Challenge - Leave a Review for every fanfic chapter you read

[seitora]

So I came to the startling conclusion four years ago that I read a lot of fanfiction. Since my upper speed reading limit on a computer screen without skimming is somewhere between 30,000 to 35,000 words an hour, assuming I read about an hour a day on average, that's potentially 50 million words of fanfiction I've read in the last half-decade.

FFN has this nifty feature where it shows you the last 300 reviews you've posted. I haven't even come close to filling out that 300.

Now let's be honest, you all love it when you get reviews (though the enjoyment is relative to how well-written the review is. An "OMG SO AWESOME UPDATE SOON!!11!!" boosts your dopamine counts for about 0.01 seconds while something with five or six lines that makes a more thorough comment, neutral or positive). It's especially the case if you write for anything other than the Naruto and Harry Potter sections these days on FFN where you won't get very many reviews, at all.

With that in mind, I have, since the start of April, resolved to start leaving reviews every time I can remember to for every chapter I read through, and tailor my responses to the actual chapter instead of just a general goodwill response, sometimes offering a comment of parts I liked and/or disliked, and occasional critiques. Since April 2nd, I have left 47 reviews.

So, thoughts?





(Of course, I will admit a little bit of guilty pleasure at leaving a three or four paragraph review absolutely laying into some of those terribly written cliche-fests that you see like 'mob people attack Naruto'. Write enough of them and you can even copy and paste from prior reviews!)

 

[chronodekar]

Now, if you want to ENJOY reading a review let me direct your attention here,

http://chronodekar.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/fanfiction-review-the-weaponless-meinster/

self-advertising, I agree, but there things that I can't do with FFN's review system (like quotes and certain braces) that I can do off-site. Besides, the author can't exactly report me, now can he?

Anyway, if you've got a chapter/story you want me to ... scrutinize in a similar manner - post a link. Won't promise anything, but should be fun.

-chronodekar

 

[rdde]

@chronodekar

That's a nice and lengthy review. But how do you inform of the author of your review so that he or she may read it?

 

[chronodekar]

@chronodekar

That's a nice and lengthy review. But how do you inform of the author of your review so that he or she may read it?

It's more to inform potential readers than the author him/herself. That style of reviewing is ... frowned upon on FFN and can easily be 'reported as flame'. I'm not in a mood to banter with the admins there, so I just post such reviews on my blog.

-chronodekar

 

[seitora]

Well I don't strictly bash, so even with the negative reviews I leave I still offer advice.

I've gotten 5 PMs already this month, all positive, so I'm obviously doing good!

 

[seitora]

I've actually started doing this again over the last two months on FIMfiction. I get a crapload of sysnote replies daily to my comments as a result.

 

[Watashiwa]

Out of curiosity, what's FIMfiction?

 

[seitora]

Here

A site exclusively for fanfiction for the G4 series of My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic.

My account

 

[Waldstein]

"good story pls update"

 

[Dheir]

Honestly, I think that challenge is incredibly useful for both the authors you review and yourself. I might want to try this myself. Not only does it mean giving useful critique to these amazing or progressing authors, but it also gives you practice in both building criticism and working on your own writing (style, ideas, etc.).

I hope other people see this thread because if multiple people are out there diligently critiquing and helping others and themselves improve, then the fanfic world may improve unimaginably as we know it.

 

[PCHeintz72]

I almost never use the review system for long meaningful reviews on a story. That review post box is murder on formatted reviews. Instead I use the review system to continuity errors or mistakes. Or a few thoughts only, nothing long.

If a story really motivates me enough, I actually would send a long meaningful review by way of email, PM, or if it is also on a forum I go to I'll post in a thread there

 

[seitora]

I almost never use the review system for long meaningful reviews on a story. That review post box is murder on formatted reviews. Instead I use the review system to continuity errors or mistakes. Or a few thoughts only, nothing long.

If a story really motivates me enough, I actually would send a long meaningful review by way of email, PM, or if it is also on a forum I go to I'll post in a thread there

yet another reason why FFN is trash and only hangs on by its status as being the dominant fanfiction site, along with other crap like awful search engine, site updates that do a better job at hunting down and killing sectional dividers than actual trained blood hounds, and such lax supervision of R-rated content after their great purge of 2002 or whenever it was that I'm shocked they haven't been prosecuted hard yet

but yeah, since I'm doing mostly ponyfiction now most of the stuff I post goes to FiMfiction first and the comment boxes there are a lot easier to follow than FFN ever was

unfortunately I got exhausted after a while trying to comment on everything, so I went for commenting on stuff that's less popular instead, so authors still get feedback, and mega-popular authors also still get feedback, just from others

 

[nixofcyzerra]

Review every chapter of every fic I read? And proper reviews, not just a sentence or two?

Yeesh, I'd go through Keyboards like toilet paper.

 

[Dheir]

FFN is definitely overrated. I honestly think AO3 is better, though I don't actually know of any other fanfiction websites, other than wattpad, which I refuse to even look at...
But yeah, I found that AO3, for the (albeit little) time I have been there, the search engines and tag system, as well as everything else seem a little more superior, except that I'm not sure they have an actual forum(?) which would honestly be amazing. 
I can tell you guys are more experienced with the websites though.

 

[PCHeintz72]

yet another reason why FFN is trash and only hangs on by its status as being the dominant fanfiction site, along with other crap like awful search engine, site updates that do a better job at hunting down and killing sectional dividers than actual trained blood hounds, and such lax supervision of R-rated content after their great purge of 2002 or whenever it was that I'm shocked they haven't been prosecuted hard yet

Say what you will on FF.NET, one thing that has been a real solid boon to all the communities is it is there, and has kept a lot of things that otherwise would be gone.

The 'great purge' as you put it I believe was around March 2002, though they actually have had a couple smaller ones since.

I do wish they had implemented the story RSS/ATOM feeds they promised in May 2005 when they implemented the Author feeds, instead they implemented the alert systems instead. I far prefer the feeds to the emails.

The crossover categories and relationship pairings were implemented much later and the latter was flawed, later fixes only partially corrected the issues.

I've never really had too much issues with the search, and a secondary way of finding what wanted is to merely use the google search engine to search fanfiction.net

FFN is definitely overrated. I honestly think AO3 is better, though I don't actually know of any other fanfiction websites, other than wattpad, which I refuse to even look at...
But yeah, I found that AO3, for the (albeit little) time I have been there, the search engines and tag system, as well as everything else seem a little more superior, except that I'm not sure they have an actual forum(?) which would honestly be amazing.
I can tell you guys are more experienced with the websites though.

Well... experience is relative. Part of the problem is hunting down fan fiction is not like it used to be. Also, if you have been at it long enough, you begin to notice tons of sites over the years have died of link rot.

- AO3 I'm not a huge fan of the site navigation, and it suffers a problem similar to Mediaminor in link consistency. Meaning there are multiple ways and multiple valid links to get to the same story and member profile.

- MediaMiner.ORG has had lots of problems over the years, a number of them have been corrected, but I fear it came too late, as the site is mostly abandoned these days.

- FicWad.COM had some growing pains and comes across as a bit crude in some ways, but tried to be innovative and have almost everything from the get go. But the growing pains cost them, and these days they are much like MediaMiner.ORG

- Adult-FanFiction.ORG is the equivalent of FanFiction.NET for adult stories, but despite a massive site rewrite a number of years ago, and a later one about a year back, it lacks in features compared to some of the other mentioned.

- FictionPress.Com is not talked about as much these days, but is still FF.NET's sister site for original stories and poems. It has pretty much the same feature set as FF.NET

A lot of sites though have either suffered link rot or abandonment. Many of these were series or fandom specific but not all... I include both forums and archive sites in that. *Some* examples, there have been far more I've witnessed:

- fanfic.net - long gone

- Fan-Fics-R-Us - had some issues they never were able to overcome, and eventually died due to hosting expenses

- fandorium - long gone

- lady cosmos - long gone

- Sofaspud - long gone

- Ranchan and crossing Bridges - dead

- TheKeep - dead

- EvaFics & Lemontastica - merged into Darkscribes

- Geocities - stopped its home page system several years back, and when they did a lot of authors lost their personal pages with all their stories, not all of which was on FF.NET. Several sites attempted to copy their stuff before going down, but no one had all of it, and Internet Archive did not either.

- FortuneCity - did something much like Geocities

- LiveJournal - this is still in operation, but a lot of fanfiction authors abandoned their journals on it when they started mysteriously shutting pages down... more modern systems have largely replaced it for fanfiction authors.

- Anime and Manga FanFiction Forum, aka Anifics - was reorganized and brought back several times over the years under different software and management. At one point lost its content, at another lost its hosted pages, with a lot of stories lost. Disappeared mid last year. only thing left is the old Delphi forum software version that is all but abandoned.

- TMFFA - Tenchi Muyo Fan Fiction Archive... the whole thing went to a new site format around 2004 or so... it was very good, but had a server crash and inadequate backups... only site still available is the OLD one from before that.

 

[da_fox2279]

I like AO3, the new format for AFF, and Ficwad for the ease of DL'ing fics. And AO3 looks better than FFN, in my opinion. The lack of ads is a big plus. But I do agree, the search options could be better.

I miss the TMFFA. I found a lot of great stories on that site, and some of the better writers for the time. Too bad most of them have either moved on to series I don't read for (Thomas '009' Doscher), or have quit writing entirely.

 

[balthanon]

AO3 has a lot of features that I like, but to be honest surfacing good stories on it is just painful. It's in part because the user community isn't really large enough (which means you don't have really valid community input to search against), but their filter system just doesn't feel as robust as fanfiction.net despite the extra tags and other things that are available for labeling stories. When I do searches there it also seems like 90% of the stories that pop up put harems to shame by pairing the main character with everything under the sun.

It is also terrible for reading on a tablet-- the simpler interface of Fanfiction.net with the ability to increase the font size does a lot better there. AO3 looks nice on a desktop, but they're not designed with the modern web in mind. I've started on some style sheets to address that, but never gotten around to finishing them and there are several restrictions on media queries that make doing it right difficult.

On the other side, that lack of critical mass in readers seems to result in far less feedback too. I think I've received 2 comments total in the stories I have posted on the site.

 

[da_fox2279]

Not to mention the custom tags that AO3 tends to use. Standard tags are useful, but the stories with custom tags can be a pain in the ass to find.

 

[balthanon]

The lack of ads is a big plus.

https://adblockplus.org/

If ads are a problem for you this add-on is going to be your new best friend.  Never leave your virtual house without it.  (It is actually much safer to be running it too-- banner ads are malware factories.)

 

[T.L]

I tried I really did, but got sick of being blocked by immature little idiots that are only out to pair the MC with everything that moves. 
Christ I think that in a lot of stories the fish stop swimming when the MC enters the room these days.
Grammar, spelling, layout, and plot if you bring up something they take it as criticism.
Don't even get me started on MST's. Havent seen a decent one in decades.

 

[PCHeintz72]

I've stuck with a format of review for some time now that seems to work well for me... Generally, unless motivated enough then unprompted I'll give either nothing or merely idle commentary unless specifically asked.

If asked, then I give a read through of the story or chapter, and take notes in a separate window literally as I read on anything that catches my attention and my thoughts as I read or finish critical scenes. Also will single out scenes thought especially noteworthy. And final overall thoughts and fell of the chapter story. Then email/pm the whole thing off to the author.

Doing it that way has several advantages, ones I've both been complimented on and told off on.
- It gives the author a top down outline type order and roadmap to the story,

- It gives my thoughts on a scene as I read it, untainted by what comes next, so as to give the author a indicator as to whether he has his/her readers getting the points and direction desired.

- It gives any hang-ups on grammar, wording, punctuation, or spelling I may have noticed.

- I do not alter or mark up in any way shape or form their original chapter, however, I do dump it and read in a text editor.

It is not random in order, and it is not a read chapter and only then write things down, nor is it a simple run of a spell or grammar checker though it, all of which I feel is a bit of a cop out.

I also nearly always remind an author in advance it is their story, and they can take the contents to improve/fix the chapter, or they can toss it.

Why would I adopt what some might call odd and others ridged, and yet others simple, format. I got tired of complaints, and I did not want to seem unfair between authors.

What I will not do is officially co author a story (tried it once just after high school, it was a disaster).

 

[balthanon]

I try and do that sometimes on stories I particularly enjoy-- or I'll take abbreviated notes in the search bar of my browser. I've lost those a couple times though. I definitely would not mind getting a full review like that on my own stories, but I have run across a few people who complained about grammar checking. And if someone is just looking for comments on the story itself I can respect that. (If the grammar is horrible I might not read any further, but at least in one case they were really pretty infrequent.)

That style of review was definitely much more common back when mailing lists were the primary form of sending out stories I think.