FIMFiction

FIMFiction
FIMFiction's official logo as of August 17, 2013
Founder	Knighty
Date founded	July 10, 2011
Type of site	Fan fiction repository

Fimfiction, sometimes stylized as FIMFiction, is an online repository for fan fiction inspired by My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. A beta version was first made public on July 10, 2011. Upon reaching its 2 year anniversary, the site has accumulated (approximately) 50,532 stories, 94,729 users, 2,758,536 story comments, and 730 million words.

Stories submitted to Fimfiction aren't posted immediately, but need to be approved by member of the site's staff first. Non-English stories or ones that are deemed to be insufficiently related to Friendship is Magic are not allowed, but adult-oriented stories are.

The site's search engine includes a toggle for such mature content and a character search mode, and stories can be sorted by the themes they contain. Registered users of the site can enable tracking: they are informed every time a story they favorited is updated with a new chapter. An automated system selects "featured stories"

The beta logo from the post on Equestria Daily

Logo until August 17, 2013

Writers used to be able to tag their stories with as many characters as they wished, but this was limited to a maximum of five characters for newly added stories in April 2012. To soften the impact of that change, new collective character tags for the Cutie Mark Crusaders and the Mane Six were introduced at the same time.

April Fools Day pranks

2012 prank

On April 1, 2012, aka April Fools' Day, Fimfiction ran a program to change certain character names from the Friendship is Magic universe to those of G1 ponies, as a sort of prank.^{[citation needed]}

2013 prank

On April 1, 2013, the Fimfiction admins pulled several pranks in rapid succession over the course of the day. knighty announced that he was stepping down and letting Poultron run the site. Poultron then confirmed that knighty did indeed step down in a considerably less humorously toned site-wide blog post. Poultron then told everyone that site-wide updates are no longer going to come a frequently and that they will be announced beforehand, as well as the fact that all Human related fics are now banned but previously posted Human fics will not be removed. A new feature was also supposedly "added": Fimfiction gold membership. Every user on the site perceived themselves as a gold member, and every user whose ID ended in zero (0) was seen as a gold member by everybody else as well. Poultron told everybody that gold members will have access to exclusive site features, but that it is currently only being tested right now as a joke. Finally, all comments made by the user Regidar were seen as Ghostwriter95's and vice versa. This was later revleaed to be an agreed upon name change by the two users, who swapped names in celebration of the holiday. Later, knighty expressed his amazement on how the community reacted when Poultron said HiE fics were "banned" on April 2, 2013.

502Fiction.net

Sometime before July 28, 2012,^[specify] Fimfiction put up a banner with the name 502Fiction.net and a tagline of "we sometimes serve fanfiction" written on it. This was due to the high volume of 502 gateway errors users would get when trying to access Fimfiction.^{[citation needed]}

December 2012 update

On December 8, 2012, Fimfiction underwent a massive string of updates that changed many of the sites features. During this time, a multitude of bugs and 502 errors also appeared, enough to bring the entire site to a standstill for a day. Many users made the joke that Fimfiction was going back to its roots. Many writers also were concerned when their unpublished chapters and stories disappeared. However, the site's programmer, knighty, managed to wrap up the problems after doing a 24 hour programming marathon.

When knighty finished fixing the majority of the problem, allowing the site to function again, he happily told all the users about the new functions which range from simple things like bug fixes to easier user-friendly access tools for writing, posting, blogging, and maintaining groups. According to Alexstrazsa, knighty had been working on the update for over a month prior to its release. knighty described the update as "rebuilding the site from the ground up."

Many new banners were also added, and the the old ones were scrapped if they were not carried over. It was during this update that Fimfiction also fixed the problem of verification e-mails not reaching user's e-mails in the form of a "Resend Verification E-mail" button. Fimfiction's background and toolbar visuals are now customizable and can now be customized. Finally the "Feature box" was made only visible on the front page in an attempt to give more notice to stories outside the feature box.

March 2013 update

On March 15, 2013, the site underwent another massive update, although this one was more for appearances. Site backgrounds and fonts were replaced, buttons were moved to different locations, and notifications were split up into three categories. Overall many things were made more compact to save space. The like and dislike bars were merged into one bar, stories only show three chapters at a time. Information about an author's story is now always availabe to the right side of any of their main story pages as well. Aside from that, users got the ability to mark their place in a story using the new bookmark feature.

Trivia

• The name is often stylized as "FIMFiction" though the FAQ page states that knighty prefers "Fimfiction".
• During the months of December 2012 and December 2013, many FIMFiction users had Christmas hats edited into their profile pictures.
• If a user types in the Konami Code on FIMFiction (no need to press enter) a random desktop pony will appear on the browser. This feature seems to have been lost in the December 2012 update. Initially this fact was a reward to any users who read through the entire list of chatroom rules. Before when entering the code Applejack would appear.

External link

• FIMFiction.net