What happened?!

5540858 Controversy regarding whether or not admins had the right to let a story in without a review. It was blown out of proportion, several admins stepped down, and it eventually died.

5540858

Tirainev1 blew it up.

also what 5540861 said I guess

Eh, it had been spiraling out of control for a long, long time. The incident Smaug speaks of might have been the public incident that correlated with the collapse, but it was far from the cause.

One of the big problems was that this group started as a very small collection of good stories, so it had a very unelegant system for adding them. When it exploded in popularity, the system could no longer keep up with the demand and it basically collapsed in on itself.

-Lumino

5540868

So, you just gave up?

5540903

If that's what you want to take away from all of it, go right ahead. You are aware that, when we opened the folders for submissions, they would fill up with over a hundred stories in less than two minutes, right? And then they would be closed for upwards of a month or more.

Yeah, that's a sustainable system.

-Lumino

5540903
This blog entry at the time may give you a little perspective. Too many incoming fanfics, not enough staff, and even if we tripled the staff, it still wouldn't have been enough. A large chunk of the staff was already burnt out, and having the two staff members that did the majority of the sorting and rejecting resign was pretty much the final blow.

It was also a massive amount of work with no pay, and standards were high, so you'd need someone qualified to do it. Finding new staff members was always difficult.

It wasn't a decision made lightly.

--arcum42

5540903

horizon wrote a blog post which explains the magnitude of the effort involved.

Which arcum beat me to, of course

Yeah, even if there had been no controversy at all, I can't see how TL could have coped without an increase in staff input that just wasn't realistic. When I got some of my fics in here (one of mine was the last-ever featured story :P ), it was literally a case of sitting and pressing F5 waiting for the folders to open, then rushing like hay to submit your chosen fic. It was pretty obvious it couldn't go on like that. There's a reason why TL has never been exactly duplicated anywhere else.

It's a shame, because TL was a nice place for solid, readable stories even if they didn't make it to EQD or the RCL or whatever. Plus it was a place you could submit a fic without having to wait and hope for a big-name reviewer (Present Perfect, Seattle's Angels etc) to pick it up, and there's not really anything else like it now.

So yeah, I still miss TL, but it was never going to last. The people who ran it did a great thing for ponyfic while it was around, and I still appreciate that. Thank you. :)

5540953
Yeah, that one was on my mind too...

5540957
Thanks.

Closest I've seen around these days is the Goodfic Bin, but yeah, it's mostly unfeasible, and without Sir Truffles and twilight-the-pony, Twilight's Library would have collapsed a fair amount earlier, since they were going through massive amounts of fanfiction.

In fact, if those two admins hadn't resigned, we were getting ready to switch to a totally different system where you post a post with a description of your story to a thread, and if either any of the admins thought the story looked interesting, or if the post with it got enough thumbs up, it got looked at. The incoming folder was going away either way, since we knew it wasn't workable. We already knew something had to change, and when all the drama hit, we weren't reopening doing something about it.

--arcum42

5540947

After all this time, that blog never fails to bring a smile to my face. We had a good run here.

-Lumino

5540984
That we did, and yeah, as usual, horizon says it best...

--arcum42

Thanks for running it while you did. This is group is how I began to build my Favorite list.

5540858
>Sub
Back to Reddit and stay back.

Are you sure it wasn't just because the library was blown up in the show... the shot used for the banner is just too perfect all things considered...

5541488 I MIGHT browse Reddit a bit too much.

I assure you its mostly for /r/GlobalOffensive!

5541450
This group started out as me building my favorites list! Bookshelves weren't around back then, and I wanted things categorized. I was swapping good fanfiction with my brother, and I wanted it to make a collection of the good fanfiction both of us ran into, too. After a while, it was just me, then people started wanting me to feature their fanfiction, I started the incoming folder and getting new admins, and things snowballed.

Glad it helped start your collection, and that's one reason I never could delete this group, even if it's closed. Even if it's old, it's still a great collection of good fanfics.

5541922
Nope. I debated on how the destruction of the library would affect it at the time, and decided it wouldn't. I'd switched over to a banner that was based on the Crystal Empire library at some point anyways. I just changed banners when it eventually did close because it was too appropriate for the situation.

(And no, I didn't delete the old banners. I probably even have the April 1st banners around somewhere...)

--arcum42

Is there a way to fix this? Impose new rules, keep all submissions inside mail sending, or anything else like that. I now that it's not a perfect system, but nothing can ever be. All that we are asking is that this group continues with its submissions. How can we ever get any new and good stories, if we just keep the classics and update it with a few stories every month or so? I'm not saying that classics aren't good, but many new authors are coming into being with great content and how are we going to accommodate them. We need a better system then, rush in, review, update, wait a couple months. I don't know how but we, as a community must fix this. This may be late, but at least I got my opinion out. Say what you will.