babble on

....Chag Sameach and Blessed Yule. If you do not ascribe to a religion or culture that celebrates at this time of year, and Christmas is just another Thursday to you, then I hope you have a nice although not especially special Thursday.

I have put up some Christmas decorations on my homepage, as I did for Hallowe'en. Ok, I say Christmas decorations, I mean gifs. They're are all pretty unspecific and non-denominational, because I just wanted to keep it tasteful and avoid clashing with my layout's colour scheme. Not very much in the spirit of Christmas, I know, but I'm not feeling very connected to it this year...if you take the religion out of Christmas (recovering Catholic here) then there isn't really anything left except commerce, and I don't really feel like celebrating that.

The decorations will come down in January, probably. I probably won't do any decorating for any other holidays except Pride. It's only during the winter in the northern hemisphere that you really need twinkly lights to cheer you up.

The more content you add to a website, the longer it feels like you've been working on it. No wonder people let these things wither on the vine within a few months...

Until recently, if you looked at my homepage, you would have seen a link to my account on squidgeworld and a mention that I was hosting my fics on squidgeworld. I have decided that I am not going to keep posting my fics to the archive because of a recent incident. Some background below:

Archive of Our Own's content policy allows users to post fics depicting underage sex so long as they are appropriately tagged. Ao3 also allows users to post "real person fanfiction" fics about public figures. Added together, this means users can and do post fics depicting sexual activity involving real children. Whether or not this is legal (as it apparently is), it's certainly open to abuse, and many people object to this policy.

A recent renewal of this controversy led to many people joining squidgeworld as an alternative archive to ao3, which led to squidgeworld making a blogpost explaining their policy on underage RPF. They also allow it to be posted, but require it to be user locked so it's not available to the general public.

This led to a new user leaving a rude & critical comment on the post, and several other users attacking them for their rude post, including the moderator of another archive, superlove. Moderators didn't lock the thread, remove any comments, or tell users to be respectful: they weighed in themselves.

I think this is poor practice for the admin of an archive or the moderators of a blog, and I think this is the case regardless of how you feel about allowing or not allowing underage RPF. The initial post was rude, but the owners of the archive should have warned the user to moderate their language and screened any further incendiary comments. This would have facilitated a more productive discussion, if one was possible. Even though the first comment "started it", it's the responsibility of mods and admins to defuse conflict rather than to heighten it, especially on an issue which is the subject of reasonable controversy and disagreement.

Unless or until it seems that Squidgeworld has improved its blog moderation & admin practices, I would prefer not to use it. I will not be deleting the fics I have already posted there, but I will not be posting any more, and I may archive my account. Instead I will be backing up the fics I have posted on Ao3 here, on my personal website, & making textfiles available.

I do feel conflicted about this and it's difficult to see any "right choice". I actually think Squidgeworld's policy on Underage and RPF is much better than Ao3's, although I don't really like either policy. I realize that Squidgeworld is a much smaller, DIY archive compared to Ao3 and the admins must feel more personally affected by rude comments. I also realise that with their firm anti-censorship position, Squidgeworld may feel obliged not to delete or moderate user comments regardless of how incendiary they are. However I think this is an error in judgment by the admins, and I would prefer not to use an archive whose admins moderate their website this way unless I have to.

I have a much stronger incentive to use Ao3 vs SqW because of its size and ubiquity, although I would prefer to use another archive than Ao3, or at least back up my fics to multiple archives. Unfortunately, the admin of the only other small multi-fandom archive I'm aware of is right there in the Squidge blog comments telling a rude user to "fuck off back to twitter you piece of shit", instead of "getting piss angry like a whining child", so the hunt for an alternative archive continues.

Will my "contribution" to this "discussion" have any effect on it whatsoever? I hope not! This blab post is just for me (because I had opinions I wanted to express) and any hypothetical readers of my website who might be wondering why I fell off posting fics to Squidgeworld. Egomaniacal of me to assume that people are desperate to hear why, I know.

If you have a comment or a criticism about this post, you can e-mail me about it. Good comments may be posted here (with permission).