A small lol from the forums

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

I can't sleep, so I wanted to see if anyone directly brought up the whole fanfic.net passwords/importer getting blocked issues with FanLib on their forums. Since the forum search features suck and there's no way to search for individual posts but only entire topics, I ended up skimming through a big long thread entitled "Problems" where people post bugs with the site.

It turns out that different browsers have different ways of translating linebreaks within our text editor. If you know any HTML, some use BRs and some use Ps.

O rly? What browser doesn't render a line break or a paragraph? I guess he is used to viewing the internet as one big monolithic wall of text.

Anyway, I find no indication that:

1. Anyone has figured out that importing hasn't worked for three days
2. Anyone had any concerns at all about typing in their ff.net password on FanLib

The FanLib user response to this feature was pretty positive, except when reporting bugs with it, which means that they did use it.

Wonder what's going to happen when they notice ff.net outfoxed them.

Comments

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

I hardly know how to categorize this.

"fanlib: internets are tubes" ?

When you enter a word doc at FanLib, each paragraph mark is transformed into two or three line breaks. But hey! It makes the stories look longer!

[elf]

"fanlib: website issues" or "fanlib: coding problems"

I'm amazed at the problems with coding & uploading there. They apparently thought it was so kewl to allow direct upload of .doc/.rtf files it completely skipped their minds that plenty of fanfic authors are competent in at least basic HTML.

I uploaded a story. I was baffled. Can change bold, italic, underline, choice of justification direction, indent, and add chapter breaks. That's all. As far as I can tell, can't do strikethrough, font face, size or color, tables (I shudder to think of what it does with tables), internal images, nor hyperlinks.

I'll admit they've got a "unique WYSIWYG editor;" nobody else's has been gutted that much.

[elf]

(Oh, and in case anyone wants to throw wankage at me for putting a story on FanLib: I copied my Hamburger Helper Hand/Arby's Oven Mitt slash. I figure FanLib'd make a great showcase for a lot of what gets posted at verywrongslash.)

[stewardess.livejournal.com]

fanlib: suckage?

*g*

[elf]

Well, you could just scrap all the other tags and use that one, I suppose. But I thought the idea was to be *specific*, not just indicate suckage.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, I approve of not letting the writers mess with fonts and such. Every now and then I run into some boingy little newbie on LJ who thinks it'd be just Too Kewl! to post her story in red or purple, or in all italics or a similarly curly font, or in some tiny little microprint. [crossed eyes] I hit the [Back] button and go on to the next thing on my Flist. There's too much good stuff out there to strain my eyes on that garbage.

Angie, who wishes these folks would learn to let their stories speak for themselves

[elf]

Oh, I hates the blinky swirly pink fonts, yes yes yes.

But it'd be nice to have, say, large text options for headlines. Or the ability to switch to a different font for indented text (like a supposed newspaper clipping.)

A list of 6 fonts (or three, really... serif, sans, and monospace) would be plenty. Colors... yeah, if you let 'em have colors someone's gonna get stupid. But it's annoying that they don't *mention* that those features are going to be stripped from your uploadable Word.doc, so authors would know to go change any sections of their story that were relying on them.

Removing strikethrough can *drastically* change a story. Removing color, not so much... except in the rare cases where the author did white-on-white "hidden text" for some reason.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree they could have a few more options for fonts and such without having things end up too icky. And for that matter, letting the baby writers (of whatever chronological age) post their stories in blinky swirly pink fonts gives me a pretty good clue about which stories to skip. [wry smile] And yes, there should definitely be some sort of notice when you upload stating what will and won't work, if they're going to deviate from the norm. [nodnod]

Angie

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

I see what you did there.

I'm all like "LOL who is this masked forum poster?" and it just now occurred to me to check the profile. Im smrt

I also never thought to turn off the adult filter before. Heh.

I liked the PC/Mac. I don't think I'll review it there, though.

[elf]

I was gonna talk about it, but, umm, eet's a seekrit.

*snort*

Don't have to review it there; it's on LJ in mac_hearts_pc. (It's listed under "My Fics" in my memories; I don't have the link handy.)

I have plans to write a number of ficlets in my new favorite fandom, "TV Commercials."

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

GEICO CAVEMEN, PLZ.

[elf]

Ooh! Don't know how I missed that one! (I know--it's not tied to a breakfast cereal. It's hard for me to notice commercial characters who aren't cereal-related for some reason.)

Yes, there needs to be Geico cavemen fic, and I probably need to write it. It even lends itself nicely to genfic. Yaay thank you!