A Missing Link

[igenlode]

I discovered an HTML file copy of my Joseph Buquet story sitting in my website that had been there ever since 2017, but never actually linked from the index of fan-fiction. Evidently I got as far as doing the conversion, but never got round to all the laborious site maintenance involved in adding all the necessary headers/footers/links required to make it consistent with everything else!

I've been trying to update my exceedingly out-of-date website fan-fiction listing in parallel with uploading stuff to AO3, on the grounds that at least I only have to do the conversion once. It's amazingly time-consuming. (Which is one reason why I gave up listing new stories there, the other two being that it no longer gets any hits because nobody searches for fanfic on personal websites any more, and that the site has had to be migrated through three different hosts over the years that the material on fanfiction.net has remained constant -- as a backup, it seemed rather *less* reliable.)

I really need to get round to setting up some standard templates so that I don't have to do every chapter from scratch every time. Of course, it doesn't help that I amused myself by writing alternate summaries for the stories uploaded there, and now feel obliged to maintain that tradition ;-p

---

I'm not terribly impressed by the author statistics provided by AO3, which are missing a lot of the information afforded by fanfiction.net; they don't record which chapters receive page hits or kudos, for example, so you can't tell the difference between a reader who glances at the first chapter and rejects the story as not what he was looking for (which is the most common reading pattern experienced by *all* fanfiction authors) and one who gets hooked and goes on to read all the way through a story. (Admittedly fanfiction.net had managed to break that particular statistic by the end...)

They don't tell you who subscribes to you as an author (User subscriptions) or even who is following a given story, presumably for privacy concerns -- but since I'm used to finding enjoyable stories on the 'people who like my fiction will probably like other fiction that might appeal to me' principle, it's not very helpful. I suspect that AO3 is set up on the principle that you find what appeals to you by subscribing to the right tags, rather than on linking fans together.

---

On the plus side, I've typed (but not proofread) what will probably be Chapter 10 of Arctic Raoul, though the precise scene boundary with the next chapter may change, which takes us up to the calf-kissing episode. And I've finally made some necessary revisions to Chapters 1–5, and sent off Chapters 6–8 (which again had to be typed as a single entity before I could work out where the chapter boundaries were to fall) for beta-reading.

And I discovered completely by chance that I could still access stories on fanfiction.net via their www links rather than via the (easier to navigate) mobile site, and managed to 'evacuate' another eleven one-shots before the site cut out on me again, though I haven't been able to repeat the feat. That leaves me with I think eight stories still missing, although they are the longer ones -- I went for the 'quick wins' for obvious reasons.

Comments

[pedanther]

On the 'people who like my fiction will probably like other fiction that might appeal to me' front, you might be able to get something out of AO3's bookmarks function -- if you click on the number of bookmarks in a work's metadata, you'll be able to see who bookmarked it and any comments they might have made about why, and then you can click through to their user page to see what other bookmarks they have.

[igenlode]

Easier to go by kudos, I think -- except that, again, AO3 doesn't list which other works a user left kudos on (and in this case it *can't* be for privacy reasons, since the link exists in the other direction!), so again you're limited to whatever the user bookmarked or recommended. (I don't really understand the distinction between public bookmarks and recs -- why would you bookmark something you *wouldn't* recommend?)

[pedanther]

With the kudos, I suspect it's a practical decision about data structures and storage space. I believe they're currently recorded as a list attached to each work -- "Here are the names of the people who have clicked the kudos button on this work" -- which is a relatively low-cost, in terms of storage and maintenance, way to keep track of what must by now be billions of events. Keeping another list for each user of where they've awarded kudos would complicate the situation considerably.

Around 2% of my bookmarks are non-recs; none of them are recent, but from what I remember they were cases where I found the fic interesting and thought I might want to find it again later, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others. Maybe it would have made sense to make those private bookmarks, but I don't think I've ever made any of my bookmarks private, because that feels like saying that I want to hide my interest in the fic.

[igenlode]

Yes, I imagine it's probably a question of server load -- they kept mentioning that as an issue in the Tag Wrangling pages.
Having a vast volume of kudos to deal with is probably a side effect of making it trivially easy to click a 'like' button rather than having a story added permanently to a list of favourites, I think, although fanfiction.net started cropping people's displayed favourites list down to a couple of hundred recently, probably for similar motives (although they still store them -- it's just that the 'desktop' mode for some reason doesn't provide the paging and filtering options available in the 'mobile' mode and simply dumps the whole lot in one list onto a single page that takes forever to render. One of the various reasons why I used to use the mobile site for preference on a desktop browser.)

I'd automatically jumped to the conclusion that private bookmarks were for the stories that one might find embarrassing to display a taste for in public ;-p

[watervole]

Yes, I find it annoying that I don't know how many people read to the end.

[igenlode]

A 50% drop between chapters 1 and 2 seems to be pretty standard, with a further drop-off after that.