Mod Post: On the subject of all those "Can you please send me a copy of..." requests

[seanmegansean.livejournal.com]

I've received quite a few emails and PMs about this issue and have been thinking of how to come up with a solution. Obviously, there are different opinions on whether it is wrong for people to share stories if they themselves didn't write them, and I'm not going to discuss the question here. I want things to be simple and clear for and in this community.

So this is what I've come up with (and I'm going to spare you my thoughts leading to these):

1) For the sake of this community, i.e. quick answers to (mostly fic) searches, I'm not going to friends-lock the entries, have posts mod-approved before posting, or disable anonymous comments.

2) If you are an author and don't want stories you've flocked or taken down for whatever reasons shared as documents, please tell me and I'll try to make sure that nobody asks for your stories in entries in this comm.

If people post a request wanting your stories as documents, I'll delete the entry. If they do it again after being told not do, I'll ban them.

However, I would appreciate it if I or my co-mods were the only people in this comm chastising people for unwanted entries. It's what we're here for, let us do it. Feel more than free to send us a PM telling us about an entry if you think we're not quick enough, or for that matter, send the person posting that request about your stories a PM asking them to stop it, but the comments in this comm should remain neutral and friendly, and I'm not sure that jumping newbies for (at least in their eyes) legitimate requests is the way to go here.

3) If you are a reader and are continually disappointed by all the comments to posts, i.e. it's not 20 new stories in the comments, but just 20 requests to send a copy via email, I suggest clicking only on those posts that have been edited with something like "Tons of recs in the comments". That's the only way of not wasting time on entries that are of no interest to you and the main reason why we have the "Please edit your post with the result of your search" rule in the first place.

******
As always, if this doesn't please you, or you have better ideas of how to deal with any of this, feel free to leave a comment or send me a PM or an email at seanmegansean at livejournal dot com.

Thank you for your attention, and have a good day :D

Comments

[netlagd.livejournal.com]

You might want to look at my post over at coffee club IJ
though it devolved down to copyright issues, it was rather enlightening on this subject:
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/qaf_coffeeclub/163351.html

[vlredreign.livejournal.com]

I thought about you and this post when the situation came up, I swear! lol The copyright stuff, imo, is bullshit, if you're taking someone else's characters and writing stories about them. If it's your work, with your own original characters, that's one thing.

An archive that I was a mod for ran into this, years ago, where a writer submitted her story to the validation queue, and didn't understand why we kept telling her we weren't gonna release her story because she tagged a copyright to it...and it was fanfiction. She had posted it at two other archives, and not one of them called her on it. On top of that, it was so OOC and Mary-Sue'd that none of us wanted to touch it...somehow I got tagged for that. After two chapters I pleaded insanity. *g*