Godawful Fan Fiction

Godawful Fan Fiction (GAFF) was a controversial website devoted to mocking badfic. It was founded on October 15, 1998—the same day as Fanfiction.net—and went down on January 31, 2009.
The website had two primary purposes: 1) to mock fanworks for the humor value, and 2) to supposedly help writers improve their future creations. Most fans tended to focus on the first purpose, and there was vigorous debate about the existence of the site itself, as well as the nature of the comments posted there.
The community's original focus was Star Trek, and its original title was "God Awful Trek Fiction. In roughly May 1999, it dropped the Trek focus and became multi-fandom.
The site was often mentioned in mainstream press articles for reasons that included the site's popularity and size, as well as the site's "side-show," vulgar aspects.Two examples: Yahoo Internet Life "P.S.: Pretty Strange (unknown date, possibly September 2000) and Harry Potter and the purple prose Fans of the innocent boy wizard are in for a shock if they stumble upon fan-fiction websites. (2004). Other examples: (The Sydney Morning Herald) (March 18, 2006), (The Sydney Morning Herald "World Wide Wackos") (unknown date), (The New York Times Book Review "The Widening Web of Digital Lit") (October 03, 2004), (United States TV Guide "Top 10 TV Web Sites")(unknown date) - Updates
There was both a fiction website where excerpts of stories were posted (and mocked), as well as a message board. To give one an ideal of scale, in 2008, the forum/message board had 175,176 posts made by 3,984 registered members.snapshot of forum on November 3, 2008
==Culture, Attitude, and Forum==
In the later days of the site, the header had the tagline "read them and weep" and the main page described itself, warned of explicit material, and had a quote about the site from the New York Times book review:
 
The first paragraph has remained basically unchanged since at least late 2000,Front page via the Wayback Machine on 17 October 2000. but the quote from the Times Book Review and the warning about adult content appeared at some point in the 8 intervening years.
The guestbook and the forums were both completely unmoderated except for the removal of spam,GAFF FAQ, via the Wayback Machine on 18 December 2008.Guidelines (unknown date) which was occasionally a problem.The Site Guru, response to Catseye, 21 April 2004. Archived link. GAFF didn't particularly care about offending authors or hurting their feelings; their FAQ outlines their philosophy pretty clearly:
This sort of attitude (as well as the relative laxness of their forum guidelines, quoted below) got the site TOSsed from several hosts, including a brief stint of having the forums on InvisionFree.
==Media Attention==
The first media attention GAFF (Godawful Trek Fiction, at the time, actually) received was in Yahoo Internet Life "P.S.: Pretty Strange" in a blurb titled "THE WEIRD AND THE WACKY ON THE INTERNET" which was probably posted in September 2000:There's no date on the archived clip, but this website claims that it was September 2000 and the site was still Star Trek only, so that checks out. (Archived version of the site.)
A May 2003 post in a Seattle newspaper, The plot thickens in fan fiction, described GAFF as a good way to find bad fanfiction:
On October 3, 2004, GAFF was featured in the New York Times book review."When you have had your fill of slash, gen and 'ship fiction (fanfic terms for various character entanglements), when you groan at the arrival of each new Mary Sue (a ludicrously empowered author proxy), when you find yourself wishing every story you read had been beta-ed (i.e. edited), then it's time to visit Godawful Fan Fiction, where the worst fan fiction on the Web is filleted with the hot knife of peer criticism. The Darcy/Wickham encounter mentioned above under FanFiction.Net is just one of many scenarios to have been deboned in the gleefully malicious Godawful forums." The Widening Web of Digital Lit by David Orr, October 3, 2004
On November 29, 2004, the site's creator (who used the username The Site Guru but is referred to in the article as "S G") was interviewed for a Scottish newspaper in an article titled Harry Potter and the purple prose Fans of the innocent boy wizard are in for a shock if they stumble upon fan-fiction websites..
Excerpt from the article:
In 2006 two articles in October included GAFF in their overviews of what fanfiction is. Popmatters, on October 2, linked to GAFF and wrote, "The fanfic is a stitch in itself, but it's the snarky commentary that will keep you coming back. For mature readers only."What the fic? Plots thicken as fan-written stories proliferate on the Internet by Cheryl Truman and Heather Chapman. 02 Oct 2006. (Accessed 25 July 2018. Archived) On October 29, The Guardian's article said:
== History ==
In A November 1998, the following announcement appeared in alt.startrek.creative:
GAFF's brief history describes 1998 and 1999:
In the early years GAFF started out as God Awful Trek Fiction, and the userbase grew out of the Star Trek community. As late as 2008 they were apparently being asked about the amount of Star Trek on their site enough to justify leaving a question about it up on their FAQ
The site switched to focusing on other fandoms in 2000, but Star Trek was still prominent. In October 2000, the front page had a banner with Picard on it and the top 4 sections of fic reviews were Star Trek: TOS, Star Trek: DS9, Stark Trek: TNG, and Star Trek: Voyager. The X-Files, Phantom of the Opera, Star Wars, and others were listed below.
Between late December 2001 and late January 2002, the list of fandoms was alphabetized and gained Harry Potter and The Matrix.Front page via the Wayback Machine on 24 January 2001.
"Mary Sue Whipple" was a shared pseud under which many fans wrote badfic.
Snapshots of the second messageboard on voy.com have been archived on the Wayback Machine, for example: May 2001,October 2002,September 2003, and September 2004. The last posts on the voy boards were in late April 2004, although according to the GAFF's own brief history they left those boards in 2003 because they were very popular but had a "clunky interface." The voy boards didn't have HTML enabled for their posters, and a late 2004 exchange between a user and The Site Guru (probably made during the time bexplained why the voy message boards couldn't have HTML enabled:
Between August 2002 and October 2002 the banner on the main page changed from the Picard picture to something that seems like it was probably Star Wars themed; the archived version of the site didn't save the picture but the description was "Begun, this fan fiction war has." The list of fandoms also gained Lord of the Rings,Front page via the Wayback Machine on 17 October 2002. probably in reaction to the Fellowship of the Ring being released in theatres in December 2001.
"Johnny Wizard" was a poster to the vox messageboard who took advantage of the ability to post anonymously and was apparently much-beloved as later iterations of the site had a "Johnny Wizard Memorial Forum" into which all of the trolls were herded.
The site went down in approximately October 2003 and stayed down until approximately February or March 2004, as the Wayback Machine shows the site is down for exceeding daily bandwidth in 08 October 2003, 02 December 2003, 10 January 2004, and 17 February 2004. By late March or so the invisionfree board was up, according to the Wayback Machine, since they have posts from 1 April 2004.
The loss of Johnny Wizard "in the shuffle" of all the site problems is presumably the source of the aforementioned Johnny Wizard Memorial Forum section. The NYT Book Review was quoted on the front page of GAFF, where they're called "gleefully malicious."
In 2007, a user posted a filk about GAFF to the unofficial GAFF LJ community to the tune of Carly Simon's "You're So Vain," changing the lyrics to "Yoooou're so lame. / You prob'ly think this thread is about you."Archived 
At the end of the site the color scheme changed from green to orange. The Site Guru explained on LJ:
In December 2008, it was announced that GAFF would go down for good in January, 2009.Post by The Site Guru to the official GAFF LJ comm on 19 December 2008. It seems that it might have been intended to go down on January 15 according to one post,There's a post on the unofficial GAFF LJ comm referencing "the 15th." and on January 27 The Site Guru noted that he expected it to be dead already.
More history is here.
===Old Site Links===
GAFF moved around pretty often over the years and changed looks a couple of times. For example:
* godawfu.net (offline)
* old site at internettrash.com internettrash.com ("The only place for trashy, tasteless, useless, politically incorrect, silly, stupid, meaningless, obnoxious, waste of bandwidth homepages! Normal & ordinary homepages also welcome! Don't wait, join InternetTrash now!")
* Updates (August 2000-July 2002)
* Forum Guidelines
* Godawful Fan Fiction Archive (early-ish)
* Godawful Fan Fiction Archive (later-ish)
==Fan Reaction==
===A 1998 Discussion at alt.startrek.creative===
Comments below are from Godawful Star Trek Fan Fiction, November 1998:
===A 1999 Discussion at alt.startrek.creative===
In 1999, some fans complained about their fics on alt.startrek.creative being linked to by "Godawful Fan Fiction." One result was a change to alt.startrek.creative's FAQ and bylaws.
From one discussion at FAQ Maintainer's Notes: Please Read (May 29, 1999):
 
===A 2005 Discussion at Fanthropology===
From a discussion at Fanthropology: , June 2005.
===A 2007 Discussion at John/Paul Slash Uncensored===
Comments below are from , a post at John/Paul Slash Uncensored, July 18, 2007:
===A 2015 Discussion at Fail_Fandomanon===
Comments below from: ; archive link part 2; archive link part 3; archive link part 4.
===2018===
Also on fail_fandomanon:
===Other Fan Reaction===
==Further reading==
* Official GAFF LJ comm
* Unofficial GAFF LJ comm
* Encylopedia Dramatica GAFF entry
* Fanthropology discussion
===Similar Sites of the Time===
* Citizens Against Bad Slash
* Godawful Fan Fiction
* SlashFic Hall of Shame
* Bad Buffy
* The Wicked X Witches of Badfic Punishment
* The Bad Fanfiction Terror Squad
* Fanfic's Critics
* Fandom Whore Hates You All
* Feel Our Pain
* The X-Files Fanfic Hall of Shame
* Melvin's Mauve Mansion of Manlove
* Down in the Basement
* No Cookie for You: Bad Buffy Fics
== References ==
Category:Fan CommunitiesCategory:Websites
Category:1990s
Category:2000sCategory:2018 Featured Articles