Back in the olden days, getting your fanfiction fix was damn hard work. Hours upon hours were toiled away clicking through page after archive page, skimming through lists of summaries, and even reading through first chapters just to try to figure out if a story even featured your pairing of interest.
Fortunately for today’s fanfiction enthusiasts, FF.net has come a long way toward giving readers the tools they need to find the fics they’re looking for. The introduction of additional search options such as Character filters, a pairing checkbox and an ability to sort by Reviews has really helped to streamline the fic hunting process.
It’s no secret that there is a strong positive correlation between number of reviews and fanfiction quality. Sorting by Reviews (and even Favs & Follows) is super useful, but there is still one important fic type that remains elusive to find using the existing filter system:
The awesome one-shot!
Now, there are combinations of filters you can use to try to track down these unicorns. For example:
What this combination of filters will get you is all completed fics less than 5000 words, ordered from highest review count to lowest. While this works for the majority of one-shots, you’re still going to miss a few because of that pesky length filter. Some of the best one-shots out there are inherently longer in length–take for example Tally Mark’s Impending Doom, or firefly’s Inamorato. Why the HELL FF.net doesn’t have a <10k-words filter option boggles my mind…but at any rate, when you set an arbitrary word count restriction, you’re gonna have some one-shots falling through the cracks.
So what could FF.net do to remedy this situation? Here are some ideas for an additional filter that could help with finding awesome one-shots:
- Categories filter –
New Filter Idea #1 – Category filter (pictured here instead of Time Range, because I don’t recall ever even using that filter in my life) A la Dokuga, this would obviously be the filter of choice to aid in the quest for quality one-shots. In combination with the sort by Reviews feature, we would be able to quickly retrieve a list of all one-shots in order of review count. The only problems with this are 1) FF.net would have to implement an entirely new categories feature and 2) this system would rely on people to properly categorize their fics. For old fics especially, this would be an issue since odds are, the authors will never come back and categorize their one-shots. That said, FF.net did make the effort to implement the Status feature some years back, so it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility. In fact, by using the Status feature, FF.net could theoretically run an update process to categorize all completed single-chapter fics as one-shots. IT COULD BE DONE, FOLKS!
Never give up. - Reviews/chapter filter –
New Filter Idea #2 – Reviews per chapter sorting option Okay, so this is not the ideal solution, but it would be SUPER EASY for FF.net to implement and would provide a more efficient means of locating quality one-shots. What this filter option–in combination with the Status filter–would allow is the ability to sort completed fics not merely by the total number of reviews, but by the number of reviews per chapter. Even a garbage completed fanfiction can amass a huge number of reviews if it’s got like 300 chapters, but normalizing review count by chapter would help to weed out those types of badfics and elevate highly-reviewed one-shots in the search results.
So, FF.net powers-that-be, if you’re out there listening, please consider putting in a one-shot filter of some kind! If other sites can do it, so can you.
What other fanfiction filters do you think would be helpful? Share in the comments! <3