On Wed, 24 Apr 1996, Jeanne Hedge wrote:

It will be talked about on the list if 1) it is seen from amid all the spam,
and 2) it's Ranma.  I can't do a thing about the second, but the spam really
does need to be reduced.

It's usually pretty easy for me to tell the difference between spam and a 
fanfic.  For one thing, Fanfics usually don't have Re: in the subject 
line :)

I also don't think anyone's not reading fanfics because there's so much 
spam.
   

Perhaps because very few people seem to care to comment on "works in
progress" (unless they are Ranma - no *wonder* so many new people seem to
think this is a Ranma-only list :).  These posts, I suspect, are getting
lost and tossed with the filler.  Or the writers, like me, have given up.
Why bother when you know nobody's going to answer?

Well, a lot of comments get sent stright to the authors, not the to the 
list.

Half the commentary I get from the list comes straight to me, not to the 
list at all.

The real problem is that NEW fanfic authors often can't get any 
commentary.  If I wrote a story and had my friend Rob Dodd post it, 
probably no one would comment, even though it would be my usual High 
Quality :)

I remember back when I first started writing, I wrote the first six 
chapters of Ranma--Putting Your Heart in the Right Place and posted them 
before I got ANY feedback at all, even a "Your story sucks" or "Your 
story is cool" letter.

I'm not surprised a lot of people get no feedback...the majority of 
people who read fanfic on the internet never even send "this was 
cool/sucks" letters.  Either that or there's only a few dozen people who 
have ever read my fanfiction :)

Plus, despite the spam, a LOT of fanfics come through here and a lot of 
the people on this list wouldn't have time to read all of them even if 
all spam came to an end.  I have no trouble keeping up with the few I 
have time to read and comment on.


John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu   http://falcon.cc.ukans.edu/~ranma/falcon.html 
                            http://www.dhp.com/~wraven/john/index.html

If you've ever watched the game warden through a gun sight...
     You might be a redneck.