Firefly Fanfic

Well, here we are. This is an imported community from livejournal that originated waaaaaaay back in October of 2003. Our purpose is to be a home for any kind of Firefly/Serenity fanfic.

After the latest updates on LJ, I've imported us over here because I was worried about us possibly getting TOSed over there.

This is a static copy of everything that was on the LJ comm as of April 2017, but I would love if it became a fully functional DW community in its own right.

So please feel free to join and post your Firefly fic. Any ratings, any pairings, it's all welcome here!

Posting rules are on the profile page, and more information about tagging your fic is in the other sticky post.

Shiny!

Alright everyone, I know it's been a while, but it's time for a little administrative business!

First off, this is a Firefly-only comm. Please do not post things that do not pertain to the show. I just had to delete a spam post, which made me frown. Your posts need to be about Firefly: namely FANFICTION dealing with Firefly! You are allowed to post ads/pimping for other Firefly related things on a limited basis, but that's it. So, for instance, "WATCH MOVIES ONLINE FOR FREE" posts will not be allowed. They will be deleted and marked as spam.

Secondly, I've changed the community status back to unlocked. I have always preferred this comm to be open to anyone who wished to read the stories, and so I decided to restore that aspect. All posts that were locked may be retroactively unlocked if the author wishes. I will leave that up to the discretion of the individual authors. But going forward, all posts will default to unlocked. HOWEVER, I would take it as a kindness if any posts containing Tamcest would be locked by the authors. If I see a post with R or higher rated Simon/River that is unlocked, I will first post a comment requesting the author to lock it. And then, if after a day or so it is not locked, I will delete it. But this will ONLY be for Tamcest posts, nothing else. And if anyone else notices a Tamcest post that is unlocked that I may have missed, please feel free to let me know about it so that I might ask for it to be locked. I'd appreciate it a lot!

And lastly, the status of the community has been changed to "Adult Content" because I felt there was enough R and NC17 fic posted here to warrant it. So if you see that little "this community might have adult content" warning, that's why.

Thank you and goodnight from your friendly, neighborhood mod! :-)

Okay, so thanks to many concerned parties giving me information in the earlier thread about locking the comm, we've managed to clarify that some of the more worrisome aspects of LJ's TOS are specified for photos/art, and not for text/stories. However, due to the craziness at LJ lately, it's hard to 100% trust in anything they say. So I have decided that no matter what we need to lock the adult material down. It's safer for the comm's maintainers; it's safer for all the authors, and it's just safer for the comm in general. However, I don't necessarily think that EVERYTHING needs to be locked.

So here's the deal. We have a script that will allow us to automatically comment on all unlocked posts asking for locks. It's been tested on a dummy comm, and it passed with flying colors. This same script will help us search out unlocked posts for deletion should it come to that. Basically, by using this script, doing a full-comm lockdown will be fairly easy and stress free, and it won't require a bunch of extra help from you guys (other than the simple act of locking any stories you get comment notifications on).

But just locking the adult fic? That makes everything MUCH more complex. That requires people to go through and check each month, evaluating each fic on a case-by-case basis to see if it requires locking. Sure, we can modify the script to look for certain trigger words like R, NC17, adult, CSI, Tamcest, etc. However, that isn't 100% guaranteed, and should only be used as a way to get us started. Also, even after all the past stuff is sorted, what about the future stuff? We'll need to have people continually checking to make sure the guidelines are being followed.

Basically, to lock the whole comm, we won't need much (if any) help. But to only lock adult fic, we need help. Serious help.

So here's the poll. Please vote honestly. If you want only adult fic locked, but you can't help out at all, then say so. Do not promise help if you can't give it. And be honest about the amount of help you can give. Don't say you can help a lot, when you can really only help a little, if at all.

I know I asked some of this before in the old poll, but please indulge me by voting again. And don't sign up for more than you know you can do.

And just to be clear, if I don't get enough of a response, I'll be locking the whole comm. This isn't a threat or anything; it's just facts. If I don't have enough people to help, the task becomes too monumental for me to undertake alone.

Thanks for your input! And I promise that this will all be sorted out soon.

[Poll #1042468]

Oh, and remember that "a month's worth" just means one month of fic in the archive (i.e. you might be assigned the month of June 2005, for example). To comment on them shouldn't take more than a few hours on average if you sat down and just did the whole month at once. At the most, it might be a job for a couple of nights in a row, I should think. This has yet to be officially tested, but that's my ballpark guess. And all amounts are negotiable. I'm just trying to get a feel for who can help more and who can't.

I'm planning on making a backup of the whole archive that will remain offline for now, and it will be updated once a week or so. I already have the framework for this in place, and a backup from back in May when this whole thing with LJ went down the first time. (Say thanks to the awesome kernelm for making this happen!)

I don't want to actually make a full-on secondary archive online until I'm forced to, as this will be a huge amount of work, I'm sure. However, I would like to try and reserve our name at the service of our choice. That way, should the worst happen, you guys will already know exactly where the archive will turn back up.

So, to that end, a poll...

[Poll #1036653]

Relevant links

The four LJ-style journaling services I know of so far:
http://www.journalfen.net/
http://www.insanejournal.com/
http://www.greatestjournal.com/
http://www.deadjournal.com/

An LJ comm made to help people who are planning to move. It has an entire thread devoted to getting people JournalFen invites if they want them.
leavin_eljay

Oh, and it goes without saying that I hope we're NEVER forced to move, yes? This is just worst case scenario planning. I intend to try and keep us here on LJ for as long as humanly possible.

I went ahead and changed the comm's security settings so all posts default to friends only. So whenever anyone posts from now on, it should automatically use the friends only setting. It still might look like it's set to public when you're writing the post, but when it goes through, it should lock down all by itself.

This does not mean we are for sure locking everything down. It can always be undone. I just figured that since the majority consensus seems to be positive (most people either think it should be locked down, or they don't think it's totally needed but won't be upset if it happens, according to the ongoing poll), it would be better to get started now. This way, if/when we start going through and requesting locks on old posts, there will be a few less we have to worry about. :-)

If, for some reason, we ultimately decide against the f-locking in the long run, I can easily change the comm's minimum security level and let people go back and unlock their posts should they wish.

More information on the proposed lock down and back up archive to come, so be on the lookout!

And please go vote in the poll if you haven't already. While I am obviously leaning more towards locking the comm down, nothing is completely set in stone, and the more people to express an opinion, the better I will be able to make a decision that's best for everyone.

In other news, the comm's new layout is finished! Yay! :-)

Okay, so it's turning into Strikethrough 07 all over again. Sigh.

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/283323.html

In light of this, I am pondering the idea of making this comm friends only. This won't totally protect us (you can even be TOSed for locked posts), but it reduces the risk of being reported greatly, since hopefully none of our members would report posts on their own comm.

I really don't want to have to lock everything down, as I always sort of saw us as an archive of FF fic, and I hoped that perhaps people who weren't members could get just as much enjoyment out of it as those who were. However, if it's a choice between locking everything down and being TOSed (which would possibly result in my private journal AND all my other comms getting TOSed, as well), I have to go for locking it down.

Anyway, please comment to this post with your thoughts on this idea. I want to know what people think.

***

ETA: This doesn't have anything to do with the FO issue, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm working on redesigning the comm's layout. I find when I'm stressed that it helps me calm down to do graphics and layouts and stuff. (Yes, I'm weird, lol.) And besides, the comm's been needing a facelift for a while now.

However, it's only partially complete right now (we're going to have a header graphic before I'm done, among other things), so please bear with me while I work on things.

Just a word to the wise: Please check your lj interests on your personal journals for anything that might catch the wrong person's attention and edit them accordingly. I know that there are fans of incest and/or underaged pairings in many fandoms (Tamcest, Wincest, Petrellicest, many HP pairings, etc.), and just because you happen to like a pairing that some consider objectionable, that's no reason to have your journal TOSed for posts/stories/artwork/etc. about fictional characters that contain all the proper warnings/disclaimers. So please take the appropriate precautions.

( If you don't know what I'm talking about, here are some helpful links with tons of info about the whole mess. )

~*~*~*~*~

IMPORTANT! EVERYONE PLEASE READ!

Please, anybody posting River/Simon fic of a romantic and/or sexual nature (i.e. Tamcest, Crazy Space Incest or CSI) to this comm, you need to lock your posts. If I see an unlocked CSI fic dated AFTER this post, I will be forced to delete it without warning. (For CSI fics dated BEFORE this post, keep reading to see how we're handling them.)

I'm sorry to require this, but until this whole thing blows over, I don't want to place the entire comm in danger. This place has been home to Firefly fanfic since 2003. If it gets TOSed, that's FIVE YEARS of fanfic that would be lost. I'm not going to outlaw CSI altogether, but we do need to be more cautious about it. So please friendslock the Tamcest from now on.

Also, if you happen to know you posted Tamcest here (or any kind of incest or underaged sexual pairings for that matter) in the past, I would appreciate it if you could go back and lock your posts. Your help in this matter is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for being so understanding about this. I repeat, nothing is being banned. I just want us to try and be more cautious about locking "objectionable" content. I have already edited the comm's interests to remove all mentions of Tamcest. Hopefully this will protect us somewhat, but I feel that locking the CSI posts is also necessary.

ETA: I will be going through the tagged R/S fic (which I realize is not all of it, as there is still a lot of older fic that hasn't been tagged) and asking authors to lock their posts. Due to time constraints, I am not going to do this for untagged fic (though if you know of an older, untagged CSI fic you posted, please do lock it), but since the tagged fic is much easier for anyone who visits us to find, I feel that it is prudent of me to be cautious with it. Again, no banning, I am just going to be requesting locks on tagged Tamcest. Thank you.

ETA2: I have updated the tagging rules (linked in the sidebar and on the userinfo page) to reflect our new locked Tamcest policy.

I have discovered that it's a bot, and not a person, that is reposting the fic at serenitymovie.org's forums. Seeing as it's just a bot, I have decided the best course of action is to simply ask for ALL the posts to be deleted and the acct. closed. You guys don't need to keep commenting with links to your fic, since I'm now asking for them all to be removed. Thank you for all your help, though, guys!

And to the people who notified me about this and supplied helpful links, info, and words of encouragement, THANK YOU! I'm extremely grateful.

~Your friendly, neighborhood mod

ETA: I have emailed the forum administrator. Hopefully this will be resolved A.S.A.P.

The "serenity" tag is not about the pilot episode or the BDM. It's for fic that include the starship Serenity as a major character in some way. That doesn't mean your fic about the ship Serenity can't take place during either of those times, because it can, but the timing alone does not equal use of the "serenity" tag. The ship itself MUST be a major character or play an especially important role in the fic for that tag to apply.

In other semi-related news, I'm still working on getting all the older fic tagged, but I'm not done yet. (Currently, everything BEFORE Sept. '05 and everything AFTER April '06 is tagged.) However, once I finished tagging the old fic, I will stop tagging new fic that hasn't been tagged. It will become the sole responsibility of the author to tag his or her own fic. If the fic does not get tagged, that doesn't mean it will get deleted or anything. Far from it. But once it drops off the main page (which can happen in a matter of days, or even less time than that, seeing as we have close to 900 members in this comm), it will be far less likely for it to get found by people visiting the comm if it doesn't have any tags. People will most likely be searching for fic via tags, and if it's not tagged, it won't show up when they search. So please remember to tag your fic when you post it, as it will make sure your fic doesn't "fall off the edge of the map" so to speak.

As it stands right now, I'd say about 70-75% of you are tagging your own fic as you post it (Yay you! You rock!), but the other 20-25% is going untagged until I find it and tag it myself. When I stop tagging new fic (because, honestly, I just don't have the time to do it indefinitely), those in the 20-25% group that aren't tagging will either just be missed or will have to start tagging for themselves.

Thanks, guys! :-)

~Your friendly, neighborhood mod

Just a quick note, because I don't know if I made this clear before. If you think of a pairing you want and don't see it (i.e. you want Simon/Mal, but you look under "s" and it's not there), remember to try looking under the other person's name before making a tag request. Mal/Simon is a tag, but Simon/Mal is not. It's the same thing, though. Just like Kaylee/Jayne is a tag, but Jayne/Kaylee is not.

Thanks guys, and I hope that cleared things up a bit! :)