Meta News

Hiatus notice

2015-08-30T12:49:45Z

Posted by: metanewsmods

Metanews is going to be on hiatus for a while.

One of our two link finders, the_rck, has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will have a lumpectomy on Friday. She will definitely have radiation treatment and may have to have chemo (they won't know that until after the surgery). It's not clear when she will be able to link find again. This week, she's too stressed and too busy (the surgeon's office told her on Monday that she'd have to wait three weeks for surgery then called Tuesday morning to say that her surgery would be Friday). She has appointments every day this week.

the_rck is in the US but has good insurance, both private insurance and Medicare. She is also less than ten minutes drive from an excellent cancer center that is providing all the necessary care. She will be fine, eventually.

the_rck normally handles Feedly which takes 10-20 hours a week, depending, and is the source of roughly 85% of our links. Our remaining link finder can't take on Feedly at this point. That left us with the choice between going on hiatus and publishing a much abbreviated newsletter or the foreseeable future.

Additionally, the surgery happened on Friday and I've heard from the_rck's husband that it went successfully.

We're not sure at this stage how long the hiatus will be for, but when we know more, we'll post and let you all know.

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12 August 2015-18 August 2015

2015-08-22T20:09:21Z

Posted by: metanewsmods

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5 August 2015-11 August 2015

2015-08-14T16:18:45Z

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28 July 2015 - 5 August 2015

2015-08-07T14:21:35Z

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22 July 2015-28 July 2015

2015-08-01T17:52:06Z

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15 July 2015-21 July 2015

2015-07-23T18:02:43Z

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8 July 2015 - 17 July 2015

2015-07-17T15:35:03Z

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Call for Volunteers

2015-07-09T21:01:26Z

Posted by: metanewsmods

Metanews is once more (and always) in need of volunteers. We're looking for two types of volunteers. First, people who would be willing to take on link finding and maintenance for one our set reading lists (LJ, DW, Tumblr, Feedly, Pinboard, and submitted links). Right now there are only two of us, and we simply can't cover everything. It's not sustainable. The only reason we're getting by right now is that one of us is unemployed, but it would be better if that one had time to do other things, too, in addition to Metanews, and didn't end up burning out.

Second, we're also looking for volunteers who would be willing to cover one or two specific fandoms of their choice. This would involve looking for meta in general, particularly in places we don't know about or can't adequately cover (especially Tumblr), and evaluating for quality any links other link finders discover for the fandom(s). We're especially interested in help with fandoms or types of fandoms that we haven't covered much or where the quality of the meta we've been finding isn't great because that generally means that we don't know where to look to find meta for that fandom.

We use Google docs for all of our working documents, so any volunteers will have to be willing to deal with that.

We've been told that we're not doing a particularly good job at posting on Tumblr, and we don't really have many readers there. Neither of us actually use Tumblr beyond following links there that we've found elsewhere and making the weekly Metanews post (which we do by rote). We would love to have someone to take over the Tumblr posting and do it in a way that's more friendly to Tumblr readers, whatever that may look like.

The fastest way to reach us is to comment on this post on LJ or DW or to PM metanewsmods in either place. We don't check Tumblr very often, so things sent to us there may languish for a while. We can also be reached as on Gmail as meta.news.fandom. ~~We don't always check the Gmail every day, so please be patient if it takes us a little time to get back to you.~~

While we do check the email every day due to it being forwarded, and will attempt to get back to any replies within 24 hours of receiving them, we may be longer due to consulting with each other.

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1 July 2015-7 July 2015

2015-07-09T18:46:37Z

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24 June 2015 - 2 July 2015

2015-07-02T15:46:29Z

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17 June 2015-23 June 2015

2015-06-25T15:50:48Z

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10 June 2015-16 June 2015

2015-06-19T14:16:41Z

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Meta links 2 June 2015 - 9 June 2015

2015-06-11T17:05:59Z

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27 May 2015-2 June 2015

2015-06-04T17:56:22Z

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Meta links 05/18/2015 - 05/252015

2015-05-30T13:34:28Z

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Another call for volunteers

2015-05-25T11:47:17Z

Posted by: metanewsmods

We're down to three people compiling links per week and honestly, guys, we need more. Even if it's a case where you could do one week a month? We need you.

Our most urgent need is for people to take part of our very large blog list. It's a case of reading through our feed - we will give you all details necessary - and adding the links to the document. One person would be great. Two or three would be utterly amazing. This would be about 2-5 hours per week for one person, and time would decrease the more people working on the list.

There are other areas we need help with as well, but the blog list is the most urgent right now. If you don't think you can do the blog list, but might be willing to do something else, please let us know.

If anyone can help, please, please comment to this post, or email us on meta.news.fandom@gmail.com.

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13 May 2015-19 May 2015

2015-05-22T18:02:27Z

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Meta links 05/06/2015 - 05/142015

2015-05-15T14:40:41Z

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29 April 2015-5 May 2015

2015-05-08T16:51:15Z

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29 April 2015-5 May 2015 Age of Ultron Post

2015-05-08T16:10:47Z

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22 April 2015 - 29 April 2015

2015-05-02T07:06:01Z

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15 April 2015-21 April 2015

2015-04-22T17:52:14Z

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8 April 2015-14 April 2015

2015-04-17T15:46:21Z

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Update to Special Bulletin

2015-04-14T16:33:34Z

Posted by: metanewsmods

More on the Ebooks-Tree Business

As more information comes out about this, we will continue to provide links in the hope that they will be useful.

Copyright info you may not know: besinaao3 (Tumblr) - Links to more information about copyright of fanfic. Note that this poster has multiple short entries answering questions about this business.

topic:copyright, topic:fanfic

Untitled: isfanficlegal (Tumblr) - "How can the DMCA be applicable here? Don't safe harbor provisions only apply to user-generated content? None of the content on ebook-tree appears to be user-generated."

topic:copyright

More than AO3 affected: besinaao3 (Tumblr) - "I’d like to take one moment to point out that although we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the effect this has had on AO3, other fic hosting sites have fallen victim to these folks as well."

topic:copyright, topic:fanfic

April 14, 2015 update on ebooks-tree.com: isfanficlegal (Tumblr) - "CloudFlare has responded to a number of people that they are only a "pass through" - basically, they do host ebooks-tree’s content but only for brief times, and we believe that ebooks-tree has been using CloudFlare to mask where they are truly hosted."

topic:copyright, topic:scam

Untitled: copyright.gov - Portion of copyright law applying to use of pseudonyms

topic:copyright, topic:law

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Special Bulletin

2015-04-13T23:25:33Z

Posted by: metanewsmods

The links here seemed time sensitive, so we thought we'd do a special post. These are all links about a site that's been scraping fic (and book samples and journal articles and anything else they can get their hands on). To find out if they've stolen anything of yours, use their search box and put in the name under which you posted your stories. Don't try their alphabetical index because it isn't really alphabetical-- It's sorted by the first two letters of the name, and then everything under that is jumbled together in some random order.

The fics taken seem to be utterly random. They didn't go by length, rating, popularity, or fandom. (This link finder had four stories stolen.)

Untitled: isfanficlegal (tumblr) - "We’ve been getting pings and @’s all morning about ebooks-tree.com who seem to be scraping/taking stories off of AO3 and hosting them as PDFs and mobi downloads on their site; the site seems to be pulling from UrBookLibrary as well. They’re not reading your "do not copy/duplicate" notes on your AO3 fic; their bots are pulling things directly from AO3, without AO3′s authorization or assent. It looks like they are pulling from Wattpad too, again without authorization or assent."

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright

They’re at it again: besinaao3 (Tumblr) - "Remember the Goodreads fanfic debaucle? Well, another site is now doing it. I just found 13 of my stories listed over on ebooks-tree.com, a for-profit site where I neither uploaded them nor authorized anyone else to do so."

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright

Ebooks-tree.com update and getting your works removed: besinaao3 (Tumblr) - "It doesn’t matter if you’re extremely prolific or if you’ve only ever written 1 fic in your life, seven years ago, the ebooks-tree site scraped everything they could from AO3, so even if you think your stuff can’t possibly be there, check!"

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright

Untitled: ao3org (Tumblr) - "A lot of people have been writing into Support about this as well, and as much as we’d like to prevent this kind of thing, there’s only so much we can do while also keeping the downloads functionality alive for our users (who might depend on it due to limited internet time or mobile access only)."

topic:fanfic, topic:copyright, topic:ao3

Scam Advisor on tzarmedia.com: Scam Advisor - Rating of the site that appears to behind the fic theft. Do not give them a credit card number.

topic:fanfic, topic:scam

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