Percyness quality guidelines.

[icarus]

Over the last several months I've received stories at Percyness: The Percy Weasley Archive that were of questionable quality.

Many of them were completely unbeta'd and written with the care you'd put into sketching a fic on the back of a cocktail napkin. Some had formatting so strange the story was unreadable. I'm not speaking to the person who uploaded their story as a solid block of text.

I've struggled with some truly bad poetry. Other stories were borderline. They seemed to be beta'd, but consisted of minimalist verbal tags floating in a sea of nothing, or epithets overused to a point that it seemed dozens of people occupied the bed and not just two. There were excellent characterisations of Percy with all other characters as cardboard cut-outs dancing around him.

It has stretched my original policy of "accept everything if it's at least beta'd" to the breaking point.

I didn't want to be the arbiter of taste. But neither do I want to host an archive of stories no one would want to read. Where does one draw the line?

What do you think? What do you want in an archive?

[Poll #695887]

Comments

[trobadora]

I voted for "open season", but what I really mean is "at least spell-checked". Otherwise it becomes entirely too subjective for my comfort. Please don't take this personally - I don't trust anyone when it comes to screening fic! *g*

And after all, one person's horribly written, unreadable fic is another one's horribly written fic redeemed by a kink button it hits right on target.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Yeah, rec-lists are really much easier because it's understood that it's arbitrary. I mean, I could run the archive like that, but I'd like to have some consistency.

Icarus

[trobadora]

Completely agreed on the consistency. And actually, the arbitrariness is one reason I rarely use rec sites. I realise I may be the only person in fandom who feels this way, but I'd rather trawl through everything myself and be sure I haven't missed anything I'd have enjoyed. My filtering is pretty good, so I don't waste much time on the kinds of stories I don't want to read, and I don't have to rely on someone else's taste. (Also, most recs lists aren't much better than a random sample from an archive when it comes to matching my taste! *g*)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

You bring up a really good point. Archives aren't rec-lists, they serve an entirely different function.

Icarus