Percyness quality guidelines.
Mar. 22nd, 2006 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusOver 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]
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]
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-22 06:31 pm (UTC)I checked the archive and 'Stockholm Syndrome' is in there - I didn't realize that, but I see you've put in all the Ficathon Entries.
But on the issue, most people no longer have time to read the stuff that is to be found in vast archives - I for instance only read on recommendations, and I'm even picky in my choices of reccers, so I'm all for selective archives. When I want to read fic, I don't want to start by sifting through mountains of bad stuff, and knowing that an archive has standards makes it more attractive in my not so honest opinion ;)
That being said, I must confess that I generally set out with only the vaguest notion of what I actually want to read ("something longish with Draco" is a frequent requirement) so maybe more variability would assist in getting more traffic - but still, most people don't want to read stuff they don't think is good, and will backbutton out of obviously unbetaed stories in haste.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-22 06:54 pm (UTC)I'm all for selective archives
The best pairing archives are the ones where the archive owners trawl for their pairing on FA and so forth and invite the writer to their site. That's how
Icarus