Questions about locking and deleting fanfics here

Hey hi there!

I know the author of a fanfic can lock their topic, but when does a moderator lock a fanfic? When a certain amount of time goes by without a story getting a reply?

I ask this because of the new thread that features locked stories. Did these tales get locked by the author or an administrator?

Also, just out of curiosity, does a story ever get erased completely? I know at the 'choose a board' page, the number of posts is more than three million. Does this number always increase, or do the admin. delete some threads once in a while to make more room? [That is, if they need to make room. Obviously, I don't know a whole lot about web sites. Is the room unlimited?]

Anyone know?

 

Alright... first of all, unless the material of a fan fiction is way far out of the guidelines of the JC forums which maintain that we have to be family-friendly, an administrator probably isn't going to lock a topic. Almost all of the locked threads in fanfic were locked by neither an administrator or the person who started them -- the snowball software locks all threads automatically after they haven't been replied to in six months. It was no one's doing; it's something with the software that we (the admins) can't change.

About prunings, yes, the JC is pruned every once in a while. However, it is not manually pruned (the server does it for us), and there are certain rules that the pruning follows... there's a full set of the rules (like that if it has less than 20 posts and hasn't been posted to in three months it gets deleted, etc.), but also it has been set up that the fan fiction forum never, ever under any circumstances gets pruned. So none of your fanfics are going to get deleted.

--Mr. P

 

However, many fan-fics from the UBB era are no longer on the boards.

Another thing, due to the unlimited editing in fan-fic the creator of a thread that has been locked due to being inactive could unlock it if he or she wanted. It would be locked again within the day unless someone then replied.

 

I have a question: How many months/weeks/days worth of threads were messed up by the switch to the new board? In other words, when I can I expect to stop seeing two or more threads twisted together back in the locked threads. It's driving me crazy!

 

I don't think you can ever expect to stop seeing them. The move was over a year ago and lots of popular threads got messed up. As long as those threads are still popular, you will keep seeing them. When going through old threads, keep looking at the subject lines. For example, the Master Lurker thread has a topic from Fan Films meshed into the end of it.

 

Also, you can look at the first post's date. If it says June 2000 or earlier, then that thread is messed up. Some of the popular stories were re-started in new threads when the author(s) saw what had happened to their stories, so if you keep hunting you might find a duplicate title later that is mess-free. But some people actually couldn't make new threads because they had never saved their story to their computer. It was only on the boards and is now lost.

 

Thanks, Liz and Julie

 

I don't think that all pre-Snowboards threads were messed up. There are certainly some where the entire story remained intact.

 

Hey hi there!

Wow! I must say, that was the most insightful and helpful answer I have gotten to any question I've ever asked here at TFN. I appreciate it tremendously.

A few follow-up questions now:
If the material of a fan fiction is way far out of the guidelines of the JC forums, an administrator's only option is to lock it [...because they can't prune it manually]?
And, to improve my knowledge about web sites, are the forums pruned out of necessity, to make more room for users to post?

 

The system's auto lock and pruning has simply been disabled on the Fanfic stories board so that stories won't be deleted by the system. That disabling only affects the system's automation, and cannot hinder the mods' powers in any way. The deleting of old and very small threads is part of the way Snowboard's system maintains itself, yes. So, the mods have the power to lock or delete anything they choose anywhere in the JC.

There are some rules that fanfiction can bend a little, but anything obviously offensive and completely breaking the rules gets reported (often by several readers) and removed in one of two ways.
1) They lock it, and edit out the offensive text and put a simple message of their own (explaining what occured or saying that the offender has been banned, etc.).
2) Or they just delete the thread from the board.

BTW, in the case of someone flaming a story (which I have only seen once myself, it is fortunately very rare), a mod will nicely edit out the rude comments and deal with the flamer swiftly.

 

I appreciate the quick response.