The Anime Addventure is dying.

[Bob Schroeck]

For those who don't know about it, the Anime Addventure is a collaborative fan fiction site.  It's kind of hard to explain without just sending you there; basically any "chapter" on the site is open to anyone following it up, and plot lines can fork or spawn endlessly.  At last count it had well over a quarter million individual episodes spread through hundreds of storylines.

But it might not get any more.  Kestrel (better known as Gregg "Metroanime" Sharp to those who started their fic reading in the 1990s) has abandoned the site after apparently being harassed in the "behind the story" comment threads, and a number of other prolific contributors seem to have vanished with him.  The site, which used to get anywhere from five to fifteen new episodes a day, has had only eight new posts since August 1.

I'm not trying to rally people to save the Addventure -- I can barely focus on my regular writing, let alone responding to a round robin collaborative site.   I just wanted to alert folks to its possible end so they can find and save favorite storylines, like "No Tendo" and "A Rose At Hogwarts".

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Norgarth]

To be honest, it's been stagnating for a while..  KLSymph, the primary Mod, is  apparently an English major and has been leaning hard on new authors/episodes that don't measure up to his standards, often deleting them.  Needless to say, a lot of said new authors quickly say 'the hell with it'. 
So the number of authors has been slowly decreasing as old authors leave but little to no new blood is added.
Another good series from there is Dungeon Keeper Ami.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[classicdrogn]

What Timote said. I started writing a couple of things there during the period when I could access it with my old WinCE PDA, got about nine scenes into one, and then the last three were deleted (I've gotten better at writing without horrible errors in every line, and catching them when I do, but this was a few years ago) and I gave up in disgust.

At least in my current bout of offlineishness I have a functioning machine to stave off boredom, though as a side effect I'm still not writing much of anything. Quite apart from the impinging RL issues that are all too occupying in themselves.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Shay Guy]

On August 19, I decided on a whim to tally up all posts on the site by year, browsing through the Recent Episodes pages on the maximum page size. The results:

2015: 353 and counting
2014: 315
2013: 628
2012: 804
2011: 1381
2010: 1993
2009: 2331
2008: 2348
2007: 2988
2006: 4348
2005: 5336
2004: 7535
2003: 10355

I didn't do 2002 because that was the site's first year -- it debuted in August. So 2003 was the site's first full year. It's literally been in decline every year since then, with the exception of this year, which has shown the first year-over-year increase in the Addventure's history.

It may have been a fountain of creativity once. These days, I think it's mainly just Sharp's playground and the home of DKA. And no longer the former, apparently.

It also holds some historical interest to me, because it was where Jared Ornstead debuted his "Lionheart" sockpuppet, four years before making a FanFiction.Net account for it. The first thing he did with it, more or less*? A Ranma/Ranko lemon.

*He has five posts from the previous few hours, but they were all leading up to the lemon and none of them got many comments. The lemon itself got a strong response, largely negative. His own comment was... remarkably typical.
EDIT: Also, I think the Addventure format came from porn sites.

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[Matrix Dragon]

... Follow that story thread back to see who made that story branch (Which started out as 'Ranma in Spells R Us' naturally.

What's this make my 'Degrees of Skysaber' score? :lol

[Bob Schroeck]

Huh. I just stumbled across what might be Sharp's last real major posting, an installment of his "another fistful of omake" on FF.net. At the very end he wrote this:

i've been writing under several different alias for a few decades, and fanfiction has developed quite a bit since then. Since there's a large percentage of comments which are complaints, well, that's one reason i'm dropping writing altogether. Another reason is what happened over at the Anime Addventure.

A rather more major reason is my health. Though the doctors have rolled their eyes and largely dismissed my complaints and told me that this is normal for my age - i'm not doing so well. My migraines are becoming more and more frequent, there are gaps in my memories that appear more frequently, and i'm often finding that i can't remember something i was just doing a second or two ago and wondering when i got to a particular place. It is affecting my writing as well, making continuing a story all the more difficult. If there's a large percentage of comments that are complaints or gripes - why am i even bothering at this point to even try? And my quitting will make some people happier, who have followed me over the decades specifically to harass me. They can now get on with their lives. Maybe i won't even be targetted by that hacker guy from Chicago anymore.

So, i'll go back and try to finish up some stories but i'm not planning on starting on any new projects or developments. i'll continue adding things to the Community on Fanfiction dot net though - whenever i find something that looks promising or is a good read in itself.

So it's not just harassment, it simply was the last straw.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

On August 19, I decided on a whim to tally up all posts on the site by year,

That'll teach me to assume the episode numbers started at 1.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Matrix Dragon]

Well damn. I knew he was done with the Addventure (I tend to lurk there and saw the comments thread where he got sick of the nonsense), but I didn't realize he was giving up entirely. That's... kinda depressing, actually. Another old-timer moves on.

[Pyeknu]

You can only go so far before it just gets to you one way or another, Matrix. It doesn't surprise me that Gregg wanted to cool it off.

[Happerry]

It's a true pity, that's what it is. His writings was one of the first pieces of actual good quality fanfiction I ever ran into...

[Shay Guy]

Bob Schroeck wrote:

---

That'll teach me to assume the episode numbers started at 1.

They do. It's just that episode numbers aren't a remotely reliable guide to how many episodes there are or when they were posted. In fact, the episode number is almost guaranteed to grow much faster than the actual episode count, by the nature of the format.
To demonstrate, look at episode 1. There are six links at the bottom. So when that first episode was posted, the numbers 2 through 7 were reserved for future episodes that might be created through those links. And you can see that those six links go to episodes numbered 2 through 7.

The third link goes to episode 4. This was the second episode created, the first of those six options picked to expand the story. It has three options, so the numbers 8 through 10 are now reserved. Bast! opts to write an episode in the "10" slot, which has six more options, and now the numbers 11 through 16 are reserved for them. And so on. (To this day, episodes 14 and 15 have never been written.)

Jumping back to the present day, the "reserved episode number" counter currently goes up to 266266, looking at the last link on the latest episode, even though there are only 44258 episodes written -- roughly a 6:1 ratio. What this means is that on average, each episode written has five options underneath it that haven't been filled. There are about 222,000 unfilled options on the site -- places where you could add an episode and nobody has yet. This is a natural consequence of the format -- when you write an episode, you're expected to add several options for continuation, which means that the "episode number" inevitably increases much faster than the "number of episodes".

Add an episode with 6 options underneath. Episode number goes up by 6, episode count goes up by 1. If everyone does that (and most do), you get a 6:1 ratio.

It'd be far stranger if there wasn't a big difference.

As for Mr. Sharp... for a while I've had an idle fantasy of doing an oral history project on 1990s anime fanfic culture. Nothing that I would've actually been able to pull off, just an idea. He's one of the people I would've liked to interview, if I had any skill for interviewing. From the way he talks, I'm starting to wonder how much longer that'll be even a theoretical possibility.

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[Guilherme Loureiro]

Shay Guy wrote:

---

EDIT: Also, I think the Addventure format came from porn sites.

As far as I can tell, it was derived from the Unending BE Addventure site, which is a porn fic site(very, very, few non-lemon fics there).
As for the Anime Addventure dying and Gregg Sharp quitting fanfiction, I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it's painful to see a veteran author leaving, and a fanfic community disappearing or becoming a pale shadow of what it was(like the FFML). OTOH, Gregg Sharp's contribution to fanfiction is... mixed, shall we say. He had many good ideas in The Bet, but at the same time, he and his fans spread his Ranma fanon to the point many( if not most) people believe it is the correct characterization. He pulled the same thing to a lesser degree with his Sailor Moon and Naruto writing, and despite having so many ideas, the fics/episodes that came from them looked about the same, no matter what. When I saw most of the episodes in the Anime Addventure were being done by him and Kender(who if it's not the same guy, writes remarkably like him), I knew it was going to end. It took some time, but it seems to have come.
Also, regarding episode numbers, a lot of episodes posted in the beginning were simply blank episodes with more options, and nothing else. It happened to such a ridiculous extent that the mods had to step on it. I wonder if half of the episodes are, in fact, episodes, or are merely option extensions.

[Shay Guy]

Guilherme Loureiro wrote:

---

When I saw most of the episodes in the Anime Addventure were being done by him and Kender(who if it's not the same guy, writes remarkably like him), I knew it was going to end.

Kender's done some round robins with him, like "No Tendo" (written from 2004 to 2013, with more than half before 2007), but different guy. Sharp's known him since at least 2002. And his last post on the site was three years ago. (Sharp apparently hasn't been able to get in touch with him since before Hurricane Sandy, so he's probably not coming back.)
More than half the episodes from the past two years have been from Sharp, and a number of the rest have been in branches he started, like the "Mischief Fragment" series. In fact, I think I'll apply some regular expressions to the "last 1000 episodes" page, which goes back to 27 Jun 2013:

592 "Mischief Fragment" episodes
549 episodes by Kestral
520 "Mischief Fragment" episodes by Kestral

...which makes 621 episodes out of the past 1000 that were by him, categorized under "Mischief Fragment", or both. Mostly both.

Guilherme Loureiro wrote:

---

Also, regarding episode numbers, a lot of episodes posted in the beginning were simply blank episodes with more options, and nothing else. It happened to such a ridiculous extent that the mods had to step on it. I wonder if half of the episodes are, in fact, episodes, or are merely option extensions.

"Fate splits", I think they call them. It's clear that some episodes must have been deleted -- the maximum number of options allowed is 6, making that the theoretical maximum for the episodes-allocated-to-written ratio, but the actual ratio is 6.016.

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[Foxboy]

From my reluctantly-admitted experience with the original... the Anime Addventure at least DOES something with its options, letting actual plot happen instead of just: "Event. Bored Now. Who else can we f$ck over? Fate Split all the things!"
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

[Black Aeronaut]

Soooo... What say somebody archive some of their favorite story lines? Pretty sure there's quite a few you can archive as stand-alone stories.

I never got into Anime Adventure, really, because it was just so overwhelming. And I think that's part of what's spooking new contributors. You can only grow a beast like that so much before mere archive binges just won't cut it for when you want to get up to speed. And that's even if you only follow the story lines you like.

[Bob Schroeck]

At least a few stories -- mostly Sharp's -- got moved over to ff.net. "No Tendo" is one, I know that for sure. But nothing's stopping anyone from archiving more.

Still, I don't think there's a hurry. I suspect the site will coast for months if not years after it effectively dies.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Proginoskes]

I'm kind of surprised that the Anime Addventure has so consistently and effectively excluded automated spam. I expected it to go the way of Usenet newsgroups and poorly-managed WordPress installations before suffering the final abandonment, but not a single product placement is to be found! (Obviously, spam gets deleted whenever it is put up, but if there were automated spam networks posting to the AA, the spam would go up faster than it could be taken down.)

Anyway, it can be difficult to predict how long a cobweb site will stick around. If Bast! owns the server hardware and domain name, and has a cheap uplink, it'll probably hang around until somebody sets up an automated spammer to post there, which could easily take a decade or more. If ey made hosting or domain-registration arrangements through another party, then it'll have a couple of years tops once ey decides that the site is dead. In either case, neither panic nor dawdle: the Anime Addventure won't be vanishing any time terribly soon, but we won't get much (possibly we won't get any) warning when its time does come.

[Shay Guy]

Today I was possessed by an urge to graph episode count per month. I started at November 2002, because there's some wonkiness going on with the dates for the month or two before.



Let's zoom in on the right side:



And again:



That cliff on the right there is Kestral's departure.

This has never been what I would call a healthy site. I don't think it ever had the content to draw in substantial numbers of new readers, nor was it well-suited to the creation of such content. Even in 2003, there wasn't that much demand for Ranma porn. And once it became That Kind Of Site, its appeal was always going to be limited beyond the initial community.

At least one story that started there has gone legit, though. Luke "Thrythlind" Green's Divine Blood has been turned into an original story and self-published. (I think it's noteworthy that most of the actual quality-ish storytelling on the site has been from one or two people following a linear thread -- in other words, little that really capitalized on the format. Dungeon Keeper Ami at least started with a choose-your-crossover-character prompt. No Tendo was a linear two-person round robin. A Rose at Hogwarts was mostly Skysaber, though the beginning was mostly Thrythlind. And, OK, it had more sprawl. But mostly it was Skysaber following, like, two paths.)

Someday I really need to scrape the site and set up my own visualizer.

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[Bob Schroeck]

I had forgotten that "A Rose At Hogwarts" was originally one of Skysaber's storylines. Wow. Back when you could count on him to churn out a decent amount of decent story before it went off the rails... Then again, several people, myself included, were trying to take up the plot at the end...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Pyeknu]

Well, it appears that the site's down. Don't know if it's a temporary thing or Bast deciding to retire it permanently.

[Bob Schroeck]

Looks less like a retirement and more like an unnoticed tech problem.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Disruptor]

I grabbed my stories off there and now have them on my computer. I'm not sure what to do with them or any of my stories.
--------------------
Tom Mathews aka Disruptor

[Jorlem]

A lot of the recent content can be pulled off the Google cache, if there is anything you want to rescue before it vanishes.
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

[Shay Guy]

So why exactly did Bast! decide to block the Wayback Machine?

---

Pronounced "shy guy."

[Bob Schroeck]

I dropped an email about the error message to the "addventure@bast-enterprises.de" address and got the following reply:

Hi!

I am currently looking into a fix or substitute for the Addventure website.

-- KLSymph

-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.