There definitely seems to be a growing trend for internet archives to stamp down on which stories are accepted.
I can understand why archives want more control over what they accept (improves their rep and gives them an excuse not to host crap fic) and I can also understand that the owners of the archives have personal preference (as evidenced by the NC17 debacle on the other large fanfic archive). What annoys me is when they promote themselves as an open archive when obviously they are not. Why not just put a huge disclaimer saying they reserve the right to refuse stories? All this analysing and explaining down to the Nth degree is asking for trouble - at the end of the day it's their archive and they will only post what they agree with. Justifying 'weeding' is daft - one person's weed is another person's Orchid :)
It would kind of be nice to know that there are archives out there that have certain standards of writing and storytelling (contradiction moment coming up :)). But that would shut out the 'bad' (according to the archivist) fic. And bad writer doesn't just mean a person with bad taste or a 'I don't care about my writing' attitude. It could also mean a new writer - we are after all enthusiastic amateurs *vbg* And I know I would be gutted if I submitted something and it got chucked out. I must admit I can see why people set up archives for their own stuff...
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Date: 2002-09-30 02:31 am (UTC)I can understand why archives want more control over what they accept (improves their rep and gives them an excuse not to host crap fic) and I can also understand that the owners of the archives have personal preference (as evidenced by the NC17 debacle on the other large fanfic archive). What annoys me is when they promote themselves as an open archive when obviously they are not. Why not just put a huge disclaimer saying they reserve the right to refuse stories? All this analysing and explaining down to the Nth degree is asking for trouble - at the end of the day it's their archive and they will only post what they agree with. Justifying 'weeding' is daft - one person's weed is another person's Orchid :)
It would kind of be nice to know that there are archives out there that have certain standards of writing and storytelling (contradiction moment coming up :)). But that would shut out the 'bad' (according to the archivist) fic. And bad writer doesn't just mean a person with bad taste or a 'I don't care about my writing' attitude. It could also mean a new writer - we are after all enthusiastic amateurs *vbg* And I know I would be gutted if I submitted something and it got chucked out. I must admit I can see why people set up archives for their own stuff...