On the "Fanfic Recs" namespace

Count me in as someone who doubts the overall quality of the fics being recommended here, but I don't think it matters. It's a fun feature for some.

There are folks who do like fanfic recs (fairly common practice on Tumblr) so there's an audience for them in the general internet population. I get the feeling that it's not quite a draw for the general public, but may be a draw to the fics from the existing userbase. Which is still not bad; it keeps editors entertained, the more entertained editors the more productive (hopefully) the wiki is.

If we did have to move this to the forums, and new-subfora creation were still possible, a decent solution would be a sub-forum to the Fanfic forum, specifically for giving and finding fanfic recs. Instead of a single thread, it'd be much more individualized.

But that hinges on a pretty big "if".

Current Project: Black Sheep

This is basically me. I dont read fanfics because a the few I had read are trash, but I know people who like them. I dont have any strong opinion one way or the other, tho.

Post 78

Yo soy el futuro

TVT is one of the more commonly recommended sources we see for people trying to find fanfiction. Both fanfic folders on trope pages and the Fanfic Recs namespace are apparently very helpful.

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"If you want to talk about a fanfic, just make a work page for it" sounds all well and good, but that is way higher of a hurdle than one might think for a newbie. It seems very likely that this would result in a handful of decent pages, a smattering of stub pages (many of which won't even have the requisite three trope entries), and most people not doing anything at all. Everyone will not just.

Look at this game! There is a CAT in it!

Just wanted to say, well, to me the fanfic recs page was useful when I wanted to start reading some. Not because most fanfics are bad, but because I had no idea where to start. AO 3 and ff.net are both huge, and for older franchises (in my case TMNT) there's way too much content and way too many tags. The Fanfic Recs page was kind of like trying out a kiddy pool before you jump in the ocean, so I could get a feel for things and get an idea of what to look for to find stuff I liked.

And now to have anxiety over having said anything.

There are hundreds of fics recced on this site. The idea that "if you like it you should make a trope page for it" seems, frankly, ludicrous to me. The pages aren't hurting anyone and they're not violating any rules just by existing. Just because one specific person (or a few specific people) wants them gone doesn't mean they should go, especially with the large volume of people who think they should stay. This wiki is supposed to be collaborative, right?

By the logic I'm seeing here from certain users, Just For Fun, Creators, Headscratchers, and a fair few other namespaces should also be cut. The recs aren't hurting anyone and they're not causing major problems for the site. Can't we have something fun like this?

I serve at the pleasure of President Pritchart.

Fanfic Recs has been a nice way for to find good fanfics when I did actively read them. It might be on-mission to have a page like that but I don’t thinks a particularly strong case to get rid of it. I think fun aspects of the wiki should stay as they aren’t causing any major issues and Fanfic Recs isn’t harming the wiki.

Macron's notes

I don't use fanfic recs personally, but I don't think it's hurting anything to have them

Gay projection tiefling time GO!

Kind of like live blogging,and even less people use that.

Edited by Ultimatum on Sep 17th 2021 at 1:42:11 PM

this music plays whenever I post also a box

I still don't know why we keep the liveblogs section.

Three quarters of the administrative decisions on this website are made out of pure inertia. I would drop or send to the forums quite a few parts if I had my way, but unfortunately (fortunately?) I don't.

The purpose of this conversation is to gauge consensus, which is clearly on the side of fanfic recs, so absent some sort of unanimous moderator veto, they get to stay.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 17th 2021 at 10:17:59 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Liveblogs was a forum, originally. Don't know why it got moved to where it is. Would vote in favor of moving it back, if such a vote were held.

Look at this game! There is a CAT in it!

Voting "no" to cutting these namespaces since I don't see how this Wiki would significantly improve with them not existing. Any issues these pages have won't influence the rest of the site, so people who don't regularly visit the Fanfic Recs have no obligation to participate in any clean-up, and those who do make use of these subpages shouldn't have any problems doing the necessary maintainence.

If anything, cutting them would require more maintainence to search and cut these newly created subpages that would suddenly become "against site policy".

Edited by Adept on Sep 17th 2021 at 11:56:04 PM

Here's the thread that led to the creation of Live Bloginations.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

So space issues, it looks like. Is space still at a premium these days?

Look at this game! There is a CAT in it!

No, we have no reason to believe that space is a similar issue to what it was back then.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Given how disused and frankly unpopular the current form of liveblogs is, we would guess that people would be largely in favor of moving it back to the forums.

Hm, thinking about it, the main benefit to fanficrecs being on the wiki and not the forums is that they're attached to the works pages. If a forum-based fanficrecs system could somehow be so attached, it might resolve most people's objections to that.

Look at this game! There is a CAT in it!

A lot of this would be resolved with the proposed TV Tropes 2.0 system, but I've given up hope of that happening any time soon. We have to work with the technology that we have and not anticipate magic fixes down the line.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Heck, if we need to remove some forum threads, shit like the WMG forum don't seem like they've really been touched in a decade (which does also prove that WMG, at least, can't function as a forum thing). I mean there's some recent posts, but most of the threads on page one are from 2016.

Current Project: Black Sheep

I thought the issue was not that Live blogs are disliked, it's just that they're far harder to access nowadays for creation, and thus, see much less use.

...It's weird having so many websites and no way to properly display now, lol.

I agree with the WMG thing.

"Listen up, Marina, because this is SUPER important. Whatever you do, don't eat th“ “DON'T EAT WHAT?! Your text box ran out of space!”

Well, the ideal place for WMG would be, you know, in the forum threads for each work. I have seen no shortage of speculation in the Media forums. It feels like all anybody wants to do sometimes. Having a separate place for it is obviously pointless.

What I find particularly odd is the idea that anyone thinks WMG should be kept as some kind of permanent record. It feels a bit self-indulgent.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 17th 2021 at 2:37:44 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

My idea is mostly because I worry that the threads will be taken up by the same theories and ideas repeated ad nauseum. If that's not how it works, cool, but I'm still not comfortable transplanting the entire thing and cutting the namespace. Maybe it's because potential readers don't always even know there's forum threads to visit for their favorite works, so their interest in theories might just take them to other sites instead. Maybe it's because I'm just biased because WMG was one of the things that got me hooked here; specifically, the Universal Mass Guesses and the other joke theory pages. I used to read those things for hours.

In general, the joke-y pages might not be "on mission", but they definitely attract readers. I'm living proof of that. I don't know if I'd have stuck around if I didn't stumble upon that namespace. Putting it all into the forums will only work for the fanbases that have bigger followings or fresh content to theorize about. Obscure works or older works, or joke pages, will be screwed over here. That's honestly an issue I have with the forum model in general- not all works are popular enough to have dedicated threads to use for these things. If I wanted to theorize about some of my favorite works, there's very few people on this wiki I could talk to, and I'm not sure if any of them are on the forums.

Current Project: Black Sheep

@Irene Yeah, the current liveblogging system is disliked.

Doesn't help that the default sorting is oldest-to-newest, making it look even worse than it is and probably giving people the impression there's no content/audience.

Edited by wingedcatgirl on Sep 17th 2021 at 2:40:28 PM

Look at this game! There is a CAT in it!

Ah, thanks for the information. Might be a good idea to give it its own topic. See what can be done that isn't simply an issue of "the current programming is borked", which admittedly a thread dedicated to someone's full liveblog probably could be interesting. I've seen these threads on forums before, and they actually are pretty fun.

...It's weird having so many websites and no way to properly display now, lol.

Dropping in to say that Fanfic Recs can stay. I managed to enjoy reading some of the fics logged in those pages and it overall doesn't cause much issues with the site.

SHOWTIME, SO FLY