FF.net deleted my scene breaks!

[Konsaki]

Just got a Review on FPCF stating that the story is good but was hard to read without anything separating the scenes. I know I put in the '--' for scene breaks, so I check FF.net and all the '--' have been removed! Gah! Now I have to go through all my stories and put something else in for the scene breaks.
I've seen other works with 0123456789876543210 for breaks, so I think I'll follow suit... that is, unless you guys can think of something better.

[PCHeintz72]

Just got a Review on FPCF stating that the story is good but was hard to read without anything separating the scenes. I know I put in the '--' for scene breaks, so I check FF.net and all the '--' have been removed! Gah! Now I have to go through all my stories and put something else in for the scene breaks.
I've seen other works with 0123456789876543210 for breaks, so I think I'll follow suit... that is, unless you guys can think of something better.

They did something with the story display interpreter... someone, I think it was Dartz, compleined of the exact same thing happening to his own story about 1 1/2 or 2 days ago.

[Konsaki]

Figured it was something to do with the coding... annoying as hell, though.

Anyways, in retrospect, I decided to shorten my scene changes to 0123456789. The 8-0 back down just added too much and it seemed like an eyesore. Probably finish up tomorrow morning before heading to work.

[Makoto]

Actually, I've been hearing that complaint for quite a while (that the interpreter eats scene breaks, web addresses, certain symbols (such as the percent sign, which probably shouldn't be used, but some authors do - which leads to text like "70 efficiency."), etc.)

That's why I had to spend some time changing all the scene breaks in the story I uploaded to horizontal rules. I still wasn't happy with all the reformatting done, though - I was going to set it so it didn't insert blank lines in all my paragraphs, but it didn't look good due to the fact that I have no idea whatsoever if you can actually have paragraph indents...

I guess I can live with it, though. Maybe.

[Sky]

This has been happening for years, as far as I remember - 2006 or so. Maybe earlier.

I've always had to put scene breaks back.

[PCHeintz72]

No.... every now and then they retweak it, and then some stories break.

I actually approve of the no hyperlinks and web addresses within stories.

And the got rid of same character breaks due to people posting spam stories with nothing but those characters.


But, I can also understand author fustration... those that try to play by the rules, go the extra mile to format their stories to meet their limitations, and successfuly post them, only to later have that work ruined.


And what of stories where the authors are gone, and thus they are not corrected when this occurs.... there are stories that have been mangled over the years because of this, and remain uncorrected due to author having moved on 2-5-8 or more years ago.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

I've had good luck with oOo centered. (that's oh-OH-oh). I just checked, and they're still there. I think FFNet automatically stomps on instances of three or more of the same character in a row. Not only do you have trouble getting % through, you have trouble with the zeros if you write, say, 1,000,000.

They're a bit exciteable over there, but spelling things out usually works.

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

FF.net has functional line-breaks.

Use those by going into the EDIT function after uploading a document, place the cursor where you're breaking, and insert the break.

It won't take too long. And don't whine to me about doing it, I had to stop and repair a 200,000 word story.

[Konsaki]

And don't whine to me about doing it, I had to stop and repair a 200,000 word story.

The stories I have to repair also amount to 200k words, so I guess I can feel justified in complaining then.
Really, it's an annoyance to me to have to replace the breaks, but I'm more annoyed at the fact that it makes it hard on new readers to get into my stories without the scene breaks. Having read through good stories myself but put off by the bad formating, I can sympathize with the readers.

I've had good luck with oOo centered.

I think I might use this as it's close to what I used originally. It's small but centered in the screen so the eyes can easily see the blank area on the far left which separates the sections. Thanks for bringing this option up, Ellen.

[Spokavriel]

No matter how much anyone ever feels "I had to suffer this and I didn't wine" that never means it makes it so others should not have the ability to vent frustrations. You could have too. You chose not to and thats good if you didn't need to but if others need to vent why showcase your problems and claim they shouldn't?

[claymade]

Fought this for a while, years ago--kept trying to get it to accept my asterisk rows through increasingly arcane maneuverings to circumvent the filter... but sooner or later, it always ended up getting caught by a stricter, later implementation of said filter, with the same result.

Eventually, I too just decided to go with FF.net's suggested horizontal rule to split scenes. Even if I could get the non-standard ones working for the moment, I didn't want them to get hacked out by some later change, when I might not even realize it had happened.

I used to mind the way the HRs looked... but nowadays I've got pretty used to them, actually. And haven't had to worry about them disappearing.

[Spokavriel]

Thing is there was a thread similar to this one about a year and a half ago in Other Talk where people who were using the site horizontal rule had all of them deleted from their story that had been on the site since 2002 or 3. So even using what they provide is not a guaranty that the breaks will remain.

[Cheb]

I constantly improve on my story compiler software to generate working ffnet versions (in addition to the main version I post on my home page).
It now replaces all "%" with "percent", "=" with "equals" and the asterisks disappear making the text they frame bold.

Luckily, I've been already using a dedicated formatting directive to insert separators (a graphical thingie and all) so I just added a rule to insert "<br>" there for the ffnet version.
Still, the one who wrote that filter is a jerk-ass. That's saying it mildly.

[Crescent Pulsar R]

Does it work to just use a space to separate scenes? Because I prefer to have my paragraphs together but indented.

[Spokavriel]

I've seen it remove start of paragraph indents so many times its not even funny.