We Lonely Here Mostly Too

Lots of Reddit threads on FFN recently having trouble.

Last May there were posts about FFN being abandoned. Anyone have links to those?

Sometime last year there was someone on tumblr dot come going “I’ve seen this before, folks, FFN is going down”, but I think it’s been nearly a year since that

so FFN could have been abandoned for two years at this point, as long as they paid for hosting and domain name in big enough lumps, and it'll go down in a dramatic fireball when one of those prepayments runs out

The official twitter account went pretty abruptly silent a year ago, huh

The fun thing is that at least for me, the tweets that both FFN and FictionPress list on their front page have timestamps that are like “10h ago”, but if you look actually through their twitter thread, those are actually from January 2021. I don’t know if the thing is actually actively dying, but it certainly isn’t very alive right now.

(As always: Always make sure you have a local backup of all your fanfics. You never know what might happen, to this or indeed any other fanfic site.)

I just hope that if it’s dying, the people in charge make sure to contact ArchiveOfOurOwn staff before it goes under, so that they can perform a mass fanfic rescue. I’m sure there are already plans drawn up for that eventuality, as ambitious as it would be.

Fanfictiondownloader.net will download any story from fanfiction.net into whatever format you like (PDF, epub, mobi, rtf, and several others). It won’t be an online archive available to fandom as a whole, but it means you can at least keep a personal copy for yourself.

I recommend doing this for any fic you like on ff.net.

Just in case.

As a Fandom Old, I can tell you that it really really sucks when an archive just disappears and you can’t find your favorite fic anywhere else.

So I know someone who’s trying to perform the fanfic rescue flightfoot is talking about.

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE due to the way ff.net is coded. EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SAVED BY HAND. Which means actively retyping it. Word by word.

IF YOU WANT TO ASSIST WITH THE PRESERVATION OF FANFICTION HISTORY, NOW IS THE TIME TO DO IT.

Pick a fandom. Any fandom. I’d honestly recommend starting with the ones with very small amounts of fic because those are most at risk for complete fandom loss. Start saving. Do it by screenshots, if you have to. Do it comprehensively—start on the last page and save every. Single. One. Make sure you include the header and any author’s notes. EDIT NOTHING, ONLY DOCUMENT. Yes, if that means someone misspelled something or you spot a misnamed character, you need to keep that error. If you can form a “network” with friends to save all of a fandom’s works, DO IT.

Do not skip any fics. We are not the arbiters of what “should” be saved. If you can get access to the forums in any way, save whatever you can access. I know some of that has been saved by the Wayback Machine, but not all. I can already tell you research into My Immortal has been rendered uncompleteable by the loss of the forums. That’s going to be true for ALL fics. Save whatever you can reach.

I strongly recommend using the following format for whatever you save, so it can be indexed later: fandom_fictitle_author_datefirstposted.fileextension. So for example (I’m making this fic up for demonstration purposes, don’t bother looking for it), naruto_blessing_ichigo98_07192009 would be Blessing, by ichigo98, posted in the Naruto fandom on 19 July 2009. This provides all the information needed to see if a fic has been cross posted to the AO3, and to run a search engine to see if it’s archived elsewhere.

We may not be able to save it all, but we need to save as much as possible. I can start a Google spreadsheet or something if people want to have a database to keep from getting the same three fandoms over and over.

If we’re going to rescue it, THE TIME IS NOW.

As of today, September 17, 2022, fanfictiondownloader.net does not work to archive things from fanfiction.net. However, retyping everything by hand isn't the only option - copy and paste is still working for me in Firefox operating on Windows 10.

As previous people in the chain have stated, the fact that the writing has been on the wall for FF.net for more than a year does NOT mean we were wrong - it means we are running out of time. The administration really does appear to have abandoned the site. So whenever the bill comes due for the hosting (and you can indeed buy hosting and domain names etc in large chunks - like decade-long chunks, in some cases) or whatever, and that doesn't get paid? The site is going down.

There is no FF.net lead mission to archive or save it. There is no "I hope FF.net's staff contacts AO3 so the fic can be archived." If we want it saved, it is up to US to do it, and the time to do it is NOW.

Even if you literally go in there and pick a fic at random, EVERYTHING HELPS. Small fandoms, large fandoms, fandoms you're sure somebody else has already covered - doesn't matter. Do it anyway.

Please help. This isn't a huge and co-ordinated effort. There's no phone tree. If you are reading this, I am begging you personally to help. Even if you only archive ten things - THAT HELPS!

Start in the fandoms you love or start in a fandom you've never heard of! Just please!! Help us save this stuff before it's lost forever!

So, uh... if there's any stories you like on FanFiction.net and you want to be able to read those in the future, NOW is the time to back that shit up.

this is like watching the titanic go down

everyone toss a life ring, even if it's just one

Wait - what? Is something going on with FFN???

If you scroll down my blog a bit, you will see people talking about it.

At the moment, there's nothing official, but there's a lot of buzz going around about the site not being updated/maintained by the admin.

It looks as though the domain is still registered for a few years, but if any of those payments aren't met, well, bye-bye site. Mostly people are just trying to be proactive about archiving things so we don't lose a shit ton of fandom like we did during ye olden days of archive purges.

i feel like ao3 would have an answer to this?

Unfortunately, FF.net is designed not to be scraped onto Ao3. It was a deliberate choice on behalf of the people at FF.net, who back then (and still) wanted nothing to do with Ao3.

I'm not saying Ao3 doesn't have a plan. I'm just saying I wouldn't assume they do.

dang looks like the Internet Archive may not have much of it either, not sure. There is saving activity, but not sure any focused archive work for entire stories. I asked on one of the archive guys on twitter about it. They sometimes mobilize a special team to archive stuff if they learn a site is about to vanish, maybe they can do something? Also gotta find that ffn archiver I saw mentioned and see if it can be updated to work or something (well, I am sure it *can* be, but IDK that I have the skill to do that)

Edit: oh never mind, the downloader isn't open source. 🤦‍♀️

Hey, this might be the reincarnation of that one?

In any case, here is a downloader project that looks modern and maintained, and of course open source

Another shortcut just for your personal use if you want to save your favorites, CTRL + P, Save as PDF. This is a quick and dirty way to just grab fics chapter by chapter while the collective folks figure out a good way to get the fics archived in the meantime.

Just to reiterate that reblog from a while ago about ffnet dying and how one day probably soon we're gonna blink and it'll just be gone:

I'm trying to make backups of the few things I'm not too embarrassed to keep from Way Back When (because I'm also like 4+ computers beyond what I originally wrote that shit on and some of it got lost in data migrations)

And guys

The password recovery is NON FUNCTIONAL.

That site is circling the drain, so if you've got stuff on there you want to keep, go save it now.

This has been a PSA from your local digital archivist/ fandom old.

PSA for my fellow fanfic writers if they have stuff on FFN like I do. I wrote all my stuff in Word docs and then uploaded them, but I’m reblogging for anyone who may have written fics in the Document Manager and then posted the chapters, which means your stuff’s possibly not saved or backed up somewhere. It’s a good idea to check if there’s anything you want to keep if FFN does go down.