Paolo wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:47 pm
They're closed until Slammr, the Nun, and I decide to reopen them.
They were closed because of complaints about quality, length, serials, the RSS feed "new stories" box on the main page, and the content of stories. We figure if it's that bad, then it can just stay on hold until it seems to be a good idea again.
Sorry.
Wow.
I really hope you guys -- the admins, that is -- are just "making a point" to the few (and unless there were other threads I overlooked, or you're talking about more than just recently, it was only a very few people complaining) who complained.
I don't know how to see page-view stats on the archive, if those are even available to anyone but site admins, but I think I remember seeing something about thousands of page views for some stories. Even if half of that is the same 5-10 people re-reading a favorite story every other day, that's still more people than the people who complained.
Looking at the posts in the Story Reviews & Author Feedback section of the forum (i.e. here) from what I can see, the vast majority of the posts are positive feedback, and many if not most of the replies in various story-, series- or author-specific threads are similarly agreeing with those threads' OPs that they enjoy the work in question. Admittedly, I am very new to the forums, and there may be (and probably is with regard to this issue) some history I'm not familiar with... but it seems unfair to punish both the many site visitors who haven't made rude / ungrateful comments, and any authors who may have wanted to upload new stories today, along with the handful of users who seem unfamiliar with "if you don't have anything nice to say..."
The administrators of this site, as far as I can tell, put an impressive amount of work into keeping it running, with no thanks other than being able to enjoy the archive & community themselves, and occasional thank-yous from other users like Transward's recent "Thanks due (
http://eunuch.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=17314)" post. Obviously the admins aren't obligated to cater to the whims, demands or even abject begging (though who doesn't enjoy a little abject begging?

) of any of us. Their decisions are their decisions, and probably the least effective way to convince them to open up submissions again would be to bitch and moan and insult them.
I do especially hope, though, that the Anonymous author of the New Neighbor Boy series, which has wound up caught in the middle of this, doesn't either mistakenly think that the submissions being closed was due to the admins wanting to keep that particular story from continuing to be posted here, or equally-mistakenly think that the couple of people who criticized the story so loudly spoke for all or even most of the people who read stories on the archive.
Personally, I'd been working myself up to writing something to post to the archive. I'm terrible at giving feedback (only recently stopped lurking, and notoriously awful at using email for anything but site-registration types of things) and had hoped to "give back" by making something for the authors I enjoy to (hopefully!) enjoy in turn.
Well, at least trying to write my own story will give me something to keep myself occupied with while I wait for submissions to re-open. No sense fretting about not being able to submit a story when I don't have one ready to submit in the first place.
(P.S. In case it wasn't clear, I had no complaints about "
Paolo wrote: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:47 pm
quality, length, serials, the RSS feed
'new stories' box on the main page, [or] the content of stories" on the archive. There are some themes I'd love to see show up more often -- or at all -- but I'm under no delusion that authors who don't even know me are somehow obligated to write stories exactly to my taste.)