FA+
Shop
Alternatives to alternatives (never mind on Weasyl)
12 years ago
First off, never mind on Weasyl.
Whenever Fur Affinity implodes or there's drama or whatever and people threaten to leave, there always seem to be two distinct camps: FA loyalists, and the edgy cool-to-hate crowd that just wants to rally behind any site that isn't FA. I usually try not to fall that squarely into the latter camp (though I do admit I support the anything-but-FA goal just as far as breaking the inertia that makes FA the site where everyone is just because it's the site where everyone is, even though it's awful). I just want to be on a good furry art site, is all. Unfortunately, FA is awful. Double unfortunately, so is Weasyl.
Weasyl does get points for a few things, such as folders (they really are a godsend) but, then again, folders are pretty much industry standard these days. Look, Fur Affinity is literally the only major furry art site that DOESN'T have folders. There's a major issue on which the anywhere-but-FA crowd is actually right.
However, Weasyl has two major deal-breaking issues for me.
1: Writers are an afterthought on Weasyl. Look, I'm a writer who's been on FA for however long, so I'm kind of used to being the other child, the Harry Potter to visual artists' Dudley Dursley. That kind of happens to writers in this fandom, at least on FA. I didn't think Weasyl could find a way to make the problem worse, but somehow they achieved the impossible in that regard. That Weasyl crossposter extension specifically only works with visual art, so, thanks. Then, if you go to submit a story manually, your only options are TXT and PDF. Seriously? Even FA at least lets you submit Word documents! (And RTF, for that matter.)
2, and this is the big one: Weasyl doesn't change or fix anything. Every site has issues out the gate. Every site has features on their wish list that aren't quite there from day one. Every site should, as time goes on, get the website equivalent of DLC and expansion packs. I don't hold a lot of minor things against most sites because I assume until proven otherwise that they will be fixed someday. However, Weasyl ... well, here, look at this Site Suggestion forum thread about their horrible thumbnail system. First off, it's worth reading because it's true; their thumbnails really are bad (and KitFox' and Ransom's summations of the problem are well-written and make for a highly amusing read.) More damningly, though, I made a thread pointing out literally this exact same problem when Weasyl launched. The fact that it's still a problem however many months or years later tells me everything I need to know about the management of this site. They have a zillion-mile long list of 'common suggestions' (AKA their "before you suggest something this site should be fixing, check and make sure eight thousand people haven't made already that exact same suggestion first" list) complete with DOC support and fixing the thumbnails, but none of it has happened. They seem to take a "we are aware of the issue--we're going to do fuck-all about it, of course, but we're at least aware of it, so thanks" approach, and if that were in any way the kind of site experience I wanted, I'd just keep waiting for Ferrox.
Now, this isn't to say I'm crawling back to FA, mostly because I never said I was leaving in the first place. Not until the userbase at large comes with me. I'm pragmatic enough that I was always going to have two main haunts: I'd grudgingly take FA because that's still where the population is and I have no intention of exiling myself, and then just mirror everything on a better site that I wish more people would use.
I'm just admitting that Weasyl is not the better site in that plan.
For my next experiment, I will probably screw around with Inkbunny and/or SoFurry next weekend. SoFurry, at the very least, should be more welcoming for writers, considering it used to be YiffStar and all. The lack of bulk uploading or crossposting feature is going to make full gallery transfers suck, though.
Whenever Fur Affinity implodes or there's drama or whatever and people threaten to leave, there always seem to be two distinct camps: FA loyalists, and the edgy cool-to-hate crowd that just wants to rally behind any site that isn't FA. I usually try not to fall that squarely into the latter camp (though I do admit I support the anything-but-FA goal just as far as breaking the inertia that makes FA the site where everyone is just because it's the site where everyone is, even though it's awful). I just want to be on a good furry art site, is all. Unfortunately, FA is awful. Double unfortunately, so is Weasyl.
Weasyl does get points for a few things, such as folders (they really are a godsend) but, then again, folders are pretty much industry standard these days. Look, Fur Affinity is literally the only major furry art site that DOESN'T have folders. There's a major issue on which the anywhere-but-FA crowd is actually right.
However, Weasyl has two major deal-breaking issues for me.
1: Writers are an afterthought on Weasyl. Look, I'm a writer who's been on FA for however long, so I'm kind of used to being the other child, the Harry Potter to visual artists' Dudley Dursley. That kind of happens to writers in this fandom, at least on FA. I didn't think Weasyl could find a way to make the problem worse, but somehow they achieved the impossible in that regard. That Weasyl crossposter extension specifically only works with visual art, so, thanks. Then, if you go to submit a story manually, your only options are TXT and PDF. Seriously? Even FA at least lets you submit Word documents! (And RTF, for that matter.)
2, and this is the big one: Weasyl doesn't change or fix anything. Every site has issues out the gate. Every site has features on their wish list that aren't quite there from day one. Every site should, as time goes on, get the website equivalent of DLC and expansion packs. I don't hold a lot of minor things against most sites because I assume until proven otherwise that they will be fixed someday. However, Weasyl ... well, here, look at this Site Suggestion forum thread about their horrible thumbnail system. First off, it's worth reading because it's true; their thumbnails really are bad (and KitFox' and Ransom's summations of the problem are well-written and make for a highly amusing read.) More damningly, though, I made a thread pointing out literally this exact same problem when Weasyl launched. The fact that it's still a problem however many months or years later tells me everything I need to know about the management of this site. They have a zillion-mile long list of 'common suggestions' (AKA their "before you suggest something this site should be fixing, check and make sure eight thousand people haven't made already that exact same suggestion first" list) complete with DOC support and fixing the thumbnails, but none of it has happened. They seem to take a "we are aware of the issue--we're going to do fuck-all about it, of course, but we're at least aware of it, so thanks" approach, and if that were in any way the kind of site experience I wanted, I'd just keep waiting for Ferrox.
Now, this isn't to say I'm crawling back to FA, mostly because I never said I was leaving in the first place. Not until the userbase at large comes with me. I'm pragmatic enough that I was always going to have two main haunts: I'd grudgingly take FA because that's still where the population is and I have no intention of exiling myself, and then just mirror everything on a better site that I wish more people would use.
I'm just admitting that Weasyl is not the better site in that plan.
For my next experiment, I will probably screw around with Inkbunny and/or SoFurry next weekend. SoFurry, at the very least, should be more welcoming for writers, considering it used to be YiffStar and all. The lack of bulk uploading or crossposting feature is going to make full gallery transfers suck, though.
Neither do I know if writer support is good, but it *appears* to be much better than on FA and Weasyl, at least at first glance.
> Then, if you go to submit a story manually, your only options are TXT and PDF. Seriously? Even FA at least lets you submit Word documents! (And RTF, for that matter.)
There’s a good reason for this – compatibility! PDF is the most widely viewable format we have available (apart from plain text – which, as you can see, is also supported), and for any other devices or browsers that lack the appropriate application or plugin, we’ve added PDF.js, which renders all pages in the browser. FA here renders neither Word documents nor RTF to my knowledge. At the moment, all other formats supported by Google Docs (which include all types of Word documents) can be easily embedded if you upload them there (again, because it’s compatible). Given that we’ve pretty much covered PDF support, it’s an open and comprehensive format, and it’s painless for users of Microsoft products to export it, though, we’d really appreciate it if you tried to use that.
Despite this,we’re also deciding on the best way to add RTF and Word support to Weasyl. My thought is to convert RTF to Markdown (which we’re moving to from BBCode, because it’s nicer for writers… ahem) and Word to PDF, but if you’ve got other ideas, we’d definitely love to hear them. If it comes to that, FA-style “throw any file up here” can be accommodated.
> That Weasyl crossposter extension specifically only works with visual art,
Sorry, I’ll bug somebody about that for you.
> and this is the big one: Weasyl doesn't change or fix anything. […snip…]
This plain old isn’t true! Well, except for the thumbnail thing. In regards to that – and I hate to say this – we’re fixing it soon. In the most fun way imaginable.
I’d go through all of the suggestions on that page (the first one got taken care of a couple of days ago, by the way) and address them individually, but I don’t think that’s necessary. We’ll add or change the features (or decline to do so) at a pretty fast pace. Come back in a week!
If you have any other showstopping complaints, we really like talking; please feel free to join us on IRC! ircs://irc.weasyl.com:6697/weasyl
As for the story support, I honestly don't see how the crossposter extension could work for any FA story submission that isn't PDF or TXT. There would have to be some sort of conversion involved if that's not going to change! But ... again, will see, I suppose. For what it's worth, anything that's nicer for writers (BBCode conversion is kind of a pain, admittedly) gets my appreciation, so thank you for thinking of us. :)
Oh, and a question: would you prioritize support for RTF or ePub?
I admit it, that's pretty big of you. If you're trying to win me over and make me give Weasyl another chance, I think it's actually working. Seriously, you've been pretty great to me for someone who just came in after I was badmouthing their site. Um, thank you.
I don't think I have a really strong preference on that, though. I guess RTF is easier to open and read without having to go find and download a special program for it or something (I don't know about other OSs, but Windows tends to come with WordPad already and all), but epub would be flashy and cool. To be perfectly honest, neither are ones I personally would use (I tend to stick to TXT, DOC, or maybe I'll try PDF since you asked me so nicely and your explanation does make sense), but would be cool to see them in the list of options, I guess ... hmm. I think I'm just going to have to admit that I'm not the one to ask about RTF vs. ePub; you'd best find someone who uses those two more frequently. I don't feel right making that decision on anyone else's behalf when I'm kind of an outsider to both of them.
I got a response in under a minute suggesting the PDF viewer. And I think that for now, that is a big deal, because while FA supports uploading an extra format or two, you can't always view them without downloading, and I always felt like that kills click-through for people. Then somewhere else I noted that it would be nice to control whether you put your description before or after the PDF reader, and got a "We'll take a look at that". So, I haven't seen those changes yet obviously, but the fact that I've gotten pretty immediate, positive feedback about writer features and the staff seem excited to hear ideas about improving the author experience on the site gives me lots of hope.