I simply could not continue to support it financially at the level I had been. I still have all the stuff for it, except the domain. (That lapsed.)

I might bring it back if I figure out a way to pay for it, but its just... not feasible for me to pay 95% of the hosting costs out of pocket.

 

Well, I'm looking at reviving this project now. Is there any interest remaining in this?

 

Hmmm... that isn't really what the point of this tool was... that's more like a meta-data filter. But yeah, people would probably use multiple tools.

 

JordanL, I am always interested in your work.

 

It was a sad day indeed when I checked the bookmark and saw the engine was dead. Thought about trying to message you, but the 2 or 3 forums I'd seen you post in had no activity for some time. More power to you, I loved this thing. It's particularly useful in smaller fandoms where it's hard to find the few gems.

 

This isn't working any more. Fanfiction.net changed something, so fffn doesn't get new updates on stories.

 

Ya ff.net changed the way they show rss last March. Moatra was planning on fixing it but then he disappeared.

 

I am interested. I made something like this for my personal use, but different tool with different sample of users may give different stories.

 

Yeah, we're interested.

 

Alright. I don't have a timeline or domain name set yet for the tool to relaunch with. A couple of points:

- I'll be relaunching it with user accounts, subscriptions, and premium features. I don't see any other way to pay for it.
- It will not have the eBook tool I made when I first relaunch it, and I might only launch that for authors that opt into it.
- I will, from the start, give authors tools to control how their stories are used in this site. (This will include a way to "claim" your FFN account.)
- I will also run a donation paypal to try and cover hosting costs.
- The site will, from the start, be hosted through Amazon Web Services. I expect the hosting will cost somewhere around $100/month at first, but I'm not sure how much that will allow the site to serve. (At the traffic level I was getting when I shut it down, I'd probably be spending about $250-$300/month to keep the site responsive.)
- The site is being entirely rebuilt from the ground up, this time for the purpose of being a widely used tool. The first time it was all custom code that was developed simply to prove a concept, and it kind of spiraled out of control. This time, it will be based upon Symfony2 Framework and Doctrine.

Here is a list of features I expect to launch with:

- User Accounts:
-- Claim an author account on FFN (copy & paste a code into your profile that the tool will read and confirm)
-- Create an exclusion list (things that should never appear in results) of stories and fandoms
-- Import your FFN favorites into your exclusion list
-- Save and share searches
- Searches:
-- Search with story ID or story URL (any chapter)
-- Search by: default (relevance scores based on relational information), undiscovered stories (relevance scores where the score is negatively affect the longer the story has been published), epics only (relevance score where any story that is less than 60K words is excluded), a "sad graveyard" search (where it only returns high relevance stories that haven't been updated in more than a year), and a "triumphant author" search (where only highly relevant stories which are marked competed are returned).
-- Save search
- Results:
-- Stories updated in the last week flagged
-- Stories created in the last month flagged
-- Stories not updated in the last year flagged
-- Stories completed flagged
-- Title, author, fandom, genre, summary, chapters, word length, rating, characters
- Statistics:
-- Total stats for entire database
-- Top 15 stories by words, reviews, and favorites
-- Each of the above for any fandom

Future feature sets (if the site can sustain itself):

- Notifications of changes to the top 100 results of saved searches
- Filter searches by individual characters or by gender match on multiple characters
- Slash fics (M/M or F/F pairings) flagged in results
- Rate stories on site (1-5)
- Weight results by site rating (1-5)

Well, if you're interested in my other projects, you should check out:

http://earthcitizenswanted.org/

It's what I've been working on the last two years.

 

You should try to ask if you can get it hosted here on this site like FFFN.
That should cut down cost.

 

I will ask, but it's entirely likely that hosting my tool will cost more than hosting the entire rest of DLP.