So, what's the solution to the search problem? I wrote a fanfiction, and i can't find it at all when searching. I can only see it when i search my own nickname and then going to my page.

Well, it's quite sad, and therefore, what can be done?

I'm afraid the search function on this site is, to be blunt, rubbish. If I want to search the site, I use Google's advanced search for all pages below fanfiction.net.

Then again, what are you expecting people to be searching for? Don't most readers find fics either from the index page of the fandom in question or from the profile of the author in question?

[quote]Then again, what are you expecting people to be searching for? Don't most readers find fics either from the index page of the fandom in question or from the profile of the author in question?[/quote]

Well, I'm expecting people to search for therms, like, the name of the shipping, the people that are included in the fanfic, some commonly used keywords etc...

Also, my fanfic was read only during first two days, when it still was on the 1st page of the listing, now it isn't and, well, nobody reads it. If you can't search it then how do you expect it to be known, or the author to be known?

Also, i don't think that many people use google adv. search, but rather that crappy search engine on that page, so, it's quite problematic.

It's the normal pattern, though. When you post a story it gets a fair few views for the first couple of days when it's new. After that, really not much at all. That's true regardless of whether it's still visible - in one of my fandoms things stay on the front page for about 10 days and in the other it's more like three months. I still get very few views after a couple of days. And in the larger fandoms (they don't have to be THAT large, Thunderbirds has it), people can filter by included characters already.

I agree that the search facility is rubbish. I just don't think that having a better one will make a whole lot of difference to how many people read a fic.

I perfectly understand that after some time there are no views. But then, in my case, if my fanfic can't be searched at all, then after some time nobody will read it at all. No reviews, no reads, just forgotten. This is not exactly a-ok, as i'm just a prick who cares that other people would read it.

And, well, working search function won't improve the situation dramatically, i understand it perfectly. But, it will improvee it by just a little bit, one person at a time. And that would be absolutely enough.

What about uploading the fiction once again? Will that help? Has anybody solved it by that means?

If you mean reposting the story, that's a big no. You are only allowed 1 copy of a story on the site. Duplicates will be deleted.

I'm not talking about duplicates, mind you, i've read the guidelines and agreed to them. I'm talking about deleting the story completely and reuploading. I dit that once with that story as that page completely screwed up the formatting, everything was perfect in document manager but later it was a garbled mess, so i had to reupload.

Maybe that's the reason why my story is not indexed in search engine? I doubt so, but then, maybe that's the solution, to reupload?

Sent email to support, maybe they will anwser in reasonable time as to what do to?

Is it a chapter story? If so, as soon as you add the next chapter it will get bumped back to the top of the front page.

I wouldn't delete it and repost - chances are it just hasn't been indexed by the search engine yet and will get there eventually. If you delete it and repost, the process will take even longer.

It's been almost 5 days, and i doubt that anything would index this long, but then, i'll wait another 5 days and we'll see.By the meanwhile, i've sent the notice to support, wonder what they have to say...

i doubt that anything would index this long,

I found several stories through Ffnet's search function that had been deleted by the author or FFnet itself long before I did my search.

As for people being able to find your story: very few people use FFnet's search, I think, to find stories. If they can sort by character, they use that. I think many more just scroll down the lists in search of a something of their liking. That's what I do. Also, I'm still getting hits for my old stuff. And my stories use key words that are so common that lots of stories would show up in a search for them.

What I just do is whenever I go to press "Enter" for the next line and avoid doublespacing is I press "Shift+Enter" and that goes right underneath the first line. :)

Hi everyone,

Vey new here, took me aroud hald an hour to figure out how to post a comment.

I saw that it can take a while for a storey to show up on FF, but i had mine up for around 24 hour, and i still couldnt find it, unless i searched my name. Any ideas why??

Ive tried looking for it under categories such as adventure, etc to narrow it down but no luck.

Thanks,

ive since deleted it and reposted it.. no sucess

Cats

Hmm, I just looked for you by going into the Harry Potter fandom and looking for "K+" and "General", and there you were, first place in the list.

thanks a mill

Yeah seems to have worked the second time

:)

I'm having similar problems when I'm uploading, I try to upload a microsoft word document and it has worked before but for some reasonnow it keeps saying fanfiction error has occured, contact is the deal??

can anyone help me and Monotonehell

shadyatem said:

I'm having similar problems when I'm uploading, I try to upload a microsoft word document and it has worked before but for some reasonnow it keeps saying fanfiction error has occured, contact is the deal??can anyone help me and Monotonehell

Did I hear my name used? ;) I think you'll find that the post your refering to was way back at the end of page one of this thread, I was replying to entropist who had the problem. What I said in that post regarding styles was their problem...

I said:

There's so many things it could be. Let's start with: What kind of document format are you trying to upload? If FF.net's server doesn't recognise the file it might spit out that error. Make sure your document is as devoid of Word styles as possible. Use only the paragraph style (no headings etc), and only use italics, bold and underline as text styles.

And entropist replied (on the next page)

THanks a lot... Problem solved with that explanation about the styles.

So perhaps try that?

I'm having trouble uploading my stories.I type the story up on my computer and it's fine.But after I load it it cuts out a lot of the words and sometimes even moves bits of sentences around.I tried going to Edit/Preview and edit the documents.I can replace all the word and edit the document but when I click save it takes out all the same words and it goes back to the way it was before, even though it says it's sucsefully saved.

I though maybe it was just my account.But now I have a second account and it does the same thing.Then I thought maybe it was my computer.But I've tired two to three different computers now and it still doesn't do any good.

Here's an example from one of my stories:

I was getting angry now.I know he had seen Tony, I could tell that much just from his he wasn't telling least he hadn't he was going to, he wasn't going to stop me from finding when I had gotten this close. "Nothing," I ground out between my teeth, not wanting to take time to explain, "Now, have you seen him?" I asked again.He looked at me for a moment, scrutinizing he gestured that I should follow him.I walked inside and he shut the door before walking towards the back of the was a small house, all on one of the curtains pulled back letting the light in and giving the place a bright and homey feel.I had entered into a small hall that led off into a living room on one side and a kitchen on the other.I followed him down the hall where it to went in off to the left and went to the right side and around the corner.I noticed the it went around a circle to lead back down the were four different doors, all of them closed except one of the second one.I followed him inside the door where he went off to stand beside an elderly woman, probably his wife, who was standing near the right side of a was wiping a wet cloth across the person's forehead wiping off what looked suspiciously like dried blood.

I've tried everything I could think of and nothing works!

I guess you aren't refering to missing spaces after full stops/periods, as you don't have those in your post text either.

I was getting angry now.I know he had seen Tony, I could tell that much just from his he wasn't telling least he hadn't he was going to, he wasn't going to stop me from finding when I had gotten this close. "Nothing," I ground out between my teeth, not wanting to take time to explain, "Now, have you seen him?" I asked again.He looked at me for a moment, scrutinizing he gestured that I should follow him.I walked inside and he shut the door before walking towards the back of the was a small house, all on one of the curtains pulled back letting the light in and giving the place a bright and homey feel.I had entered into a small hall that led off into a living room on one side and a kitchen on the other.I followed him down the hall where it to went in off to the left and went to the right side and around the corner.I noticed the it went around a circle to lead back down the were four different doors, all of them closed except one of the second one.I followed him inside the door where he went off to stand beside an elderly woman, probably his wife, who was standing near the right side of a was wiping a wet cloth across the person's forehead wiping off what looked suspiciously like dried blood.

I've highlighted a few places were words have gone missing. I don't know whether I've caught them all. It's a strange problem.

What kind of document do you upload? .doc .docx .rtf? Perhaps the problem is in the document type. Have you tried saving it as a different type, like .rtf? Or even .txt? Those tend to cut out all the odd formating that .doc and .docx allow.

The document type I'm using now is rtf.

That's a good posibility, I hadn't thought about changing the document types.I'll try that, and hopefully that will fix it.Thanks so much for the help!

Another possibility occured to me after I had the same problem myself. I uploaded a chapter a few days ago and today found out that a few words had gone missing from that. I copy-pasted the text from the original document, and like you, it did not safe the text properly. I changed the wording a bit, and that bit stayed in. In changing the wording I found out that there had been no space after the period in the original text that went missing.

That might be your problem too. I've noted before that you don't put a space after a period (.). FFnet has this thing about people posting links in stories; it deletes all the urls. In urls there are no spaces after the periods, where in regular text there should be. I guess that's how FFnet searches out the unwanted urls: it looks for periods that have letters on both sides of them.

If my guess is correct, trying .rtf format will not help with your problem. What will help is when you end a sentence with a period (or full stop) is to hit the spacebar.

Okay, I'll try that first.Thanks agaian so much for the help.

Did you look in the "Publish" tab of your account? I don't know how long it is since you last posted a new chapter, but they have changed the layout reasonably recently.

If you have a Publish tab but no My Stories when you click it, I suspect it was a site glitch - I can see mine fine at the moment, so just try again.

...It's supposed to be under 'Publish' at the top of your login page. It' goes:

Publish

Guide

Document Manager

New Stories

My Stories

Guidelines

Then your account has a glitch and you need to PM support under the help menu on the top right of every page.

The url is the following:

http://www.fanfiction.net/secure/story/story_tab_list.php

If it's not showing correctly, try this but kill all the spaces (ff.net forum's are very limited in terms of linking):

http : // www .fanfiction.net/secure/story/story_tab_list. php

Thankyou so much i have been trying for 4 hours strait but couldn't get it to upload

No i feel so stupid i only had to close the window first

Thanks so mach it was my first fanfic and i was worried

Thanks again

I'm a total noob to this whole fan fic stuff...and I'm loving it, but I've just run into this problem. I've reached that 15 document limit and I'm confused by the message I got saying that I needed to publish the chapters or convert them. I have those 15 chapters published, people are reading and reviewing my story...and breathing down my neck for updates, btw...

I tried to just delete the chapters that I've already posted, and they went away in my published story. Am I doing something wrong? I had to scramble around to get my chapters all back in order after I deleted them...I'm confused. Help me before my reviewers hunt me down...please!

FanpireMama said stuff:

I'm a total noob to this whole fan fic stuff...and I'm loving it, but I've just run into this problem. I've reached that 15 document limit and I'm confused by the message I got saying that I needed to publish the chapters or convert them. I have those 15 chapters published, people are reading and reviewing my story...and breathing down my neck for updates, btw...I tried to just delete the chapters that I've already posted, and they went away in my published story. Am I doing something wrong? I had to scramble around to get my chapters all back in order after I deleted them...I'm confused. Help me before my reviewers hunt me down...please!

What you need to comprehend is FF. net's 'system'. Once you've understood the overall concept of how it works, things will start to become more clear to you.

The basic process is;

Edit your story on your word processor at home; and save it in a supported format, one chapter per file.

Upload each chapter to your document manager.

Now you have chapters in your document manager. They are not published but in a kind of 'holding area' ready to be proof read, have minor edits made to correct formatting issues etc.

Once you are happy a chapter is ready to be seen publically (ie published) you can copy it out of the holding area (the document manager) into a story.

Now you have two copies of the chapter -- one in the document manager and one published in the story itself. They are independent, that is you can delete a chapter in the document manager and the copy in your story will remain. Chapters held in the document manager need to be deleted if you reach capacity, or if left for 60 days (I think maybe it's 90?) they will expire an be deleted by the system.

So you go from; your edited copy on your PC, to the document manager, and then to the story itself. Ostensibly you have three copies at this point.

You can also copy a published chapter from a story back into the document manager if you wish to edit it further, then you can replace published chapters with chapters in your document manager.

---

It all makes sense when you understand the concept.

I guess that further should be added, that if FFnet says Document Manager has reached full capacity and that you must delete a story, you must delete one from the Document Manager. Deleting an already published chapter will not affect the stories in the Document Manager in any way. Vice versa, deleting a story from the Document Manager will not affect a published story. As Monotonehell said: they are two different things.

Yes, so you should be deleting copy number two, not copy number three, as we are assuming you did.

I appreciate the help...yeah turns out I was doing it wrong. Guess I was functioning on too little sleep, because this morning it made total sense and I felt like a moron! Thanks again!

Everything's confusing 'til you get it. Then it seems like the easiest thing in the world. Weird, huh?

You're welcome.

hey the same thing is happening to me! It wont allow me to upload this chapter but i think its all correct and everything! Help! it comes up with an error message and i have absolutely no idea what to do!

What error message are you getting, Yolanda?

If it's tthe '15 doc limit' message, then you need to delete some of your docs. If you already published them as stories for people to read and review, deleting the document copy on FFN won't affect it at all. The editable documents are separate; when you publish a fic, a new copy is generated as a published story, making the original doc you uploaded obsolete and unnecessary. Just delete the ones you don't need anymore, and you can continue uploading.

Hello.

I know it can be done, I've seen it, I just can't seem to be able to do it.

I have a few chapters where I have paragraphs that are not as wide as the rest of the chapter. When I made them in word, I just changed the margins. How do I get that to show up in the copy I want to post?

I've already come to terms that my ==== lines won't stay. So I have to redo them for all of my 60+ chapters, but what about the margin changes?

Thank you for any help that you have for me.

BTW, what on earth is DocX good for? I tried copying from there to a story layout and it went up in smoke when I hit the save button.

Jhoy said:

I have a few chapters where I have paragraphs that are not as wide as the rest of the chapter. When I made them in word, I just changed the margins. How do I get that to show up in the copy I want to post?

FFN is very restricted as to formatting. Forget anything beyond the following:

1 Bold, italics and underline.

2 New paragraphs.

3 Horizontal rule.

When you write your chapters in your word processor don't use any paragraph styles other than the default one. Once you upload it to the document manager (or document mangler as some have called it) anything FFN doesn't allow will be stripped out. Sometimes with unpredictable results. It is here that you can edit the chapter of any such 'upload errors' before publishing the chapter to a story.

BTW, what on earth is DocX good for? I tried copying from there to a story layout and it went up in smoke when I hit the save button.

DocX is supposed to be the system for collaboration between authors and betas. You can upload a chapter to your DocX and send it to one of your authorised betas for their review. There's some extra styles available in DocX for annotations (highlight and colours I believe) but I've never used it to know from experience.

Hope that helps!

Thanks.

I must have seen that indent thing on another site then.

The DocX thing is just wrong in my short sighted oppion. It gives us hope that it can stay like that for posting when it can't. I wonder how many people actually use it for what it was made for? Don't we talk to our betas via e-mail already?

Oh well... I'll just have to trudge on then.

Thanks for you help again.

The antisocial idea behind DocX is to keep your betas (who you don't know from a bar of soap) at arms length while still being able to communicate and collaborate. But yes, once a chapter is in DocX, you can't get it directly to being a published chapter. So all the extraneous formatting is lost.

You may have seen the indents on here, a while ago the admins restricted the format set we can use. Also consider that it may have been centred text?

PMs are too restrictive for betas. I like to bold and underline my notes and changes so people can see them immediately, instead of looking around for what changed. PMs don't let you do that. And trying to get a person's email is just too much work, not to mention the fact that I have difficulty saving Yahoo! emails to my jumpdrive so I can take stuff home (where I don't have internet). DocX is most convenient for me.

I use DocX on a regular basis.

Yes, a document can be left, right or center align, but that applies to the entire document. Or, at least, last I checked, FFN applied the first line alignment to the entire document. Don't know why, but I've not used alignments since.

I only seem to PM people who leave reviews for my stories or who I leave reviews for. My beta and I talk via e-mail. Well my ex-beta. I need a new one now. She got too busy. But I got her e-mail address when I realized that we were were going to be talking a lot and she did all the changes in the word file I sent her, and she sent it back to me, and I saw the changes in red and she explained why for a few things. If I had issues, I would put them in an e-mail and she would consed or argue her point.

But I'm happy that someone uses it. I would just hate to do all that and then loose it. But I guess you could copy it over to word and save it there.

Yes, a document can be left, right or center align, but that applies to the entire document. Or, at least, last I checked, FFN applied the first line alignment to the entire document. Don't know why, but I've not used alignments since.

Not true. FFnet only allows left and centre alligned. Also it copies the alignment style you have in the document you upload. You can ahve a scene left aligned, then a scene break centre aligned and return to left aligned for the next scene. That's how I format my stories and that's how FFnet keeps them. It's your word processor that keeps everything aligned acoording to the first paragraph unless you change a setting somewhere.

And if you right align FFnet probably defaults to left aligned. That's probably what caused your controversy with FFnet's alignment styles.

Oh. I assumed it allowed all three alignments since I've seen the first two (but who uses right anyway?)

Okay, it's my processor. That explains a lot, actually. Thanks.

I would just hate to do all that and then loose it. But I guess you could copy it over to word and save it there.

Huh? What is that in response to? Copy all what? If you meant copying the text to a Word doc, that isn't going to work. I have MS Works, but the internet computers I have access to all have MS Word 2000 or 2003, which Works can't read. So I have to save webpages or I get nothing. And some webpages open with a text file. FFN's don't though, so I use FFN webpages. I hate looking around for new stuff if I've already found something that works.

I was talking about the DocX file.

After it has gone back and forth between the author and the beta and you wanted to keep a copy of it with the changes before you make your 'story' copy, I thought coping and saving it to a word file would be a good way of doing that.

I haven't done it, but I have copied right from a word file into a DocX file and it kept it the way it was, so I just thought that it would work the other way too.

BTW, I'm using Office 2007. I have MS Works 8 on my computger also, but I haven't really tried to open one with the other yet, but I do use both due to some odd history I have with some files.

I just checked and my MS Word does save to MS works 6.0, 7.0 and 9.0. As for MS Works it can save to MS word 93 - 2003 and MS Word 2007. I think you just need to get updates for either your office or your MS Works install and you can open and save in the other format.

Oh, right. Yes, you can copy it all to Word. Unless you still have the chapter where it started from...I mean, if it was a Word file you uploaded, you can just upload it again, but as a Doc file. Or even upload a blank Doc file and copy/paste from your DocX. I do that to avoid upload glitches. Doesn't always work, but I've never seen everything turn superscript or strikethrough on me when I copy/pasted.

I think you just need to get updates for either your office or your MS Works install and you can open and save in the other format.

Thanks, but I really don't feel like doing all that work at the moment. Especially since I don't actually own most of those computers and my home computer isn't hooked up to the internet. I don't know how to get an update for a program that doesn't exist on the computer I'm currently at.

I have MS Works, but the internet computers I have access to all have MS Word 2000 or 2003, which Works can't read. So I have to save webpages or I get nothing.

Ah. That would be why DocX works for you, then. I forget not everyone has MS Word, which is what I prefer to use when betaing for someone. I'd never really got why DocX was so useful because I'd been e-mailing people before (not the PM system) when doing betaing.

You know what? I've never even heard of Works before...is it like Word, but free?

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