Archive of Our Own

[igenlode]

Contrary to my expectations, I *did* manage to get an AO3 membership request and creation working this time round: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Igenlode
And I managed to upload a trial chapter; one of the problems with not having access to my original home page is that I don't actually have a record of when the various works were initially written (as versus when the file on my hard disc was last saved, which can often be years later -- as in this case!) So I can't backdate them so that they don't show up as brand-new works, even if I wanted to.

I have to say I'm immediately reminded of just why I find AO3 so difficult to navigate -- because of the 'everyone tags everything' ethos, it's not practical to do a quick skim through ignoring every story with an explicit Erik/Christine tag [†], because it's all hidden within a massive list of characters and potential relationships. And of course almost all of them *are* Erik/Christine stories, because that's where the fandom demand is...

But it did work. Handling long freeform text tags without auto-complete is a complete pain (just try typing "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms" with identically-placed spacing and accents, especially given that trying to highlight and paste keeps causing the clickable link to activate instead!), but at least they do allow the option to do it manually. Uploading a single chapter is very laborious, and I think I need to deploy one of the various form-filler apps if I'm going to do multiple chapters/stories, but to be fair it is actually *more* accessible than FFnet's approach, where I used not to be able to get past the fandom selection popup, and had to reselect the characters listed from the start for each story if anything else went wrong with the submission.

† Actually, you can -- the various filter links don't do anything, but if you type the text strings into the 'other tags to exclude' writable icon, that has the same effect, e.g. Exclude: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera, M/M
On the whole I'm happier with the approach that displays everything and lets you 'filter' it visually according to the clues given and your own judgement -- that search link would exclude "Fraternité", for example -- but the option to do it via manual override is there. Now if only there were an option to search Dreamwidth tags for a combination of "fic-meta" AND "swedish", for example...

Comments

[erimia]

Ooh, excellent! I hope it will work. I love this website and would love to see your works posted there.

I'm not sure if backdating would be that necessary anyway - the stories showing up as new works are much more likely to get the attention of potential readers.

[igenlode]

I felt it was a bit unfair to post the stories as new works when a lot of people have probably seen them already; however, I experimented with using the 'import from URL' feature to import a multi-chapter story from its Dreamwidth posts rather than re-converting the text to HTML a chapter at a time from my original word-processor document, and that coincidentally turns out to pick up the DW publication dates. So I have a test case to check against ;-)

(Possibly not the best test case, since the "Les Miserables" stories were among those that frequently got no traffic at all on FFNet, so getting no traffic on AO3 either doesn't necessarily demonstrate anything...)

As a posting process I don't think it actually saves any time -- I deliberately chose a short two-chapter story to test with in case it didn't work out, and although it did work I still had to do a lot of editing on the imported text, not least in order to strip out all the blog-style material surrounding the actual chapters. I recycled some of that as AO3 'notes', but it would really have been easier to start with a freshly-converted HTML file; most of the upload time is spent on trying to establish what the appropriate fandom tags etc. are (and trying to use Google Search previews to track down my original summaries, which I assumed would be in the document files but weren't!)

So given the difficulty of locating a set of chapters for a specific story on Dreamwidth anyway, I think I'll just go for uploading them as new stories and one at a time. It's just as well my fanfics tend not to have all that many chapters...


Newly-discovered (and probably connected) issues with AO3 and my browser; I can't dismiss the 'new user' banner, because clicking on "Dismiss permanently" ( https://archiveofourown.org/users/Igenlode/end_first_login ) redirects to an authentication error, and attempting to edit logged-in comments has the same effect. However, I can't edit comments I leave here (possibly for the same reason) and I'm used to living with the 'Please enable JavaScript' banner, so I can cope with another one as a permanent fixture :-p

[pedanther]

I could copy and paste your works list off ffnet, if that would help? It would only take me a couple of minutes, and that would give you publication dates and summaries.

(I don't know if the email address I have for you is still active, though.)

[igenlode]

My email is in my Dreamwidth profile (and in my AO3 profile, now).

Could you send me the list? It would definitely be helpful -- I assumed I wasn't going to need that particular set of information as I already *had* copies of all my own stories, but it turns out the associated metadata is worth having as well!

(And of course I've lost access to all the past reviews on my stories as well -- even if several hundred of them were just spam....)

I don't seem to have been consistent about which stories I included the summary in at the beginning of the document and which ones I didn't. It may have depended upon what stage the summary got written at ;-)

[pedanther]

I've emailed you the list.

[igenlode]

Got it, thanks.
(And thanks for having the initiative to grab the entries from the old account, as well -- I'd forgotten about those!)

[erimia]

Les Miserables fandom on AO3 seems to be very active (but mostly slash-centered) so it may be not a bad choice for a test case.

[igenlode]

Well, so far I got 4 hits on the book-based Les Miserables story (at least one of which was Paul) and zero on the musical-based one -- both backdated, to 2016 and 2014 respectively.
The fact that the former is tagged for both Javert and Valjean and the latter for neither may have something to do with it :-P

(Also, I'm apparently the only person on the whole of AO3 to tag stories for the non-romantic relationships betwen Raoul and his brother and Cosette and Javert -- the latter doesn't surprise me (all that much, though I came across at least one other story based on a similar premise on FFNet), but the former does. Or perhaps it just says more about my stories!)