March Meta Matters Challenge, Check-in No. 5

[yourlibrarian]

Hello everyone! It's check-in time again to see how we're all getting along with our meta importing.

Comment below with any of the following:

1) Have you got tips you've developed during this process, especially about issues with particular sites? Share them with the group!

2) Has interacting with your own meta exposed you to other meta elsewhere during this month?

Remember, this account accepts anonymous comments, so if you don't have a Dreamwidth account we still want to hear from you and have you take part.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

I've only been copying over the Squidgeworld so no new tips there. The one thing I think I mentioned last time re: organizing is that I have several "nested" series, so that I have a series that has 3+ parts with 25 chapters each, and all the different review series are nested within an umbrella series of Reviews.

I have not been deliberately looking around at meta, though I have run into some in the past week.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have made no progress on saving things, as I've been swamped with other activities. *sigh* Usually I do better than this.

However, I've seen a lot of other meta and keep pointing people here if they haven't found it yet. So that's something.

Also, I've noticed more and more people complaining about service outages and other problems at AO3. That's one of the warning signs that a platform may collapse. This makes it a good idea to prioritize saving and reposting anything you have on that site to another site.

Re: Thoughts

[yourlibrarian]

Well, you still have weeks to go for the challenge itself 🙂

Yes, unfortunately AO3 is not an ideal meta repository either (it accepts some kinds, but not anything that's a review or which smacks of commentary rather than analysis). I haven't been keeping up on what's going on, but I'm guessing that anything like the bot attacks which are going on elsewhere are going to ramp up problems on a large, highly traffic site.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Well, you still have weeks to go for the challenge itself <<

I'm hoping to make more progress.

>> Yes, unfortunately AO3 is not an ideal meta repository either (it accepts some kinds, but not anything that's a review or which smacks of commentary rather than analysis).<<

I've never recommended it for meta because it's so unpredictable. Moderators say different things. One person posts a thing and is fine, another gets kicked off for the exact same category of thing. It's just never been safe for meta, or even certain types of creative content like demifiction, which is nonfiction from some other world. Disappointing.

I would love to see someone create a hubsite especially for meta -- reviews, rec lists, link clouds, fanifestos, headcanons, analyses, etc. Like the smut folks, meta creators and fans are usually on the fringe of sites designed for something else and thus precarious.

>> I haven't been keeping up on what's going on, but I'm guessing that anything like the bot attacks which are going on elsewhere are going to ramp up problems on a large, highly traffic site.<<

That would make sense for service outages. Even major places can be crippled by a large-scale bot attack. It's a growing problem. And that, of course, encourages more sites to lock up their stuff, which makes it less accessible; and to ban archiving sites, which makes them uber-fragile and means the material will eventually disappear if not saved to people's private hard drives.

Re: Thoughts

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, one thing I've been running into a lot is locked posts. Well Squidgeworld now has a recs only site, which is a plus. And since they accept all meta they can be used for most of those things. (I'd think link clouds might gel with recs?)

[mrsluigivargas]

Yesterday I learned that AO3's HTML doesn't give a damn about the height attribute wrt to image embedding. So that was a fun 10 or so minutes while I tried to figure out why the images I had embedded with only a specified height were showing up on the page so large XD Meanwhile, SquidgeWorld had no such problems 😒

Hopefully I'll have some time later this month to go through one of the March Meta Matters collections! Saw some interesting stuff out of the corner of my eye already~

[yourlibrarian]

Ugh, good to know that though in terms of future posts (yours and others). Odd, given they use the same site construction.

Great to hear someone will be sifting through the trove 💗