Aeärwen's Corner

I hate some fanfiction archives. Today, the bulk of my ire is for LOTRFF, which has, in its infinite wisdom, decided that my log-in ID and password will NOT let me access my stories so I can update them. Considering that everything I see at that site is centered - story text included (and on all stories, not just mine) I'm just about ready to bail from there.

Then there's SWG, which simply won't let me log in anymore. At all. I have a story (this one, as a matter of fact) that belongs there. Can I post it? Nope.

Finally there's OSA, at which I'm going to have to go through and manually tag all my italics with brackets [ ] rather than the regular HTML marks < >. It's a PITA, and that's the site where the admins are downright ugly to anybody who makes innocent mistakes.

Yes, I post to HASA, but I really don't like their new interface, and the fact that I have to go through the entire story text every time taking out the frelling extra spaces between paragraphs. Used to be that those only appeared when one went to edit; now, some horse's ass has decided to inflict that on ALL text.

All in all, this makes me weep for the state of fan fiction, when the one and only archive that seems to be in working order and/or doesn't mess with me is FFN. How sad is that?

/vent

OK, now that I have that off my chest, here's the next chapter of this one. Enjoy!

( Foundlings - Chapter 3 - Strangers )

I have been told, by those who know, that the SWG would be a great place to post this. Well, after fighting with their interface, their stripping out of all paragraph breaks and other formatting, their adding extra spaces at the beginnings of lines - and doing so for nearly an hour without success - I have decided that SWG is impossible to work with and not worth the hassle. Sorry guys - you need to talk to the lady in charge and tell her to find some software that WORKS.

And for those who read my ranting last week, this is the beginning of the story I was whining about.

( Along Came A Spider - Chapter 1 - In The Beginning )

Edited to add: I just messed around with SWG again, once more reinserting carriage returns stripped away, margin wierdness, stripping of italics formatting - spent ANOTHER half an hour doing it - and finally got it to look right only to find out that my story will not appear until "approved by a moderator." You know, I REALLY despise having to wait for someone else to say "Yeah, you have a story there," and have to give an official okie-dokie for anybody ELSE to see it. That smacks of control issues on the part of the archive owner to me.

So far, I am seriously under-impressed with SWG. They better have something seriously on the ball there - or this will be the one and only story of mine to ever see light of day there. The hassle, from what I've seen so far, just simply is NOT worth it.