podfic archive

well, the lingering display problem in internet explorer has finally been conquered! sorry that took so long. and also: hooray.

we've managed to put most of the category reorganization work into place, taking into account the responses to the site survey.

in order to make things more consistent as well as more supportable, we've split the fandom and pairing terms into two different lists - we know that it was handy having the pairings divided up according to fandom, but it was making a huge list even longer, it meant a lot of duplication (every crossover pairing had to be recreated under every fandom it applied to), and it was leading to errors. it was a hard decision to make, but it was the only real possibility at this time.

what that change allowed us to do, though, was to reorganize the list of fandoms, splitting them up by media type, and further allowing us to group fandoms that exist within the same universe together - so now, not only can you view all stargate: atlantis entries, you can also move up the category tree to view all stargate franchise entries. similarly, you can view all my chemical romance entries, or broaden to include all entries under the bandom parent term, or broaden again to include all entries under the music fandoms parent term.

pairings are now all alphabetical by surname/family name within each term, where a surname exists. this introduces consistency and should help you to find what you want! the pairing terms are listed on the browse by pairing page in aphabetical order, though, which means they are displayed there alphabetically by first name. sorry about that.

gen categories were also split out, since they were part of what was making the pairings/fandom list so horribly long. they are now a list of their own, and as a side-effect of that, if you use the browse gen categories page, you can actually click on gen as a parent term to browse through all gen entries at once.

we'll keep working to improve things - as the archive grows, we learn more and more about what works and what doesn't. thank you for visiting - it makes the work worthwhile!

hey all! we've made some changes to the site in order to improve function and layout, but the big, horrible side effect is that things are now kind of broken in internet explorer. which is not something we plan to live with, so we're working on it. the issue that we're seeing is that the main content of the site is squeezed over to the right, and becomes one long, skinny column of text. things work in all other browsers (that we have been able to check) and we should have the ie problem sorted out soon.

more soon...

thank you to everyone who participated in the survey. your feedback is much appreciated!

we received 226 responses. here are the results, question-by-question. the numbers in parentheses are: (the actual number of people who chose that option / the corresponding percentage out of the 226 respondents).

1. we'll be changing pairing tags to reflect full names (when possible). which of these options makes more sense to you
-alphabetical by first name (94 / 41.6%)
-alphabetical by last name (123 / 54.4%)

2. should animated and live action television series
-be part of separate categories (156 / 69%)
-be part of the same category (62 / 27.4%)

3. should animated and live action movies
-be part of separate categories (142 / 62.8%)
-be part of the same category (77 / 34.1%)

4. should anime and non-japanese animation
-be part of separate categories (74 / 32.7%)
-be part of the same category (60 / 26.5%)
we forgot to add this question until the survey had already been published. the results are therefore much lower since we added it in after the survey had already been up for several hours.

5. would it be useful interesting to be able to browse through related fandoms (e.g. all Star Trek series or all bandom groups)
-no (27 / 11.9%)
-yes (196 / 86.7%)

6. regarding gen podfic
-i would like to be able to browse gen stories separated by fandom (117 / 51.8%)
-i would like to be able to browse it all, regardless of fandom/source (10 / 4.4%)
-i would use both options (92 / 40.7%)

7. other thoughts
-left blank (157 / 69.5%)
-comments/suggestions (69 / 30.5%)
for comments that included questions or suggestions, see below.

we have another week or two of planning, then you will start to see changes in the way the categories are organized! it will take a while for it all to go into effect, but we will start making more frequent posts to the site news page, so that you can keep up to date if you're interested. :)

the text responses, aggregated by topic:
Some fandoms have a standard pairing order, like SPN Sam/Dean, and some fandoms commonly use pairing nicknames.
it's true, many fandoms do use standard pairing orders and standard ship nicknames, but the scope of the archive means that we are unable to apply those with any consistency. sorry - we'll be sticking with full names and a universally applied alphabetical ordering system.

Could you have a "most recent updates" page on the main listings - it would be nice to be able to view by date added.
this is something people ask for a lot! and it already exists. :) the default view for the archive is reverse chronological order (newest at the top of the page), no matter what category you choose. we've added a browse most recent posts link in the menu, though, to make it more obvious.

I'd love if it there was a comm announcing all the uploads to the archive.
an announcement community isn't something that's feasible or within the scope of this archive. however, it has always been possible to get alerts to new posts via rss - we set up an lj feed for that, and hope you will find it helpful. that feed is all posts, though - you may wish to use the rss feeds directory to create a feed better tailored to your interests, or to a single file type. the lj feed is here: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/audiofic_update/

It would be nice when browsing through the titles that they are in alphabetical order.
this isn't something we had thought of, but we're doing some research, and you should have the option of alphabetical order soon. :)

Huge fandom/pairing lists are hard to navigate. Current layout of the "browse by fandoms and pairings" less readable than it could be.
this will be changed as part of the category overhaul - it will get better!

I would like it if I could browse by language!
since we just added our first non-english content (finnish!), we're only just working out the details of this, but it will be possible soon!

Is the last question talking about treating gen podfic different from slash or het?
we treat gen as a pairing - so really we're asking if you'd like to see everything in all fandoms with that "pairing" at once, or not. the ability to do so was an accidental feature introduced when the site crashed last spring - since we needed to reduce the number of categories we were using to get the site running again, all fandom-specific gen tags were combined into one giant gen tag. it wasn't pretty. we've since sorted them out again, but if the other way was more useful to people, we want to know.

I can't help wishing to combine mp3 and m4b (and whatever else there might be) versions of a podfic into a single record.
we will not be combining records because that would remove some of our other functionality, but we're working on a way to search multiple terms that will eliminate browsing duplicate records.

It would be useful if the mp3 entry for a podfic had some kind of marker or tag to indicate if there is also an audiobook or other type of format available.
this may be possible in the future.

I would like to be able to filter my search so that I can look for a specific fandom/pairing AND a time range AND a certain file type, rather than only one at a time.
we think we've found a way to do this! and we are currently working out the bugs. feel free to try it out, here (please think of that page as a beta!)

It would be nice if the entries had a quick summary of the story.
this is not feasible, sorry.

Do you tag for rating? What about warnings?
no. please see the site statement on mature content.

Archive-wide femslash/(male) slash/het/gen tags would be great.
there are no plans for this right now - since the archive is inclusive of many fandoms, tagging to denote the story type is beyond our scope, mission, and ability - sorry.

A crossover category would be nice!
maybe! we'll investigate - would this be one tag for all crossovers, or many specific crossover tags? do we need to do another poll? :p