Valk already answered some of this, but I'll try to give you my take.
In the words of one of the founders: The LU -- The Literate Union -- is a society that helps to improve the quality of stories on FanFiction that either break the rules or are poorly written. In the case of the latter, we try to help the author, bringing their piece up to standard. Difficult cases are reported to the admins.
That doesn't sound too bad, but in practice it's considerably less friendly than it sounds.
In the first place, it means they've appointed themselves the policemen on fanfiction.net. Any infringement of the TOS (that's terms of service, and anyone who joins has to agree to them) they come across -- and they seem to be actively looking -- is reported. On the one hand, they have every right to do this. On the other, it seems unnecessarily aggressive, and it rubs lots of people the wrong way on principle. The LU treats all infractions as equal and equally reportable, whereas many others (myself included) see shades of gray. If they wanted to go thru the archive and get rid of any instances of kiddie porn, I'd say: more power to you. Wanting to go thru the archive and find every instance that contains a few lines of script formatted text? Not so much.
Secondly, it means that they look for stories they feel are below par, and every Saturday they pick one story to descend upon en mass to leave reviews. Each review is supposed to contain constructive criticism, but they also openly admit they include flamers in their numbers, and that many members aren't there out of the kindness of their hearts, but for the lulz. I therefore suspect there are people who are targeted who don't feel that they are being 'helped' in any way. Personally, I think anyone with a brain would realize that receiving multiple reviews, in succession, that tell an author all the ways they suck isn't likely to be taken in a positive fashion.
In any event, that's the LU. An author calling himself 'Lord Kelvin' is a member of this group, and deciding that sifting through the stories 'by hand', so to speak, was too time consuming, he wrote a program to do it for him. That program is RedBootton.
There are several things RedBootton is designed to look for, but the one that has people on ff.net scared are stories that contain sex. LU describe these as 'MA' stories masquerading as straight 'M'... and there are a lot of them on ff.net, and all of them are an infringement of the TOS.
For myself, the MA thing isn't the issue. I think if you break the rules you have to be prepared to get caught. For me the issue is the checks the program does for bad English. Exactly how it does this hasn't been detailed, but I've been using word processors for far too long to trust a program to get that right. No word processor in the world has a default dictionary that's sufficient, or a grammar checker that doesn't report far more false errors than it does correct ones. I don't believe this amateur policeman has gotten it right when Microsoft and Corel, haven't. Sooner or later, it's going to report someone who hasn't done anything wrong. I firmly believe that, and the fact that it hasn't yet doesn't reassure me. Especially since I used to test software for a living! =) And I don't believe the onus of proving this is a concern should be on the writers who haven't done anything wrong. Kelvin should have the sense to stop checking this particular aspect, since it's the one that has the well-behaved authors upset. Instead, he's convinced his program can do no wrong.
I also think the criteria for good/bad English will change, given time. When they no longer can find any of these 200 errors in 1000 word stories, they'll look for 100 errors in 1000 words. I just... think that's what the trend will be. I can't prove it, I can just say I'm suspicious. I hope I'll be wrong.
Lastly, AO3 is a newer fanfiction archive that's been setup in the last year. They allow MA stories, and have quite a number of interesting ways for people to search. The number of stories there is far smaller than what's at ff.net, but hopefully it'll gain popularity. I'll include a link in my post above.
no subject
Valk already answered some of this, but I'll try to give you my take.
In the words of one of the founders: The LU -- The Literate Union -- is a society that helps to improve the quality of stories on FanFiction that either break the rules or are poorly written. In the case of the latter, we try to help the author, bringing their piece up to standard. Difficult cases are reported to the admins.
That doesn't sound too bad, but in practice it's considerably less friendly than it sounds.
In the first place, it means they've appointed themselves the policemen on fanfiction.net. Any infringement of the TOS (that's terms of service, and anyone who joins has to agree to them) they come across -- and they seem to be actively looking -- is reported. On the one hand, they have every right to do this. On the other, it seems unnecessarily aggressive, and it rubs lots of people the wrong way on principle. The LU treats all infractions as equal and equally reportable, whereas many others (myself included) see shades of gray. If they wanted to go thru the archive and get rid of any instances of kiddie porn, I'd say: more power to you. Wanting to go thru the archive and find every instance that contains a few lines of script formatted text? Not so much.
Secondly, it means that they look for stories they feel are below par, and every Saturday they pick one story to descend upon en mass to leave reviews. Each review is supposed to contain constructive criticism, but they also openly admit they include flamers in their numbers, and that many members aren't there out of the kindness of their hearts, but for the lulz. I therefore suspect there are people who are targeted who don't feel that they are being 'helped' in any way. Personally, I think anyone with a brain would realize that receiving multiple reviews, in succession, that tell an author all the ways they suck isn't likely to be taken in a positive fashion.
In any event, that's the LU. An author calling himself 'Lord Kelvin' is a member of this group, and deciding that sifting through the stories 'by hand', so to speak, was too time consuming, he wrote a program to do it for him. That program is RedBootton.
There are several things RedBootton is designed to look for, but the one that has people on ff.net scared are stories that contain sex. LU describe these as 'MA' stories masquerading as straight 'M'... and there are a lot of them on ff.net, and all of them are an infringement of the TOS.
For myself, the MA thing isn't the issue. I think if you break the rules you have to be prepared to get caught. For me the issue is the checks the program does for bad English. Exactly how it does this hasn't been detailed, but I've been using word processors for far too long to trust a program to get that right. No word processor in the world has a default dictionary that's sufficient, or a grammar checker that doesn't report far more false errors than it does correct ones. I don't believe this amateur policeman has gotten it right when Microsoft and Corel, haven't. Sooner or later, it's going to report someone who hasn't done anything wrong. I firmly believe that, and the fact that it hasn't yet doesn't reassure me. Especially since I used to test software for a living! =) And I don't believe the onus of proving this is a concern should be on the writers who haven't done anything wrong. Kelvin should have the sense to stop checking this particular aspect, since it's the one that has the well-behaved authors upset. Instead, he's convinced his program can do no wrong.
I also think the criteria for good/bad English will change, given time. When they no longer can find any of these 200 errors in 1000 word stories, they'll look for 100 errors in 1000 words. I just... think that's what the trend will be. I can't prove it, I can just say I'm suspicious. I hope I'll be wrong.
Lastly, AO3 is a newer fanfiction archive that's been setup in the last year. They allow MA stories, and have quite a number of interesting ways for people to search. The number of stories there is far smaller than what's at ff.net, but hopefully it'll gain popularity. I'll include a link in my post above.
*HUGS*