Searching Fanfiction.net by reviews

One of the things Fanfiction.net search method that really annoys me is the late not being able to search by popular stories pokemon stories
e.g. most hits, reviews, made favorite

I did find some methods but they have large drawbacks

Advanced google search just on Fanfiction.net for 'reviews' include Numeric range: in 1000

-while i did get a few results its very sloppy but this was how i found death
of today

searching authors with large amounts of favorite stories

Since it is possible to sort favorite stories by review numbers this can help.

I searched for authors who where interested in my favorite series and categories and for authors who had large amounts of favorite stories

but again this a very sloppy method

Does any one have any other methods or techniques

First, let me move this to the Writer's Lounge. That's where writing discussions go.

Reviews really don't mean anything on ff.net. Reviews tend to be rather...lacking in quality over there, and stories that are written badly but still hit the popular ideas in the fandom will still get a lot of reviews. For example, my friend wrote a really horribly Ash/Misty fic years before she wrote other better fanfiction. She still gets more reviews for the badly-written Ash/Misty fic just because it's an Ash/Misty fic, while her better-written stories don't get as many reviews.

I don't go to ff.net anymore, but I've read many discussions involving people who do go there. What they do is check the favorites of authors whose tastes/standards in fanfic they trust, so that they don't have to go searching through the archives. That seems to be the most popular method that I've seen, though it could still be disastrous, as some people don't use their favorites list in the way the name implies.

You could possibly look through the C2 communities on ff.net for recommended fics, ask for recommendations in the forums, or hang out at writing communities on forums for the fandom to look for recommendations. We just had a topic about that, so you could find some good fics there.

Other than that, I don't know what else to tell you. ff.net gets a lot of stories uploaded to it each day, especially for a popular fandom like Pokemon. Sometimes, you'll just tend to run into the lower-quality stuff, but there's still some great fics on that site.

thanks for the reply Astinus

it was a unusual question so i was not sure which section it belonged

yeah searching by reviews is not the best method but since i can see any other data for tracking it the only one i have

not surprisingly Harry potter and twilight are the most popular section hence they get a huge amount

i do check the recommended list for good tales, but i wanted to see if anyone had found a solution to the not so user friendly Fanfiction interface

nightangel said:

i do check the recommended list for good tales, but i wanted to see if anyone had found a solution to the not so user friendly Fanfiction interface

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I don't know about this. It seems pretty friendly as it is. Anyone can easily filter out fics based on the characters in it, the genre, the rating, the word count (with the longer fics usually being pretty decent in quality, considering an author would have to spend quite a chunk of time on it), and even the language. It's not that difficult to customize a search in order to find a fic that would suit your tastes. Like Asty said, review count isn't everything, especially on FFNet. Unfortunately, if review count can't be relied upon, that means that the art of finding good fic there is the same as finding it anywhere else: you have to trust rec lists from other people. That's something that's subjective, not something that can be quantified. In other words, it's not possible to build a search engine based on something like that.

Your best bet, then, is to just use the filters to zero in on the genre, rating, and/or characters that you prefer. Alternatively, the communities serve as rec lists, so you can look through that too.

nightangel said:

i do check the recommended list for good tales, but i wanted to see if anyone had found a solution to the not so user friendly Fanfiction interface

Click to expand...

Yeah, actually ff.net is more friendly for users than other archive sites. Like Jax said, there's search functions by: rating, genre, character(s), status of completion, and (for Pokemon) what canon it takes place in. Plus, there are summaries, word counts, and chapter counts. Plus, communities. Those collect fics that fall under certain descriptions, like fics focusing on a certain couple or those that write about certain characters.

For highly active fandoms like Harry Potter or Twilight, there are communities dedicated to finding/recommending fics. For other fandoms, though, it's more subjective what makes a good fic. There's no one quality for fics that make them good. All you can search for, like with Pokemon, is the characters that you like seeing (if people write about them even), the genres that you like to read, and the word count (if you want). You can also search for fic rec sites/communities which cater to all of that particular fandom, so you'll get a wider mix of fics and opinions. Those mostly tend to list the popular fics because of word-of-mouth and everyone reading them and then continuing to rec them because they're of a particular quality.

Plus, well, different factions of fandom have different popular fics. Some groups might have never heard of the most popular fic in another group.