WingedPanther

My adorable wife has been writing fan fiction for decades, and introduced me to the art fairly recently. In the world of fan fiction, there are not a lot of quality sites for sharing your stories. You can post them on a blog, but that's a good way to never get them read. For a long time, we've used fanfiction.net, since it's the largest repository, and much easier to work with than the second best site, mediaminer. Recently, she found a new site, ficwad, that seems to be the real answer to what we've been looking for.

These three sites represent three distinct visions for how to organize fan fictions and how to allow people to provide feedback. Before I get any further, let me make one thing clear: the basics of a fanfiction site are simple. You have to let people register, post stories, and read stories. That's it. Those are the absolute minimum requirements. All three sites add one more feature: you can organize your story by fandom, which are all organized by media (anime, movies, tv, etc).

Let's start with why I don't go to mediaminer. It's pretty simple, really. If you look for all the stories, you have to deal with dropdowns to find the story, rather than scroll through a page of options. They also have a few silly things, like FOUR instances of Twilight as a fandom. Once you do this, you have a fairly standard list of stories and filter options.

By contrast, FF.net and ficwad do a more granular approach. You pick the category (ficwad and mediaminer allow original stories), then the fandom, then you can look at stories. So, from a reader's perspective, mediaminer is a nightmare compared to the other two. Why write for it?

Writing is a different matter. FF.net makes posting a pain. Every new story requires you to reread the guidelines, which never change. Those guidelines are quite restrictive, as they don't allow you to post a variety of things. By contrast, the other two are fairly non-restrictive. FF.net also regularly presents a captcha to users during logon. It's annoying, to say the least.

Feedback comes in various forms. FF.net provides lifetime readership stats, and monthly stats. It also provides charts of daily reads, and reader reviews. Readers can also mark stories/authors as favorites. MM, to be honest, I haven't spent time on. Ficwad allows reviews, but also has a rating system that allows users to give feedback on stories, marking them as either good or bad.

I will probably be migrating completely from FF.net to Ficwad. FF.net has a lot of fluff that doesn't provide me with the feedback I desire. Ficwad's rating system is very useful to me as a reader and as an author. Personally, I prefer a simple, clean interface to a feature-rich, but somewhat buggy interface.

While this is certainly a somewhat academic exercise in reviewing a few sites that are competing with each other, it really does bring to light a simple point: design matters. Users expect certain functionality, but the presentation of that functionality is as important as whether it exists/works. This principle applies to ALL software, web-based or otherwise.

In my opinion, you are better off keeping a simple, clean interface, and adding rock-solid features than adding a lot of features that aren't fully thought out and won't be easy to change later. As long as your software is designed to be extended, you will be in good shape.