There are many fics which don't really deserve to be there. Anyone else think a clean up is necessary to keep DLP standards high?

 

Applying current standards to the library would likely result in it having about 5 fics in it. Best to leave it as it is with the understanding that historical standards are not the same as what we look for in fics now.

And of course, there's nothing stopping members from going in and rating fics they think are bad.

 

Or reviewing them, as I understand it. That could be interesting in some cases.

 

My goodness! Warner has gone on a tangent with a huge volume of posts today.

 

I actually do think DLP would benefit from such a clean up.

However, I admit that I don't have the first clue on how to organize something like that, because it would definitely be problematic to pull off.

You'd basically have to scrap the current rating from everything that was put in the library before, say, 2008/09. But what do you do then? Do you create polls for each fic, most of which are commonly known and therefore not exactly interesting to read again? I bet those would have pretty low participation. Or ... do you ask a select group of people to do all the work? Who would be up for the task of re-rating so many fics? Or ... would you just delete them? Then the library would indeed be pretty empty.

So, might be beneficial, but I don't think it's possible.

 

Regardless of the merit of such an undertaking, the Review Board and Library don't exactly see tons of traffic. Most of the archive was created years ago. Since then DLP has grown beyond fan fiction and some people have moved on from it, their tastes have matured. If you wanted to reevaluate all of the old fics you'd need a bunch of reviews for each one and that's just not gonna happen. Plenty of people read without reviewing. And no one's gonna want to spend hours upon hours reading old fics that may have not aged well just to conclude that DLP circa 2017 would've tossed them into trash vs DLP circa 2007.

I don't get this obsession with "cleaning up the Library". Not the first time this came up in my time here and I'm not exactly a DLP old timer. If you're smart enough to realize that some fics rated 5 stars eight years ago are 2 stars today, you're smart enough to take the archive date into consideration when looking for stuff to read.

If you're concerned with how it looks, well, consider this. Anyone on DLP who's been around long enough to even care about this knows the reality of the situation and everyone else can fuck off. The Library is a part of DLP's history and I for one think it's pretty fucking cool that the forum is still going strong and continually elevating standards after 12 years.

If you wanna contribute, write a good fic or find good fics to submit to the Review Board.

 

It belongs in a museum?

 

I don't particularly care, because I don't read stories written before DH came out.

However, as others have said, it's part of DLP history so for whatever that's worth it should be preserved.

After all, DLP history is quite colorful

June 2005 DLP via WaybackMachine: