oh look, the trolls are back...

[edenfalling]

Yeah, the self-appointed ff.net police (specifically the group calling themselves Eliminator -- yes, there are multiple groups of these people, and they apparently have schisms and everything -- it's like a bizarre parody of actual fandom, only instead of creating stories, art, or whatever, they can only destroy other people's work) are once again on patrol!

The target this time is a Harry Potter ficlet I wrote back in freaking 2003 and posted to ff.net in 2004: Parseltongue (LJ mirror here), which was previously attacked by Greyshade (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/4076901/) on October 26th (as mentioned in this thread). Somehow after eight and a half years of peaceful existence on the net, it has mutated and become miraculously offensive unto the sight of... yeah, no, it's just that I pissed off some trolls and they can't let anything drop. *deep sigh*

"Parseltongue" is an experiment with my own border between squick and kink, specifically centered on the use of live snakes as aids to foreplay. (Yeah, yeah, I know, and I say I didn't write porn until this year. That's because I don't think "Parseltongue" is porn. It's more of a tease, and it fades to black before the actual sex qua sex.) Anyway, I left the characters unnamed and used second person because I wanted to make readers focus on the situation and the kink rather than on their feelings about various HP ships, or their feelings about what kind of sex would or would not be IC for various characters. I particularly did not want to wade into the very fraught waters of, say, Harry/Ginny versus Harry/Hermione, or into the problems that arise when writing Voldemort/anyone. Hence the literary avoidance tactic. :-)

Anyway, I am quite sure these trolls are still after me because they didn't cow me into leaving ff.net or deleting my stories this fall... because once again their bugbear is the false conflation of second person with interactivity, which was the point under contention in the previous round of accusations. There is no mention whatsoever of the ficlet's sexual content, which I think (if I were in the mood to accuse myself of breaking rules, which I am not because I don't think I did) might conceivably be construed to break the rating limit on account of kinkiness. (Kinky sex is inherently higher rated than vanilla missionary sex! It is dirty, bad, and wrong! We must think of the children! *removes tongue from cheek*)

From: Lord Imagawa (http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2642349/)
-------------------

Hello, there.

You've been warned before about your violations. I'm afraid that you're breaking 1 rule.

Here are the sections of rules that you break:

Entries not allowed:

5. Any form of interactive entry: choose your adventure, second person/you based, Q&As, and etc.

Solution: Simply insert a name instead of saying "you" or even change it so that it is not about the reader.

Please repair this story immediately, otherwise your story will be reported and deleted as the consequence.

Sincerely,

Lord Imagawa
(Member of Eliminator)

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

You know, I am not even going to bother answering these people anymore. They just make me tired and sad about the seemingly inherent flaws of humanity. *deeper sigh*

If this is what ff.net has come to -- if this is the kind of petty, systematic harassment the site owners and mods are happy to let stand by not taking all of five minutes to clarify their rules one way or the other, instead of allowing the muddy wording that appears to conflate second person with interactivity (which I continue to maintain is a false equivalence) -- then I wish the mods and owners joy of their inundation with petty, stupid complaints over infractions that are not actually infractions.

I did my part to request a clarification of the rules. They ignored me.

I wash my hands of the issue.

-----

ETA: In the interest of keeping all discussion of this issue in a place where people can actually find it, I will mention that I got an anonymouse over at LJ who commented on this issue, but for unknown reasons attached the comment to a post about my recently fired coworker instead of this post. *shrug*

Comments

[branchandroot]

Yeah, ff.n policy has always been one of those things that makes me go "...um, no". Stripping out horizontal rules was my benchmark of wtf-ery for a long time. This, though, is even more actively harmful to their user-base, and really there's just no excuse for it.

At least the assholes trying to police writers used to huddle off on their own separate site to marinate in their own bile. Honestly, I think the "social" aspects of ff.n were were worst idea the site ever had.

[edenfalling]

I am not sure that a forum attached to an archive is inherently a bad idea... but on a site as huge as ff.net, without effective moderation and clear rules, yeah, it's asking for abuse.

What bugs me the most about this whole situation is that the rule in question would be SO EASY to clarify, no matter which direction the owners and mods chose to come down on. All you have to do is say flat-out that either second person is only forbidden when used in the service of an otherwise interactive story and does not make a story interactive by itself (which is true!), or say flat-out that all use of second person is forbidden whether it is interactive or not.

But will anyone clarify the rule?

No. Of course not. That would make too much sense.

*headdesk*

...On a completely different topic, I am now partway into vol. 5 of Kuroko no Basuke -- Kagami has met Aomine and Kuroko has revealed some of their mutual history at Teikou. I loved the bit where Kuroko punched Kagami in the middle of the match with Shuutoku (sp?) to bring him back to reality, and also Riko's dead-on analysis of how many more times Kagami could jump and realization that they needed to spend one of those on blocking Midorima's first shot of the quarter, to rattle him. Yay Riko! (You are right that the boob jokes about Momoi are really annoying. *sour face*) Also, the difference between Aomine's expression in his early days at Teikou and his expression in the present day is, um, yeah. Poor kid. It's like he was pushing on a wall that he thought was made of stone, and all of a sudden it turned into tissue paper and he stumbled off a cliff. But man, he still seems like a complete JERK right now.

[rthstewart]

Last time, after I posted on your LJ in comment and then reviewed one of your stories, they went after me and spammed 4 or 5 stories with homophobic, threatening, misogynistic reviews. When I reported them for TOS violations, the site did nothing. Which tells you something about the site's priorities. They did accuse the two of us of being lovers, which was sort of nice. Hundreds of miles apart is no barrier to our love, Liz! Nor my husband of 20+ years! I love you for your fic, my darling!
Ahem.

[edenfalling]

<3 <3 <3

Yeah, ff.net just does not seem to care about creating a user-friendly experience for the people who create the content that brings readers (and thus page views) to their site. It seems like a very short-sighted approach to me.

I also remain baffled by the way various anonymouse commenters during this "saga" have implied that I am using the site wrong because I didn't already know about these forum groups and the ridiculous, hair-splitting differences among them. Well, why should I have known about them? I don't use ff.net's forums! I was there before the forums existed, never asked for them to be added, and have never felt I was missing anything by not bothering to explore the new functions. I use ff.net to read and post fic, amen, the end.

As I said to branchandroot, I don't think adding forums to an archive is inherently a bad idea, but it's never a necessary one. *sigh*

[branchandroot]

Yeah, it's just pure carelessness on the admins parts. Bah.

But! Yes, I dearly love how much of a little thug Kuroko is. And the fact that he only ever does this to /Kagami/, that it's his fear for what might happen to his new partner that brings that side of him out.

Riko is, indeed, amazing; considering the fact that she's /not/ a basketball specialist, she's even more amazing.

And, yeah, when you see what Aomine was like at Teikou it's just a moment of "omg, ow". And you see what it is Kuroko's trying to get back, and just how far from that Aomine's come, because yeah he's a /total/ jerk right now. You get the impression he was always a bit of a jerk in that basketball-monofocus "manners, huh, what're those?" kind of way. But he's way far down a hole now. (Though it never fails to amuse me how much of that is still focused on Kuroko despite Aomine's cosmic obliviousness; I mean, he's totally jealous of Kagami.)

[askerian]

gnnnngh. aw damn it. *huggles* i'm sorry, hon.

[edenfalling]

*hugs back*

[lady_songsmith]

Ugh, I can't believe they're back AGAIN!

Every once in a while since the first go-round I've prodded ff.net via one of their few, poor means of contact. Think it's time to prod again. *sends letter*

[edenfalling]

Mnrgh. If I can dredge up my ability to give a damn, I may write to ff.net to request, again, a clarification of the rule in question. Perhaps if the request is presented as a separate issue instead of as part of a complaint about harassment, it may stand out more in the mind of whoever reads the.... oh, who am I kidding, obviously the admins don't care. *sigh*

I am not going to dignify the "review" with either a response or a complaint letter, though. Anyone who wants to read "Parseltongue" has probably already read it, and it's not like the ff.net version is any different from the version on my journal anyway.

...

I really ought to work on AO3 crossposting. Ah well, someday.

[wrabbit]

Ugh. What is the motivation for these people? Who has the time to get upset about every bad fic or one that breaks the puritanical rules when they're not even your rules and the rulemakers don't care, for one thing. The main thing I don't get is how anyone could be so loyal to the dignity of ff.net when it's arguably not a great site for fans and in ways that have nothing to do with the people who use it.

[edenfalling]

Some of them are classic trolls, complete with every misogynistic slur and bizarre sexual insult in the book. (Go read back in the "tales from the pit of voles" tag for a classic example of that subspecies.) I don't get trolls at all, but at least they fall into a known category.

The ones who seem to think they are actually helping writers baffle me much more, particularly the ones who make that a sort of all-consuming crusade. Just, who has the time? Why spend all those hours of your life looking for things to be angry about, particularly such petty things? Why not read stories you like instead? And sure, if you see a story that blatantly breaks a rule, you can report it -- which is what I think was meant by "self-policing" in the first place -- but to create a community specifically to incite other people to dogpile on writers? That's not helpful. That's cruel. (Particularly when the rule in question does not mean what they think it means... but I have given up trying to explain the difference between second person and interactivity, since they refuse to listen.) And if you want to be outraged and feel like you are improving the world, is the quality of stories on ff.net really the best place to spend your energy? Why not volunteer at a food pantry instead? *sigh*

[rahirah]

Aaaaand reason #4217 why I pulled my stuff from ff.net. Not that I've ever been personally harassed (I doubt anyone ever even read my stuff there any longer) but their weird refusal to have clear and consistently enforced rules cheese me off. As did whichever of their stupid formatting changes borked the paragraphing on everything I had posted there. :P

[edenfalling]

It's not like it would even be hard to fix this particular rule! That, I think, is what bugs me the most -- that the admins apparently prefer to put up with endless "violation" reports and the harassment of innocent writers (like rthstewart, whose stories got bombed by a virulent troll "reviewer" just because she expressed support for me in October) than to take five minutes and fix the wording of a really badly written rule. I don't think there is any universe in which those priorities make sense. :-(

[lexicology]

*eyerolls* Oh dear lord. I'm sorry you're having to deal with these assholes again. Ignoring them may well be the best response. And at the same time you're having to deal with shittiness at work, too. :(

Hope you hang in there (and also hope you're enjoying KnB--I've been vaguely embarrassed lately by just how much I've been enjoying that one myself, considering how much I hate sports IRL).

[edenfalling]

I am fairly sure that someone from this group reported "Parseltongue" back in October -- she certainly left a review saying she was going to -- but as you can plainly see from this latest iteration of idiocy, the story didn't go anywhere. I didn't bother writing to ff.net about the last attack on "Parseltongue" and am not going to bother this time either.

I may, on Wednesday or Thursday when I have more time, write a letter asking for a rule clarification, because the poor wording of the ban on interactivity irritates me regardless of any attacks on my own work. It's just sloppy.

(I am enjoying KnB very much! And I am with you on finding my enjoyment somewhat strange, since I don't give a damn about basketball in real life. Football and soccer (or American football and football, to use the rest of the world's terminology *wry*) are the only sports I bother to actually watch, and even those are a very mild and sporadic interest. I guess it's the character interaction that gets me -- I like that the characters are enthusiastic, driven, and a team, even if I don't share their particular enthusiasm.)