----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gary Kleppe" <gary@garykleppe.org>
To: <ffml@anifics.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2006 4:22 AM
Subject: [FFML] Re: About all these fic requests/searches...


Well, it's twelve hours later, and the FFML has received more constructive 
traffic than in the last two weeks at the very least, as well as some good 
ideas about how to fix my problem. I'll have to say to DB that I really 
didn't percieve his comments as insulting, so if someone could ungag him so 
he can join in and discuss the future of the list, I'd be pretty 
appreciative.

I think you're engaging in revisionist history here, at least with respect 
to
Granberry. When I banned him he was quite clear in knowing that he had it
coming. Kenko, to my knowledge, was never banned nor threatened with 
banning, so
I'd be surprised if his leaving had anything to do with the list 
moderation. And
I don't remember who "Togashi Gaijin" is.

No, Kenko wasn't threatened with banning, just slammed with an "I can see 
where this is going and I'm not interested"... from an admin. Loudest of the 
fans to cry foul for that - and it *was* totally unneccessary - was Don 
Granberrry, who got booted for voicing *his* dissenting opinion with the 
moderation practices. If an Admin can spout inflammatory comments and then 
ban anyone replying in kind, the mod practices aren't healthy. And an admin 
is an admin, regardless of whether the tag is used.

In the case of Mark Shurtleff, he received some very pointed C&C - 
warranted, but more inflammatory than neccessary. There was a big blowup 
with a lot of insulting going round - some of which was being flung by the 
mods. Mark flung some insults of his own and left before he was banned, 
IIRC. Incidentally, it took him a year or so to get back to the fic 
afterwards, and he did rewrite the scenes under contention to where they are 
much milder.

Any new authors that pop up usually aren't - they're very old hands who've
been out of touch for a few years and finally show up with an update, not
genuine fresh blood.

I remember this list two years ago, when I had to filter the posts into
their own folder to keep up. I remember four years ago, when I could 
expect
at least a couple of different, often long, chapters posted every day.
Considering that the fandom has grown exponentially in that time, why is
this list fading like it is?

Good question, and I don't know the answer, but I am reasonably sure that 
you
aren't helping.

Pointing out the situation and making people aware of it *did* help. It got 
us a bunch of ideas for how to evolve this list into something that may grow 
back into what it was several years ago.

Personally, I like the idea of opening the list up to all fandoms. It's 
presently stuck in a Ranma rut - nearly everything posted has Ranma involved 
somewhere, sometimes to the detriment of the fic. In fact, sometimes it 
seems Ranma is involved in a fic solely to qualify it as anime fanfiction, 
and thus postable here or in other anime-specific venues. (The Ranma 
category at FF.net counts, seeing as it has a much higher signal to noise 
ratio than most of the rest of FF.net IMHO - at least of the categories I'm 
actively investing time in).

Recreating this as a message board though isn't really a great idea, though. 
Part of the reason why the list can give good C&C is the built in quoting 
function of e-mail, which gives us a ready-made  copy of a posted fic into 
which you can intersperse your corrections and questions. Trying to do the 
same with a message board is annoying in the extreme - the amount of manual 
editing that goes into that is not fun.

We do need a good, well placed and well linked front page for our list 
though - and advertising, in one form or another, on the various archive 
sites.

And above all, the admin team needs to clamp down hard on themselves and 
their own reactions. This place is the most aggressively modded list I'm on, 
at the moment, and also the one with the least traffic. Nipping discussions 
that are drifting a little in the name of topic and bandwidth preservation 
is all well and good - if they're a factor. When said conversation is ten 
posts long and the only thing going on that week, then I say let people 
discuss what they please, so long as it remains within the same fandom.

SP



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