03/17/05
Help Me Ayla, Help, Help Me, Ayla!

I went to AdultFanfiction.net to see how messed up my stories were. A while back in real life, the site suffered many problems, including some data corruption which resulted in garbled stories and stories being listed under the wrong authors' usernames (as if they had been plagiarized). I had stopped visiting the site for some time prior to this as a result of recurring problems using it, and I have not been back since, so it has been months; and although, according to the Yahoo! Group, they are fixing the problem, I have not been back to see how badly my own stories might have fared. (Lack of interest from readers was another reason for my absence.)

Well, in my dream, I went back. The site had the same grayish background as in real life and looked much similar. I logged in and went to my own author page. Here, it lists all the different stories you've posted. In real life I can't have more than a dozen, and in the dream, at first that was about how many I saw--they all looked fine. Not even garbled. *whew!* But then I remembered I had more and I wondered what happened to them? Had they been deleted? I thought to scroll down and now saw that I had many more stories than I'd thought; I think the number was 37 or something. The most recent of my stories were okay--but after those there was a big section of stories showing up with either garbled titles or NO titles at all, just empty space! You couldn't even click on them, I think! :( And I did see at least ONE which was listing a different author's username (a guy's name, maybe including something like "Charles") instead of my own! How awful! -_-

(In real life I think what happened was the same story would show up under two different authors' accounts, as being by both of them depending on whose account it was accessed from. But in my dream the story was linked from my page, yet had a different person's name. I do not know for sure what happened in real life as I have not gone back to look for myself. I thought I would get too flustered.)

"Oh, crap," I murmured in frustration. "I'm going to have to e-mail Ayla now and bother her!"

In real life, Ayla is the webmistress of the site, and has been undergoing a lot of personal attacks from irate members, in the Yahoo! Group, for letting the site slide in her absence. I would be lying if I said the neglect of the site did not bother me too, but rather than rant against it and attack her now that she's trying to fix it up again, I simply haven't done a thing--just left the site in the hopes it would get fixed sooner or later--but when I heard of the atrocious errors that were occurring, I became too afraid to return and see what shape MY writing is in! Lest I have to upload it all over again. I wasn't even getting enough interest from readers to warrant taking THAT time. -_-

Still, in the dream, I was upset about having to contact her now that I knew what had happened to my writing. I was doubly upset because in real life Ayla asked members to report problems quite a while back, and I did not respond. Now I felt bad that I would have to bother her AGAIN now that she probably thought such data errors had been corrected because nobody else had complained! *sigh* Yet another example of me taking my precious time.

In real life, as I said, I have not been back to the site just yet. I have been following the postings in the Yahoo! Group though, and have been irritated by all the flamewars that have been going on concerning a user who posts really crappy stories on the site. I'm of the mind to just ignore what you don't want to read, but people bitched about it so much that poor Ayla finally had to step in and threaten to delete said user. From the looks of it, said user will soon be gone from the site, simply because they post a lot of crappy writing. IMO that rather goes against the anti-censorship stance of the site, but it's not my call to make. :/



2005 Dreams
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