Fanfiction.net

A formerly brillant site which has now spiralled into a sad pile of crappy Mary-Sues, pointless, restrictive rules, and endless server problems. Nevertheless, it still seems to have a monopoly on about 99% of fanfic writers on the Internet, though you have to trawl through a heap of Sueage to get to anything decent. Fanfiction.net annoyingly bans, among other things: stories in script-form, stories in second-person (or "you-fics"), fics involving real people, and anything they deem "interactive", up to and including responding to readers' questions. As a member of the PPC once declared of scriptform: "If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for fanfiction." It also doesn't support many punctuation marks, such as *, <, >, , , and /, despite several of these being vital to certain fandoms, for example as the <> "thought-speech" speech marks in the Animorphs fandom. It also removes any links or email addresses in stories. The site furthers its bad reputation by randomly banning a lot of really good stories for absolutely no reason. Its reporting system also doesn't seem to be regulated, as it can and has happened that one person has reported another's story because of a grudge rather than the story having anything wrong with it, resulting in the story's unfair deletion. Fanfiction.net is popularly known as "the Pit of Voles", or just the Pit. Have you ever heard the saying that a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare? Well, if that's true, then common wisdom is that whatever's writing the stories on ff.net can't be monkeys.