Petition Against the Tamora Pierce Category Change

In the latest lot of reorganization on the website http://www.fanfiction.net the Tamora Pierce section was split into new categories. These changes were unexpected and have caused much confusion and distress within the community. The reasons why we find these changes so distressing and why this petition has been started are:

- Readers now have to look through 9 different categories to find new stories.

- Stories that were finished or abandoned by authors who have left the site will never be changed into their appropriate categories.

- Stories cannot be found through the search function of the site as their locations are now unknown.

- The characters in the two universes that Tamora Pierce has created (Tortall and Emelan) often recur within each series and this creates a large amount of crossover within the 5 series in the Tortall universe and the 4 in Emelan.

- Due to the old format where everything was in one category, many authors have stories that are a compilation of drabbles or one-shots that are spread across many of the series. Therefore, these fan fictions cannot be re-homed into the new categories

- Writing fan fiction often means including characters from several different series in each universe.

- The 'characters' filter in the Protector of the Small category is missing many vital characters and the main character's name is spelt 'Kelandry' when it is actually 'Keladry'.

- The titles of the categories are inconsistent ('Immortals Quartet, Tamora Pierce' and 'Beka Cooper series') and add to the confusion that has been created by the changes.

- Stories that are set within one of the universes (Tortall and Emelan) but outside of the time frame that each series covers cannot be placed into the new categories.

- 8 of the 9 new categories are missing character lists.

- The old category which has been renamed 'Song of the Lioness' still has the option to sort by "Tortall" and "Emelan" which makes the situation even more confusing as many authors are still unaware of the changes.

-There are now 3 categories labelled 'Immortals' and many fan fictions are being misplaced despite the author tags.

- The changes reduce the number of readers and authors who are willing to look for and publish fan fiction. Many author's have noticed a drastic drop in their hit counts since the changes occurred and the number of new fan fictions added to the archive has been slowed to a trickle - this also reduces the number of page views which has an adverse affect on fanfiction.net's popularity.

- Though the Tamora Pierce section does have a growing number of fan fictions archived within in it, the number is nowhere near as prolific as that of the Twilight section or the Harry Potter section.

-There are many fan fictions that use original characters to explore Tamora Pierce's realms. These stories usually involve characters from many of the series and do not fit into the time frame that is covered by the books which makes it impossible to archive them.

-The crossover function that fanfiction.net currently has only allows for two categories to be selected whereas fan fictions in the Tamora Pierce section frequently involve three, four and even five of the different series.

This is only a list of the main reasons, there are still many more.