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 goingĀ āIāve seen this before, folks, FFN is going downā, but I think itās 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 itāll 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 likeĀ ā10h agoā, but if you look actually through their twitter thread, those are actually from January 2021. I donāt know if the thing is actually actively dying, but it certainly isnāt 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 itās dying, the people in charge make sure to contact ArchiveOfOurOwn staff before it goes under, so that they can perform a mass fanfic rescue. Iām 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 wonāt 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 canāt find your favorite fic anywhere else.
So I know someone whoās 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. Iād 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 comprehensivelyāstart on the last page and save every. Single. One. Make sure you include the header and any authorās 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 ānetworkā with friends to save all of a fandomās works, DO IT.
Do not skip any fics. We are not the arbiters of what āshouldā 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. Thatās 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 (Iām making this fic up for demonstration purposes, donāt 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 itās 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 weāre 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 isnāt 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 doesnāt get paid? The site is going down.
There is no FF.net lead mission to archive or save it. There is no āI hope FF.netās staff contacts AO3 so the fic can be archived.ā 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 youāre sure somebody else has already covered - doesnāt matter. Do it anyway.
Please help. This isnāt a huge and co-ordinated effort. Thereās 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 youāve never heard of! Just please!! Help us save this stuff before itās lost forever!
hey Les Mis fandom olds, remember the days when LJ and forums were where we hung out but FFN was our archive of reference? idk if i have the personal bandwidth to spearhead a full-blown preservation effort right now, but Nowās The Time and thereās lots of history lying around there. one of the other reblogs mentions Fichub Dot Net, btw, as a FFN downloader that still works as of September 2022.
If you go to ffn and ācanāt copy-paste thingsā, replace the āwwwā in the url with āmā, which will take you to the mobile site on desktop, and you should be good to go, although check various browsers if you run into trouble, etc.
You do NOT need to retype anything by hand. If the above tip stops working there are also ways to download the text of webpages in ways where you might need to deal with wonky formatting shit, but it is basically never true that āyou need to retype it by handā of anything ON THE INTERNET. There is no text on the internet that is unscrapable, you just need to dig around a bit to find out how, sometimes.




















