[FFML] A thought on the future of the FFML

[Gary Kleppe]

My own two yen on this:

I don't think a fanfiction.net-style web forum would quite work for  
us. The technology is readily available, but it only effectively  
facilitates comments that are short and address the fic (or a chapter)  
as a whole. That's fine for fanfiction.net, but the character of their  
membership is not the same as ours. FFML, at least historically, has  
been a smaller, more dedicated community with a greater commitment to  
quality before quantity, and a willingness to spend time looking at  
each other's work in detail in order to help ourselves improve.

Personally, I don't mind that we're smaller in population than other  
venues. When I first joined FFML it had only a few hundred  
subscribers. But it was still a great place to get detailed feedback.  
To a lesser degree it still is, and I wouldn't trade that for an extra  
thousand subscribers.

So, I'm not necessarily against the idea, but whatever we switch to  
has to suit our needs as a community, one of a very different  
character from fanfiction.net. We *need* the ability to target a  
specific line or other portion of a story, to write commentaries that  
are as long as the story itself, and to comment off of someone else's  
comment. I don't know of any web software package that currently does  
this. Maybe we could find one, or maybe we could design and write our  
own.

The other issue is that any new venue would need to be accepted by the  
list population at large. Even if people *think* this will happen it  
might not. Once I was adminning a political email list and suggested  
the idea of moving to a web forum. Everybody was positive toward the  
idea. But when I actually set up the forum, nobody used it; everyone  
just kept using the email list because it was what they were used to.