this is not a place you want your children freely roaming about or practicing their writing skills.
The two sites cited in the article are basically ages-13-and-up sites. Neither us at FictionAlley.org nor the admins at Sugarquill allow people to register for the site to submit or review fics if they're under 13 years of age, and our message boards at FA are off limit to posting as well. At FA, we also have a two-page block in front of any R-rated stories, which asks people if they're underage and if they are, whether their parent/guardian is ok with them reading R-rated fics. Yes, of course, people will lie, and we're not doing this to duck responsibility - it's just a way of preventing people from randomly stumbling across a story that they're not mature enough to read.
As a parent myself, I am a big fan of parents keeping an eye on their kids - especially the under-14's - when said kids are online. I don't think that ickle 8-9 year olds should be wandering the internet sans supervision, and I don't think they should be reading any of the R-rated stories on FA.
Rather, I'm simply saying that an unsupervised child in the world of Harry Potter fanfiction might wonder how exactly Severus Snape managed to get pregnant with Draco Malfoy's baby, and why exactly Ginny Weasley became so much of a harlet.
Because Tom Riddle is evil and left an evil residue in her mind, of course. There's a slew of Evil!Ginny fics out there, you see...
Point taken, but one has to learn the rules before one can abuse them. When we at FictionAlley.org (I'm one of the admins) ask for reasonably good grammar and accurate spelling of major canon characters' names and places, we're expecting that people won't submit things like this:
"HaRrY; cOme out-side." Ron said.
Instead, we hope they submit:
"Harry, come outside," Ron said.
And if they don't know what's wrong with the first one on first glance, we teach it to them. We're not asking for perfection, and we have little tweaky rules about things like semicolons - if it's technically proper to use a semicolon and you use a dash instead, that's *fine by us*. But there's an enormous number of people who have read all five of the Harry Potter books, in English, and still can't figure out that declarative sentences in dialogue should have a comma at the end if it's being followed by an "X said..." bit. We're not asking for rigid adherence to conventional grammar; we do need readability.
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this is not a place you want your children freely roaming about or practicing their writing skills. The two sites cited in the article are basically ages-13-and-up sites. Neither us at FictionAlley.org nor the admins at Sugarquill allow people to register for the site to submit or review fics if they're under 13 years of age, and our message boards at FA are off limit to posting as well. At FA, we also have a two-page block in front of any R-rated stories, which asks people if they're underage and if they are, whether their parent/guardian is ok with them reading R-rated fics. Yes, of course, people will lie, and we're not doing this to duck responsibility - it's just a way of preventing people from randomly stumbling across a story that they're not mature enough to read. As a parent myself, I am a big fan of parents keeping an eye on their kids - especially the under-14's - when said kids are online. I don't think that ickle 8-9 year olds should be wandering the internet sans supervision, and I don't think they should be reading any of the R-rated stories on FA. Rather, I'm simply saying that an unsupervised child in the world of Harry Potter fanfiction might wonder how exactly Severus Snape managed to get pregnant with Draco Malfoy's baby, and why exactly Ginny Weasley became so much of a harlet. Because Tom Riddle is evil and left an evil residue in her mind, of course. There's a slew of Evil!Ginny fics out there, you see...
Point taken, but one has to learn the rules before one can abuse them. When we at FictionAlley.org (I'm one of the admins) ask for reasonably good grammar and accurate spelling of major canon characters' names and places, we're expecting that people won't submit things like this:
"HaRrY; cOme out-side." Ron said.
Instead, we hope they submit:
"Harry, come outside," Ron said.
And if they don't know what's wrong with the first one on first glance, we teach it to them. We're not asking for perfection, and we have little tweaky rules about things like semicolons - if it's technically proper to use a semicolon and you use a dash instead, that's *fine by us*. But there's an enormous number of people who have read all five of the Harry Potter books, in English, and still can't figure out that declarative sentences in dialogue should have a comma at the end if it's being followed by an "X said..." bit. We're not asking for rigid adherence to conventional grammar; we do need readability.