severe it's practically a different story, and one of which got mediocre feedback and I've since been modestly disappointed in that I've severed it from my story lineup. I've also had one story published during the transition days. Stone Hearts. Probably one of my prouder stories. They were still using the old comment system and star ratings at the time. I haven't finished it, but it almost got sunned because it had an implied wet dream sequence and somewhat risque content, but I ensured them it wouldn't dip into clop content, so on it went. So it leads me to believe there are several ways to get a story on. 1) Make it vanilla but flawless in grammar. 2) Make it sexy but not cloppy. 3) Make it so far out there that nobody's ever seen anything like it before.
And for the record, I like putting two spaces between each sentence.
Another I must complain about is how one pre-reader holds the entire fate of the story in his hands. I can also imagine how the workload must mean the pre-reader puts less and less effort into truly reading a story but instead modestly skim it. I'd prefer to see a multi-tiered system that's more democratic where several pre-readers can analyze a story.

923224

9. Probably the thing that pissed me off the most: THE DELETION OF CUPCAKES. THIS! THIS was the straw that broke the camels back. Now the story wasn't that great sure and it was gory as all hell, but this one fic practically started the whole grimdark genre (one of my fav genres if you couldn't tell). IDK. It just seems like a part of our history, and they removed it...

I'm glad they removed it. Want to know why? Their rules state "No Gore" yet that fiction was there. It really got me riled up when I continued to see gore-filled stories such as FO:E and such. I'm glad they're actually bothering with their own rules.

923224

BUT, sorry, forgot to mention this, Cupcakes is in the Fiction Vault or whatever run by RBDash. At least, I think it is.

923328

The problem I see with your 1. is that it must be flawless in Chicago style, because anything else is considered "wrong". And in the case I mentioned above, some of them don't even know Chicago well.

But yes, I'd be happy to see groups of prereaders as a gateway. That's the norm for most other fandoms; why can't the Cult of Trixie figure this out?