Monday, September 22, 2014

A Quick Trip Down Ponyfic Memory Lane

You know, I've got my problems with FiMFiction (still no bookshelves system; the Feature Box is, well, the Feature Box; people are allowed to clog up their page with a trillion .gifs so that I can barely load the dang thing; etc.), but on the whole it's a pretty nice setup.  I don't know of any other fanfiction site--pony or not--that combines it's ease of use, readability, and social features, and even if the thing's not perfect, it's a fair sight better than any other fanfiction platform I'm familiar with.

But I want to talk about the Before Times, or rather, about one specific aspect of them: filled-up Gdocs.  Those of you who've been around for a few years no doubt remember those, but some newer fanficcers might not know what I'm talking about.  So, indulge me as I ramble about the old days, below the break.

Once upon a time, there was Equestria Daily.

It's still there, of course, and it's still a big, popular thing, but it's not the center of pony fandom like it used to be.  For more than a year, EqD was somewhere that pretty much anyone who was a pony fan visited at least occasionally, and as such had a centralized influence that no site since has matched.  There was no FiMFiction (and even after it was created, it was a while before it became the go-to site for ponyfiction), and there was no other single site where most of the fanfic-reading populace congregated, so getting your story posted on EqD was pretty much the only way to hit the large majority of readers.

EqD accepted any submission form, but the three most common were links to fanfiction.net pages, links to deviantart pages, and links to Gdocs.  Of those three, the latter were generally preferred by both Seth and the readers, because let's face it: ff.net and DA are terrible for formatting, features, and general ease of reading.

Now, you can only have a maximum of 50 people in a Gdoc at a time.  Nowadays, if a 51st person tries to access the page, they get booted to a read-only copy (which, for fanfic-reading purposes, is the same thing anyway), but at the time, it would just tell you that the doc was full and you couldn't access.  So for months, whenever a story with an eye-catching cover or synopsis popped up, or whenever a popular story updated... you couldn't read it.  I remember sitting at the computer, refreshing every couple of minutes while I tried to focus on other things, hoping that someone else had stopped reading and that I might be lucky enough to squeeze in before someone else did.  On at least a couple of occasions, Seth or the author copy-pasted the story/chapter into a new Gdoc and posted it as an "alternate link" to alleviate some of the congestion.

In a weird way, I wonder if that didn't enhance the popularity of certain stories.  Sure, some readers definitely saw they couldn't access the story and then decided not to bother.  But I know that when I had it happen to me, I was suddenly filled with an urgent need to find out what the forbidden fic had going for it, even if it was a story I was ambivalent about reading initially.  It also became a status symbol of sorts; a good (read: popular) author was one who could max out his reader numbers.  It was like an invisible-from-the-outside Feature Box, except that the recommended fics were the ones you couldn't read.

Anyway, I don't have anywhere I'm going with this; I just remembered filled-up stories over the weekend when someone mentioned story heat (totally unrelated to what you're thinking; I was at an educator's conference at the time), and my mind wandered in an odd direction.  I don't miss not being able to read popular fics and updates until the day after their posted, but it certainly ended up being a memorable part of ficreading back in the early/middle days of the fandom.

12 comments:

  1. I remember that happening to me once or twice back in the day, but I can't remember when, because back then I only read stories from the archive that were recommended to me, not necessarily the new releases. It must have been an update of something I was following.

    I remember when FimFiction was first getting its start, too. Funnily enough, back then, it was actually my least favourite format as a reader, because before I had an account and could just favourite stories, I bookmarked the EqD pages of all the stories I liked, and if it was hosted on FimFiction there was a single link to the story page instead of links to every chapter, and it meant an extra page load before I could get to reading. It's weird what sticks out in the mind.

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    1. I have a Google Sheet that once recorded dozens of my favorite fics, including links and word counts. Over the years, entries have disappeared as those fics have shown up on FIMFiction.net. I never thought I'd see FOE and "It's a Dangerous Business" on FIMFiction.net (I failed to convince Kkat more than two years ago and couldn't track down Jetfire), but now, only FOE:PH remains. I'll ask Somber about uploading it once it's complete.

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    2. Personally, I have way more than just the one that I'm waiting on, most of which are the really, really old ones which I can't even remember that well now. I'll probably have to re-read a lot of them sometime.

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  2. That was before I started to read pony fan fiction. I think Equestria Daily was still the major pony site when I first got involved with the show, but its prominence was in decline. I mostly read fanfics on my kindle and what I've noticed most is that FimFiction has made that a lot easier. Older stories and reviews it was a struggle a lot of the time to get a story on my kindle in readable form. Ever since FimFiction became the go-to place it's been really easy.

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  3. I'd say EQD's still the center of the fandom, but it's no longer the center of fanfic, Fimfic having taken over that position. And it's funny, because nowadays, seeing a GDocs link on a fic submission is almost as bad as seeing DA or FFnet. It carries a lot of stigma. "Just get a Fimfic account!" I think loudly. Even in the recent contests, there's been maybe one GDocs submission that wasn't total crap. (Not counting I Am Demon, which Aquaman submitted in a GDoc because he was almost out of time for it to be published on Fimfic.)

    Also, I have insider info that suggests the bookshelves might actually be coming. :O Shh, it's a seekrit.

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    1. Sorry, but I'm not familiar with this term. What are bookshelves here?

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    2. In a word: folders

      www.fimfiction.net/blog/301986/bookshelf-update

      The current Favourites and Read Later folders provide most of the functionality that users need, but allowing users to create their own folders will open up a bunch of possibilities. Personally, I'm looking forward to tiering my favorites and moving a few fics from RL to Tracking. I can't wait!

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    3. That does sound really cool, and I could definitely make use of a more organised system. Though, I'm not crazy about some of the new default bookshelves. Tracking and favourites were merged for a reason, I thought.

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  4. I joined in late 2011, right as season 2 began, and this totally brought me back to reading those gdocs fics linked from EqD. Does anyone else remember "Ponies Discover 4chan"?

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    1. www.fimfiction.net/story/224/ponies-discover-co

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    2. Are you referring to Ponies Discover /co/? Chris reviewed that almost three years ago, same time period you said you joined the fandom. Incidentally, that's when I joined too. September 20th, 2011, to be precise

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    3. Once again, my failure to refresh pages before posting makes me look like an idiot

      So, I was just looking at old posts I'd made on Facebook and apparently I saw my first pony video earlier than I'd thought. It was June 27th, just one day after the video was originally uploaded. That's kinda cool

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