MetaFic

Okay, some hope still remains, but I'll have to wait and see...

My point exactly. That pretty much sums up what I've written in my post there, and in the PM to the admin.

I got a response, though. The admin thanked me for pointing out the wrongfully placed nominations and assured me that at one point, they're going to look over the nominations and move them to proper categories.

But that raises another issue I didn't want to mention to them. Is it really okay to move a nomination? If it's erroneous, it should probably be deleted and not moved. The whole idea of a nomination system is that users are the ones nominating the stories. If they just move them, are those nominations really valid? I'm not sure I can have a high opinion of a poll where the admins are those who move the nominations around.

If anything's an AU, it's MoO. Or at least I hope so.

I've always assumed that if a story was going to be called 'AU' it was because the something regarding the foundation of the story was going to be changed. Typically, this means changes prior to the events in canon, or significant changes early on in the beginnings of canon that change the course of canon from the very beginning, rather than simply taking a different turn at some point.

I have always been a bit irked when authors say "Well, HBP came out now so this story is now AU" - which implies that up until this point that author was writing as if it was canon. Everything is 'AU' because it's not JKR writing it, so calling something like The Seventh Horcrux or Taking Control or any other simple continuations/book substitutes 'AU' is completely redundant and presents no new information to the reader.

I much prefer it when authors specify a point of canon divergence, such as post-HBP or post-OotP, where you can assume canon-compliance up until that point. And then if an author is going to 'restart' the series in some way, they can use the 'AU' tag, such as MoO, Fate's Debt, Backward with Purpose, or any other of the dozens of fics that re-architect the entire HP arc. Stories don't have to be 'redo' style either, to be AU. Some stories that qualify simply throw away the entire base arc that occurs in canon - like the stories where Harry is a child prodigy and has killed Voldemort by the time he's 8 years old - or maybe V didn't even exist in the first place - and now he's seventeen and he's the youngest teacher in the history of Hogwarts and *BAM* that's where our story starts. Completely AU? Check.

To me, that's an AU. Just like NoFP. The idea is retelling the established story with a change in the premise. If the time-turner took them to some other time, like the Marauder's Era, then that could be post-DH because it's not covering a period of time that JKR covered. But if it's deliberately re-telling the original sequence of events, that makes it AU to me.

I agree about stories like Seventh Horcrux, though. Those aren't AU... they're more-or-less attempting to be canon-compliant continuations based on canon at that time. Just like Post-DH fic is doing now.

All of this, as someone said, is why I prefer the metafic system. You can determine what you need to know about a story by looking at its attributes. You don't have to worry about what a particular term means in context.

Details...

I know it has been raised, but as I've got back into looking for stories I'm not finding much out there. So can we start a rec thread? Or is this it? :)

This is the reply I got from my PM to the Mods.

'We've decided to just go by the genres the author has tagged. I understand what you mean about if it wasn't AU at the time of writing, it wasn't tagged as such, but is now considered to be AU, but to eliminate confusion, we've simply decided to go with the genres the author has tagged.

As I'm sure you can appreciate, the mods don't have time to go through and decide if each sotry fits into the category it was nominated for, even if it wasn't tagged by the author. I understand that this may result in not all fics that the readers deem as "AU" being nominated under the AU category, but just for consistency's sake, we've decided to progress in this style anyways.

I hope that helped to clear things up. If you have any questions, feel free to ask'

Is it impolite to state that they don't seem like they have the brains to run something like this?

No, it's not impolite. In fact, I got similar PMs from the admin, and after that, they moved my nominations, and in the end outright deleted them.
Lack of brain seems to be a major issue on that site.

*sigh* Reminds me of the awards that were handed out on a message board I used to go to... The nominations were bad and the results of people's votings were 'misplaced' and found 2 months later...

Well, according to the latest PM I got there, there's still some hope (again). Of course it also raises more issues, but those are beyond my caring.

And seriously, Dave. Do you want to be known as "the author who needed to spell out his story was an AU?" Longish title, and not very flattering.

I'll try to discuss the MoO AU issue.

Overall, I'm not sure I'm going to like the end results, but this will be a nice learning opportunity. Learn from others' mistakes and all that.

There's that. I've already coined the monstrosity that is MoOPOSaF. It's probably not a good idea to add "TAWNTSOHSWAAU." If nothing else, it sounds like someone having a seizure of some sort.

right, I've been reading your comments about our site and I've decided to post. I am not going to attack anyone, I just want to clarify some things.

I've moved your topic to the proper section, Sovran. The mod who moved it to Drama most likely put it there because it was categorized mainly in the 'Drama' section. Sorry about the confusion, it's just been a mess. None of us is really familiar with the MetaFic system, which is our fault. We should have started double-checking nominations in the first place rather than assuming the members knew where to place the fics.

"*sigh* Reminds me of the awards that were handed out on a message board I used to go to... The nominations were bad and the results of people's votings were 'misplaced' and found 2 months later..."

I am not going to guarantee anything. However, this isn't some run-of-the-mill crap nomination site run by overzealous Harry Potter fanfic writers who think they know how to run a website but can't. We're working hard to make this site run smoothly. A few mistakes (I admit we were disorganized throughout the whole AU mess) can be expected.

As for the AU definition - to be honest, the way I defined it is how I've known it to be ("if a story follows canon, it's generally not AU."). I mainly go on HPFF (harrypotterfanfiction.com) and if you look, some of the stories are categorized with AU in conflict of your definition and comply with mine. That's why I got confused. It's not due to "lack of brains." However, I realize yours makes most sense and quite honestly am surprised I didn't realize before. It's obvious, that definition, once you think about it XD

I'll look through some of the masterlists now to see if there are any other problems; I will most likely get through all of them by the end of the week (me as in myself, one mod - I'll speak to the others about this as well.)

Thanks for being brutally honest about it, actually. I'd rather someone tell me to my face what the hell I'm doing wrong than confusing me with vague statements :) it benefits the site in the long run.

Hi Bella, I've been watching you on the site (not voyeur-like, more like morbid curiosity) , previewing your comment and wondering if it was going to be posted. And what it was going to contain...

Now that I know, well, I've been thanked for brutal honesty the second time today. And both time from TBO staff members. Damn... I should have registered there as BrutallyHonest instead of SickPuppy.

Let me ask you a question before I say anything else. How much planning was involved in the creation of TBO?

Do you mean before the site was opened to everyone? I joined after it was opened, because bluestickie asked for help over at HPFF. I was the first mod to join, I believe. Another joined not that long after. I know she ran a different fanfic awards a year ago - you may want to PM her for that info though, because we didn't discuss it all that much.

So the three of us basically planned out how the nominations would work. The number of nominations a person is allowed is unlimited, for now, until the site gets more crowded.

As for how people would nominate. We set up some basic categories, the ones you see (save for two, but it was clear that nobody was going to nominate anything for that category), and posted the masterlist and nomination form/rules topics. That's really about it. We don't want to put a number on how many nominations we want to receive just yet.

I suppose that's about it. I'm not sure you're interested in the graphical aspects of the site, so yeah.

BTW, sorry if I disappear on you, my internet's psychotic at the moment.

The reason I asked that is that Sovran and I had a discussion earlier today about what would we do if we wanted to do something like TBO.

At some point we discussed the time-frames for organizing a similar event, and I believe weeks and months were mentioned.

That's what it all really comes down to. Any problems you might have (apart from users who have no idea where to place their nominations because they failed to read the rules) are probably the result of organization, or lack of.

I'm currently too tired to ensure that I'm completely polite, so I apologize if I sound like a canon ball traveling at 250mph. Are you open for suggestions and discussion or not? I've talked with Norah, and she accepted my suggestions so far. If that practice continues (as long as we're giving valid suggestions and you give us valid explanations and/or objections) I might lose my latest bitching topic.

I appreciate your taking time to come over and address things and, more importantly, being able to do it without having a go at individuals - however tempted you were :-)

I think things got more 'excited' over here when the thread was closed because it appeared to indicate that the discussion was closed.

Anyway, thanks again for being here.