FF.net deleted my scene breaks!

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

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

I tried doing some Norse poetry in Ryoga's Terrible Horrible No Good Really Bad Day. In this style, you have extra space in the middle of the line to help show where the stresses go. So I indented the lines, and put the spaces in the middle, and by the time the parser got done everything was left-justified and single-spaced. I put in a couple dashes as a substitute, but beware: you really cannot count on your formatting being preserved.

[PCHeintz72]

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.

I wrote something like that once... I have basically what amounts to a file scanning routine go through the file... and characters in the ascii character set that are out of range, it replaces them with something that is in range...

I have something similar in my Lister program... because of the way URLs and Favorite/bookmark names are handled by Browsers, XML, OPML, and HTML formats (CSV, BBC, BB2, and TXT are not a issue), I have a filtering stage scanning and replacing characters with acceptable codes instead that will still work.

[Crescent Pulsar R]

FF.net sounds like a pain to publish things on. Does it still make it impossible to end a sentence with a "!?"?

[Spokavriel]

I've seen it delete second punctuation characters. Not often but it has happened after some of the more recent updates.

[Tovath]

I use a line of x's (xxxx) for breaks

[Shanami]

If you exceed a certain length of the same character repeated (I think this is a recent thing) it sometimes deletes them Tovath.

Alternating characters and/or changing capitalization seems to help.

I've just taken to using their line break feature to insert horizontal lines... it's a pain but at least I know it stays formatted the way I want it to be.

[claymade]

FYI, they've added another new "feature" to their filter... Now, all instances of a double dash--for example, parentheticals like this one--are now shortened to a single "-" character.

Best part? It's retroactive. Applied to all existing chapters already posted, as far as I can see.

The single extended dash character "—" still seems to work, though.

[Crescent Pulsar R]

God, that's going to be annoying. I've been considering uploading my stories there, but it keeps on coming up with more things to convince me not to. It's becoming more inconvenient, and it's bad for prose.

[claymade]

God, that's going to be annoying. I've been considering uploading my stories there, but it keeps on coming up with more things to convince me not to. It's becoming more inconvenient, and it's bad for prose.

Ugh. It's normally not this bad, but every once in a blue moon they pull something like this and it's a royal pain. Personally I find it still worth posting there overall, though times like this do make me a bit irate.

Positive side--although the filters strip it out, it's still there in the raw data. So if you export it, you can to a quick find-and-replace between "--" and "—" if you have the firefox extension for search and replace on a website and then re-save it after checking it. It's made things marginally less heinous as I plow through my posted chapters.

[AshK1980]

I usually use the horizontal Rule button for scene breaks.

[Makoto]

Thanks for the heads-up. I had a couple instances of '--' that I needed to edit. (Well, and a ?! and !! that I didn't realize were in the story I posted, too. -_-; )

[CRBWildcat]

...Talk like this is making me consider just leaving my stuff on Mediaminer and being done with it.

[Spokavriel]

Well Media Miner is more friendly to formatting (Not allot) but they are easier on it. And content. You can rate your chapters for specific audiences all the way up to Adults only. Even going to the extent of only allowing registered Adults to access them for another layer of Censure between youth who might not be mature enough for your work.

[CRBWildcat]

Yeah, I noticed. I've been posting my stuff at both places for some years, and I'm starting to get more and more annoyed with FF.Net's setup as time moves on.

[Ellen Kuhfeld]

I must have stumbled upon the Golden Mean formatting - I simply have not had any trouble with FFnet after a few early experiences. And while I've used both sites, I think I prefer FFnet to MediaMiner.