Oh my God, human stupidity has no limits! I feel like barfing at these news

The fan-fiction.net owners haven't even tried to stop this yet. This is sad.

Sorry, need to rant for a bit:

Hey, RedBotton guy, if you're going to try and purge badfics from the Internet, how about following the site rules while doing it. It's called "reading the story, supplying useful advice". Try it. Maybe you'll actually get something done about it, as opposed to just irritating the Internet.

Once again, sorry about that.

Here are a couple of posts describing the situation from the opposite perspective.

http://lord-kelvin.blogspot.com/2010/08/redbootton.html

http://lord-kelvin.blogspot.com/2010/09/reflections-in-buttonwood.html

While their position seems reasonable, it's the thought that they may be reporting without thinking/automatically that worries me.

a quote from one ff.net user's profile:

I'm moving to DeviantArt, LiveJournal, Mediaminer and Adult Fanfic Net...go find out about the RedBooton issue.


* I will be on a hiatus from ff.net, possibly forever, as the RedBottom issue has simply gone too far. I'm now in an argument with LordKelvin (the creator of the damn program) and I think I'll be leaving until this is sorted. If this happens, and I don't come back, I love you all very, very much, and wish I didn't have to go. Thank you to everyone who's been with me on any of my stories, any comments made, any reviews posted, and any help given has been hugely appreciated. You've been like family to me.

xxx Lemon

CLEVERBOT IS A LIE. IF YOU LIKE ME AT ALL LISTEN. You see, the program simply connects you to another user, who believes that YOU are the robot. After a while, the users are switched which is why the conversations are so random. If you attempt to tell someone else this, you are quickly switched after only a couple of more messages.

An extract from one of my conversations:

"Cleverbot: No you're not.

User: Yes I am.

Cleverbot: No you are a machine.

User: Did you know cleverbot isn't actually a robot? It just puts you in contact to another user so you think it's a robot.

Cleverbot: Oh.

User: Now we're about to be split up because I told. I'm not even joking, that's what they do. What's your first name?

This is where we were quickly split up.

Cleverbot: Am I clever?

User: YOU'RE A LIE. YOU'RE NOT A ROBOT, YOU'RE A HUMAN BEING. WHAT'S YOUR NAME?

Cleverbot: You just said that I'm a robot.

User: No I didn't - that was someone else. The bot moves you on to another user after a while, that's why the conversations are so random, because it's not the same person.

Cleverbot: I thought of that theory, and I think I need more proof.

YOU SEE.

Me: Your mother is a prostitute.

CleverBot : Your father is a hamster.

Admittedly, that last part could be pure... well, it's probably not serious. Or completely serious. But now I'm off to research Lord Kelvin

Period.

This is a horrible idea. Similar full-auto SPaG bots have been used to patrol Wikipedia in the past, but are now forbidden due to the huge false positive rate they had. It is virtually impossible to reduce this due to the myriad ways 'bad' writing can be used on purpose. If WP has deemed such bots not-fit-for-purpose, it's probably for good reason. Even with heuristic learning (which I seriously doubt is in use here) it is very difficult to get such bots to work effectively.

I agree with the others on this one. What if a character speaks in a dialect? What if a character who's had little education writes a letter, and it's full of spelling errors? What if a canon language that doesn't exist in World One is used in the fic? What if dirty language actually serves a purpose to the plot? What kind of creativity-stunting is this?

A computer program, a brainless piece of coding, deciding what's good and what's bad, reporting on it over and over, and thus potentially dooming the works of writers who are already good or on the way there. I'm scared, I really am.

I read that article and I totally disapprove. Bahd wrighting can be a stylistic device and the other way round, not all badfic has bad grammar. Also, fics with a few grammatical errors can also be enjoyable if the rest fits. And everybody does typos. It just happens. Other than that, pretty much everything has been said in the articles.

PS: Stutid.

a few weeks ago. For the most part that became a discussion on whether proper SPaG is mandatory (a guideline or rule) or merely a curtesy (etiquette) on ffnet.

The PPC isn't really about being constructive either. Most of us write missions because we really would have liked it if we could have done bodily harm to badfic. But most of us also give concrit to the authors we "target" or at least to authors that look like they can still make something of their story. We don't do that under the guise of the PPC, we do that with our (other) only personas.

Red button, bad thing. There's a risk of false positives. Sometimes there's some bad grammar in the story for purposes of plot point. The problem that bothers me most is the risk of false positives and that there doesn't seem to be any manual check whether or not a story deserves to be flagged.

If it doesn't do concrit, it's a bad idea. Moreover, bots like that tend to make mistakes and generalizations (as already seen in censorship screening) so goodfic could be being reported as well.

Now, if the author him/herself used it to check his/her own stories for obvious problems? That would be awesome. But as it is? Very not.