For what it is worth.

A rant!

My apologies to anyone offended by my opinions, but I’m a man of free will and a writer and by God, I’m going to say what’s on my mind.

I’ve been preoccupied for the past week or so and am now venturing back, and what I see happening here is very sad.

ABCTales, 6-8 months ago was one of the first really good international writers sites I’d come across in a long time. Someone could post a story, get a bit of constructive feedback and didn’t have to wait for ages for that feedback. The forums were lively, with very little twaddle and what did exist was limited to a few “regulars” and wasn’t too distracting.

I came to ABCTales because I’m a writer and I wanted to broaden my horizons. I have no delusions of grandeur, I just wanted to see how my style and substance went over in a different environment…England..for the most part. I learned a great deal in the first few months about writing for “other audiences.” Most of the users welcomed me and I felt like I was accepted on the whole.

What I see now disgusts me. This is the fault of the folks running the site. Sorry Tony, I have nothing but respect for you and Mark and everyone involved with ABCTales. I know it’s difficult and time consuming, but still, you’ve lost the edge boys.

I think the upgrade is where the problem originated. Or so it seems to me.

Poorly planned and poorly executed. I suppose the idea was to solve the nagging problems the old site was having and give a fresh look and feel and so on…whatever… A professional job it wasn’t. It was amateurish and sloppy and there is no reason to be proud of the work done as a result. It killed the writing and not for just a few days, but for months. The resulting “upgrade” is a downgrade from this writer’s standpoint. The new format relegates about 1/3 of a screen width for writing; the rest is wasted space and twaddle, wrapped around small, newspaper column size allocations. This new format is fine for 50 word poems, but for somebody who wants to write 2000-5000 word stories, it’s a nightmare and makes for exceptionally bad reading and formatting. The new editor system isn’t user friendly and creates more problems than it solves. In short, it’s crap. No professional publishing outfit would dare present a writers work in such poorly formatted form. I’ve tried to post 2 stories in the past few days, only to find it exceedingly frustrating to achieve a usable, readable result. I’ve given up. When I have to spend more time playing with the formatting of a simple 1200 word story than it took me to write it, time to do something else.

Now, even if the editor system was worth a nickel, there’s another problem. The writer’s forums have degenerated into a blisteringly boring string of ceaseless irrelevancy. I look at the names of people writing poetry and stories and I can’t find very many of them involved in the forums, unless on the rare occasion one of their works gets flagged by somebody other than the normal drivellers, then it’s usually a quick thanks and off they go.

Writers works look like pooh, most writers aren’t involved in discussion, the forums are overrun with senseless bickering and dominated by the few people that seem to be doing the least writing.

What you have here is Anarchy. This isn’t a place to write. It’s a public toilet.