I will also say that part of OEAM's appeal was that we allowed any type of fic - all ratings and quality. I was and am a firm believer that people who want to write fanfiction need a home for their work without judgment. And we allowed Real Person fiction. I never made a judgement that it was wrong or immoral because we were all adults and knew that it was all fiction.

By the same token, I avoided the sites that seemed geared toward this exclusivity - which has always been a problem in the Tolkien fandom, as far as I can tell. The nature of the original works themselves seems to leave a bit of a division in the fandom.