Can we please differentiate between webhosts stopping their service because of business reasons and fanworks that get taken down/soundtracks being deleted/etc because of alleged copyright infringement? Works getting TOSed somewhere else was, in fact, a motivator behind founding the OTW and building the AO3. It's why owning the servers was considered so important.
Also to some of us it is just really insulting that only kerfluffle about the hosting of yet more text-based works would be what inspires the demand for development of those features that should have been developed from the start. Who cares about what people want, except it's an annoyance to someone's fic reading habits, right? Because we all only care about fic.
Can we please differentiate between webhosts stopping their service because of business reasons and fanworks that get taken down/soundtracks being deleted/etc because of alleged copyright infringement?
Certainly. They're different. And being ToS'd is one of the big reasons behind AO3's creation, perhaps the biggest reason. However, "bored or angry fangirl deletes entire archive out of apathy or pique" was also part of it, and so was "platform hosting the archive is going to stop existing in two months." The first almost never applies to meta (the occasional accusation of trademark infringement is possible), but meta's just as vulnerable to the other two as fic. More, perhaps; there are no general-purpose meta archives.
Hosting other fanworks has been in development since the start. AO3 always had the intent to host art and vids. Direct progress toward that goal--an upload system, display system, appropriate label/headers system--was delayed in favor of getting a functional text archive, but hosting of art and vids is not being set aside for this.
This may put fanworks-type labels and sorting on a faster track (possibly at the temporary expense of other features like search improvements); it's not going to delay anything in development.
The key issue is, "is hosting meta/nonfic consistent with AO3's purposes?" A lot of fans, including the board, think it is. Once that's established, there's no excuse for saying "people cannot upload met yet because we're not ready"--the archive isn't ready for art or vids, and entries for those are being uploaded.
We'll just have to disagree on out assessment of the development. Polishing the text-based side of the archive to perfection before even *starting to discuss the requirements for other works* and putting bells and whistles on the features for Yuletide, which is not even an AO3 project, still shows a clear bias in favor of text-based works to me. I don't believe building a simple gallery system is inherently more difficult, it's just different. Also the hosting side of the Audiofic archive, for example, is taken care of by one fan who I'm sure has less funding available than the OTW. So if I hear one more time how omg so huuuuge other files are though, poor servers, I'm going to puke. I feel like if there was a will to actually develop these features and host other works there would have been at least one concrete, visible step towards it after five years.
I'm first and foremost a fic writer, but I agree with you.
The Archive has been and still is promoted as a multimedia fanworks archive - but essentially the only thing that was built in five years was a text based Archive. There isn't even a real timeline, yet, for when it will be able to host more than texts. So it's not surprising that people who produce non-textbased fanworks are getting annoyed by now. Especially when meta wasn't a part of the agenda before, but now gets in because "we can already host it anyway", while people waiting for the actual multi-media hosting are still waiting for any sign of it actually happening.
Comment on Fandom nonfiction: seeking feedback
A. Nnoyed (Guest) Thu 14 Mar 2013 11:02PM UTC
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