I only ask because my method of searching for all stories with the character Harry P. in them (though we can eliminate Draco and Ginny now yay! edit: oh and Snape) is quite inefficient and slow. I can spend a good hour scrolling through pages, open about 5 'promising' stories and then end up closing most if not all of them a few chapters in.

I know there's a lot of good fics with no character tag at all (annoyingly) too, which I obviously miss completely, but just thinking about searching with no kind of filter at all gives me nightmares.

Searching pairings I currently have an interest in often leads to skipping over 10s of harem fics too (not that these don't appear when I only have Harry listed), I wish that FF.Net had mandatory boolean Harem and Slash tags we could filter for.

Since I pretty much only read things over 100k it does cut down on my searching a lot, but it's still not good enough.

How do you guys find promising material?

 

I hear there's a site where people post fanfic recommendations and others review them.

 

Yes, but that site doesn't have everything reviewed, and a good portion of it can be eliminated per person depending on their personal preferences and guilty pleasures.

EDIT: Also new things kind of stopped being added a while ago. Not sure if less fics (good anyway) are being written these days is the reason, or people have just lost interest here.

 

The DLP Library and Almost Recommended threads.

New stories submitted to PatronusCharm.

C2s: The DLP C2, obviously. Also, C2s by people who have decent taste in stories (nonjon's, DobbyElfLord's, mine, etc.)

FF.net email updates from authors whom I follow.

The "Updated Fics" thread on Beyond the Veil.

Occasionally, decent stuff will pop up in /r/hpfanfiction or the SpaceBattles HP fanfiction thread, but this is really hit-or-miss.

 

I only search for fics rarely, but when I do I tend to have some luck. I have a list of pretty much every fic author I've ever enjoyed, so I'll go to their profiles and look for other things they've written which has led me to entirely new fandoms a few times. After that, I check their favorites for both stories and authors. With that new list, I run through and read the interesting ones. When I find some that I particularly enjoy, I go up a level and check that author's favorites.

It might not be very efficient at times, but my ratio of chaff/content is pretty low. The rest of the time I rely on DLP. The almost recommended threads have quite a few guilty pleasures in them, so they're worth checking out if you haven't already.

EDIT: Ninja'd by Pers on the Almost Recommended threads.

 

Will definitely take a look in the almost recommended threads. C2s sound interesting too.

I have on occasion looked at authors favourite stories/authors. Sometimes this is profitable, sometimes their taste seems to have...evolved, since adding those stories.

EDIT: Sometimes they seem to add everything they come across too. People with 200 favourite stories are either very tolerant or VERY dedicated.

 

Dunno if this is a weird way to do it, but it's always been the Favorite's List of authors for me.

Whenever I find a story I enjoy, I check the author's page and look at their favorite's list. A lot of authors tend to write what they like, so you tend to find good stories in there that match the genre.

Indy Harry authors tend to favorite Indy Harry stories, so if you happen to like those, the favorite's list of one of those writers will likely get you a bunch of good stuff.

And hell, it's not even necessarily about the genre matching (though it helps), just going through a favorite's list will generally get you good quality stories. You'll start to see a lot of trends throughout the fandom and what folks enjoy. It's kind of interesting, sometimes.

 

That's how I do it when I actually look for fics, which isn't too often anymore. Other than that I usually go by recommendations. I lost my taste for trawling through FFN a while ago.

 

I use Scryer. To copy the forum notice: "Scryer has been released. Scryer is a search engine for fanfiction built for Ponyville members". It allows much more powerful searches.

 

Did that replace FFFN?

 

In addition to Pers' methods, I also still occasionally trawl FF.Net, now that their filters are better.

Ratings: All
Language: English
Character: Harry Potter
Words: > 10,000
Sort by: Update date/Publish date

Exclude:

Character: Draco Malfoy
Character: Severus Snape
Genre: Hurt/Comfort

Going for a wordcount around 20,000-30,000 and sorting by publish date is a good way to find fics that are new and updating regularly.

 

I use a filter similar to Taure's. But I combine it with Fanfiction.net - Liker script. It allows you to hide fics and authors. Saves a lot of time if you don't have to wade through the same shit over and over.

 

Yeah, I'm going to grab that, since I find myself reopening the same fics over and over even if they look somewhat familiar thinking "MAYBE it wasn't so bad. Right?". Since I can't remember all the fics I've ever read there's a chance it was actually good. Yeah. Right.

Might conflict with my current script though.

 

Yeah, pretty much that.

 

Yep, trying it out now, there's not TOO much more it could have to satisfy me to be honest. There's only so many ways to filter fics based on summaries and tags.

 

Makes you wonder how after all this time custom word count and summary filter (+- words) is not part of their standard search.