grr!!!

[mamajoan]

It happened to xochiquetzl the other day, and now it happened to me! I got one of those "we archived your story on our new site, here's the URL, hope you don't mind!" emails. So I went to check out the site -- and of course they don't archive by author, nor had the email mentioned which story it was, so I had to search through all 26 of their "stories by first letter of title" pages to find it.

But eventually I do find it, and AUGH!!! It's one of the most horrible, unbelievably embarrassing awful Mulder/Scully PWPs that I wrote in the very early days of my X-Files fandom. I've done my best to eradicate this story from the 'net but of course it keeps popping up anyway. I'm ashamed to have written it. I immediately emailed the archivist back to say, "take this down asap!!!"

I also added a stern but (I hope) not *too* nasty paragraph about how you should really ask for permission BEFORE uploading a story to your archive. I mean, hello, isn't this just plain old common sense, not to mention common courtesy? The old "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" tenet doesn't apply here. If an author doesn't want her story on your archive, she's going to be a LOT more pissed at you for asking permission after the fact. If you ask first, she can be pleasant and say "thanks for the compliment, and sorry, but no."

I mean, this isn't just me, is it? (Okay, me and xochiquetzl?) Isn't it just plain RUDE to do it that way? In some ways I actually think it's *more* irritating than posting someone's story and *never* asking permission.

(ETA: They emailed back very quickly and were VERY apologetic, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on the "we're new to this whole archiving thing" excuse.)

Comments

[obsessedmuch.livejournal.com]

Allow me to join in the grr. Because you can take the time to TELL someone after you put up their work but you can't take the time to ASK before? Asking which earns you lots of "oh thank you for asking, that's perfectly lovely, how kind of you to want to share my fic, by all means, please do so" responses as opposed to a very terse "that's mine, take it down you dolt" response?

So yes, grr to that.

[xochiquetzl]

Obviously, I don't think it's just you. ;)

I'm going to agree with obsessedmuch: You ask. I run the official archive for a discussion list and we ask that every fic posted has an "archive" statement--i.e, "Archive: Alpha Gate," or "Archive: Please! Anywhere!" or "Archive: No." You don't just randomly decide you're an archive now and put other people's stories there. It's rude.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the trouble is that this was written waaaaay before that convention arose of putting "archive: yes/no/only these places" in your story notes. And then it got archived on one site, so I guess other people started to feel like they had free rein to put it just wherever. Sigh.

[xochiquetzl]

Be that as it may, it's just rude to assume that since you said yes to one archivist that's a default "copy my story widely all over the net!"

I'm afraid that the reason I'm so picky isn't so much that I think I'll want to pull them later. It's that once upon a time, I posted a fic and the archivist screwed up the html, causing several lines to disappear, which makes the fic make less sense. That was 1995, and the fic is still like that. :P

I also heard that another archive was selling CDs of fic archived there, which, if true, means my stories have been sold without my permission, sigh. I just decided to let that one go without saying anything to the archivist, since it's my very old fic and I would have said, "What, you want that old thing?" anyway, but it influences my decision to archive anywhere.