On 8/23/98 7:02 PM, Andy Skuse at askuse@lonet.ca wrote:

Jeanne Hedge wrote:

At 10:54 AM 8/23/98 PDT, The Critic wrote:

Unfortunately, all the fics posted to the list recently have been
forgettable, and some were downright bad. I used to take the effort to
read and C&C almost every non-spam Ranma fic, but after seeing that this
practice could lead to a ban, I'll only C&C those fics that have a
chance at being better than bad.

Why would providing C+C to a non-spamfic lead to a ban?  That's what

you're *supposed* to do around here....

Yep, that's what people *used* to do some time ago, but it seems that
practice has fallen out of favour for privately emailed C&C which has lead
to the concept of "pre-readers", something that never existed before, and
something that just rubs me wrong every time I see the word mentioned. This
list was founded on the idea that everyone here is a pre-reader, to help
each other with their writing, and to enjoy each other's fanfics. There
were no other expectations. Reducing spam is always a good thing, but we've
turned away from the once very productive method of posting C&C to the list.

Well said, Panda! :)

I'd like to add my own codicil, on MST's. When I started writing my own 
fun fanfic reviews (I don't like using the term MST myself, partly for 
its negative associations, partly because I based my team on Siskel and 
Ebert ^_^), I went into it with the idea of writing real C&C in a format 
that was more fun for both the writer and the commenter. Unfortunately, 
the idea of real C&C is something that seems to have slipped by the 
wayside in a large number of the reviews I've seen on the list, where it 
seems like the main idea was to let the reviewer make clever (and not so 
clever) one-liners at the fic's expense. Heaven knows, I'm guilty of that 
myself, but I do at least try to give real C&C in every fun review I do 
and post. I'd like to see more reviewers do the same.

(As a side note to this... does anyone else think the characters on a lot 
of the review teams sound the same? When some friends and I created 
Windir and Frito, we deliberately made two very different, distinct 
characters so we could critique stories from different angles; when 
Firehawke gifted me with Lyra, she became the more-or-less normal member 
of the trio, and gave me a third viewpoint to review from. I don't see a 
whole lot of this around these days; often it's hard to tell who's saying 
something without looking at the tags.)



Travis Butler
(The Professor, formerly of Myth and Magick!, Lawrence, KS;
 tbutler@tfs.net, now from the Wandering Powerbook;
 <http://www.tfs.net/personal/tbutler/>;
 Mac page <http://www.tfs.net/business/tbutler/>)

...Classified Ads: The Final Frontier.