2015 has been a pretty busy year for the WBA and the Review Board, which I remember being more or less deserted for a long while in 2013 when I signed up on DLP. Some good fanfiction was published and interest was reinvigorated.

It got me thinking about what prompts people to put fanfiction up for review. Is there a dominant factor that you pay special attention to when deciding if a fic should be subjected to DLP scrutiny? Beyond the obvious things like quality and enjoyment, how far along does a fic need to be for you to throw it up there?

Of course, this is a non-issue with oneshots and such, but works in progress are probably considered from this angle in most cases. Do you wait until a certain wordcount treshold, or until you think the plot is kicking in? Is it something else, or do you ignore that aspect entirely? Do you have a checklist the candidate fic has to fill for you to put it up for consideration?

 

Speaking as a mod, we'd be really happy if more people put things up for review. The interest is still there - as evidenced by how active threads like Almost Recommended are - but less and less people are submitting to the library, which is a bad thing because it makes stories much harder to find.

We actually recently lowered the criteria for putting a story up for review down to if you feel a story merits a 3/5 instead of a 4/5. Something to consider, because generally everyone's standards have only increased over time.

Go forth and recommend!

 

Sadly I don't read much these days that either A. doesn't come from a WbA area or B. from one of the other guys offsite. Much of that is already covered from what I glean -- I haven't considered checking particulars to see if they aren't.

For the most part I've self-submitted a couple of my own stories(protip, that's bad. Not many people read a self-recced thread, let alone vote it :d), and in the case of the Library IIRC the first was completed(woo Desires of a Hallow) and the second incomplete. Other Fandoms one was completed(Island in the Sun ) and the other was toward the end of the story after doing clean up and rewrite.

If I were to look at offering somebody else's story, I'd probably check toward how far along they are in terms of plot, how well the story has conducted itself to that point, yeah.

 

Because I didn't actually give my thoughts on this:

I guess it ties directly into what I pay attention to when reviewing a fic someone else submitted, seeing as I rarely submit stuff for review myself. I always look at how it's presented (quality of writing and all that this entails) and what's actually there to review.

If the author is emabarking on an epic AU journey, I would wait until something interesting is actually happening. If there's just a few chapters and they barely nick the beginning, I'd hold off until I can reasonably estimate some things, meaning that I could give an opinion based on some substance instead of mostly speculation about the author's ability and execution of their premise and how things might turn out in the future, taking my my collective experience with the fandom into account.

 

I must admit, it feels like a long time since I read anything that enthused me enough to bother posting anything. And generally when I do, I then discover that it has already been put up at some point in the far distant past. There's also the fact that in many cases my taste can be rather... dubious. I still maintain that Fate Be Changed is a goddamn classic, okay!?

And as far as my own stories are concerned I've basically decided on a wait-and-see approach. None of the stories I'm currently working on are especially far into their main arcs. Even then, I think an important aspect of the For Review is that first review and it is unlikely that I'll be able to review my own stuff in an especially helpful way.

Eh, next time I find a thing that was readable I'll be sure to post it.

 

Last time I posted a fic in the the old Almost Recommended thread, was Newcomb's first chapter of WYLB. And look where it has gotten. That is the stuff I am interested in. I can't even open a story like Cadmean Victory because I know I wouldn't like it.

I suppose the WbA authors have ruined my interest in most ff.net stories that are either full of cliches or badly written.

 

If I read something and think I'd like it enough to read it multiple times and archive it, then it's probably Library-worthy. That seems like a smaller number these days, but I think part of it is that a lot of DLP has fallen into a rut where we browse only the stories that are written by DLP members, or by authors we know are good from previous stories.

Luckily, Raven made Scryer which has mitigated some of that and he's mentioned several feature expansions that have me excited for the new fics we'll find for the library.

As for how far along the fic would have to be to warrant recommendation, it depends entirely on the genre, structure, and pace. A grand epic AU would probably need at least 40k words written already before I threw it up, while a oneshot or something a lot more tightly plotted might be only 15-25k in before warranting recommendation.

When it comes to the type of story, that's not nearly as big a consideration today as it was in days past. Back in the day, certain genres of fic or certain tropes would instantly disqualify it from recommendation. Today, I'm pretty sure we even have a slash fic or two in the library. Northumbrian's Harry/Ginny post-epilogue fic has gotten a great reception, when just those words would have been enough to kill it once. Today, quality is nearly the only consideration for recommendations and that's the way I prefer it to be honest. For those who dislike a specific trope in broad strokes, they can just not read a fic featuring them. For the rest of us, execution is the most important consideration and if it's done well then it deserves evaluation.

I don't have a checklist or anything for the qualifications. If it feels like it deserves to be put in For Review, then it will. I think having strict guidelines only leads to omitting potentially great fics, and that's terrible.

 

I'll want to talk about a fic if any of the following is true:

a) It's genuinely good (e.g. What You Leave Behind)

b) It's entertaining despite having too many errors to be considered good (e.g. Cadmean Victory)

c) It had potential at the start but it jumped the shark and I want to talk about why (e.g. The Legacy)

It used to be that A went to For Review and B and C went to Almost Recommended.

Now A and B go to For Review. I'm not sure where we can discuss C, since we're not meant to discuss fics in Almost Recommended any more. I don't want to post C-fics into For Review because I know they'll fail to get into Almost Recommended and all the discussion about the fic will be lost. You can't continue to discuss its ongoing failures as it updates further (or, optimistically, talk about how it has rescued itself), nor can you refer people to the discussion when they ask you about your opinion of the fic. The discussion has been moved to the Trash Bin and is inaccessible unless you have it bookmarked.

Further, there's the risk that B-fics will also meet this fate if DLP considers them inadequate to get into Almost Recommended. Our standards for even rating a fic a 3/5 are quite high -- lots of people were rating Cadmean Victory as 2/5.

That's a disincentive to recommending fics. I tend to write long, 1000 word+ reviews of fics if I think there's a lot to talk about in how they failed. If I think that review is going to disappear into the aether, I just won't bother.

The essential problem is this: people still want to read and talk about fics that aren't good enough to make it into the Library or possibly even Almost Recommended. Without a general "dump" thread for discussion of these fics, there's no real venue to discuss them. But if you do allow a dump thread, then discussion tends to accumulate there because it's less effort than recommending a fic For Review.

My solutions? Either:

A) Make trashed threads publicly accessible so people can continue to discuss fics (and look up past reviews) that have been moved to the Trash Bin.

B) Permit discussion of fics in Almost Recommended but strongly enforce a rule that it's only for fics that people want to read and discuss despite being likely to score 2/5 or below.

My preference is for A. Option B requires constant ongoing moderation and a succession of judgement calls about whether fics are good enough to get 3/5. Option A allows people to use the Library for all their fic discussion/review needs.

The only problem with A is that I'm aware the Trash Bin contains a lot of non-Library threads and would be a bitch to sort out. An alternative would be to apply it going forward but not retroactively.

 

Speaking only for myself, my reluctance to post more stories for review has several factors.

One is the obvious, that I am not sure whether or not the story meets the standards of DLP, for whatever reason. Some already named, like the story being relatively in its beginning or middle stages, with plenty of room to go bad still, as so many promising stories have done. So often, you have stories that start fantastic but then switch on to the shit track. In that case, it seems premature to recommend stories that you are not 100% sure in.

Then there is reading a fanfic in one sitting through the night and really liking it but then not being too sure whether one liked it because it was genuinely good or whether it just hit enough tropes and spots one liked to tolerate its immense flaws. I'll admit, that my biggest criteria for liking a fanfic is whether or not I enjoyed myself reading it.

If I had a lot of fun and it made me invested in it, the fanfic could break every single Potter Law twice for all I care.* However, that doesn't mean that others will also like it, let alone that that story should be submitted to the library.

There is, after all, a big difference between liking something and that something being good after the DLP sets of criteria, things like plot, characters, prose etc.

Then there is the thing that some characters are not generally all that well liked here. People do prefer Harry centric stories, and there is nothing wrong with that, however, it does make one reluctant to propose non Harry centric stories, and I mean good ones like Alexandra Quick or Cultural Anthropology, when so many people give 1/5 ratings to those stories for simply not having Harry as the main character.

Similarly, I have, over the years, shifted mostly away from HP fanfics in general. I still read some, occasionally, and follow a few ones but I don't seek them out. Generally, only click on one if I find them on the favourites list of an author that I just finished reading a story from or if someone I know reccs one via chat. But mostly, it's non HP fandoms and, well, same reasons there, tbh.

Having a story focus on not the canon protag but someone else, be it a secondary or tertiary character or a SI, does have a stigma attached to it and unless the story is outstanding, people are quick to write those off. That's just not a good incentive to post them, if you know you are going to get quite a few kneejerk "All SI stories suck" reaction. Not going to pretend that all or even most of those stories are good, but there are solid, readable ones, and a few greats. Dreaming of Sunshine is in the library, actually.

But I did not know that the threshold for the library was lowered to 3, so, that might get me to post more.

*Not that I am particularly concerned with those in the first place

 

Though I review a large number of stories, I find that I rarely start For Review threads, generally only doing so for ones I would rate 4/5 or higher (i.e., threads I hope to see survive) or, like Taure, stories that I think are interesting enough to warrant DLP discussion. Part of this is laziness, I admit, as it takes a lot more effort to write a proper For Review post than to post a follow-up in a thread, and eventually most decent stories get threads started by someone else. Part of this is not having the energy to put myself out there sometimes--it's discouraging when a story you genuinely enjoyed gets shat on by the community.

I like Taure's idea of making Trash Bin stories accessible. As we now have a bunch of new mods, perhaps sorting the Trash Bin might be a good task for one or two to tackle.

 

I think a big part of lack of good stories being put up for review is, well, lack of good stories. What I mean to say is that we discover good stories at a faster rate than they're being produced, and by now have mostly exhausted the supply.

For me personally, I would not put a fic for review unless I thought it was 5/5 material, or 4/5 with some aspect that really impressed me.

Similarly, I understand that the shortage of story influx in the Library is worrying, but I disagree with lowering our standards to keep the influx steady. There's a plethora of shit stories in the Library already from years past, no need to add mediocre fics to the heap.
If anything, our standards have mostly gone up over the years as we keep reading and reading. That is good. Having high standards is part of our identity.

 

I'll echo Republic on this one, there's seemingly been a dearth of good fics lately that haven't come form DLP authors. And I've gotten so much more picky since I joined the site.

Although I don't think I've ever been particularly active in For Review, let alone actually having submitted something - most of the 'fic I read I either find by looking in For Review myself, WbA, or is just not good enough to bother.

Mostly it's because I read a lot of crap

And I don't review stories that often because I either don't have particularly strong opinions about them one way or the other (which I suppose would be constructive to point out...) or it's already been pointed out. I prefer to have something constructive to add to the conversation.

That, an I'll admit to having lurker tendencies (7 years on the site and less than 300 posts can attest to that). I'l try to stop that.