Dean should have done more of those elder siblingisms like each time Sam disagrees with him he should have whipped out the "well I don't have to listen to a guy we found as a baby in a dumpster behind a Denny's in Wisconsin" or "that's rich coming from someone who was a toad until that witch made you a real boy" and grown ass man Sam would immediately revert to ten year old Sam and be like "THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN"
Utility for downloading fanfiction in bulk from the Archive of Our Own - nianeyna/ao3downloader
Well folks I've been sitting on this little script for ages and finally decided to just go ahead and publish it. What does it do?
you can enter any ao3 link - for example, to your bookmarks or an author's works page - and automatically download all the works and series that are linked from that page in the format of your choice. if there are multiple pages, the script will page through results for you until there are no more fics to download
you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters. you can also check for new fics in series!
if you're a dinosaur who uses Pinboard, you can back up all the Pinboard bookmarks you have that link to ao3
don't worry about crashing ao3 with this! this baby takes forever to run, guaranteed. anyway ao3 won't let me download stuff too fast even if I wanted to so it's quite safe
I've been working on this for about two years and it's finally in a state where it does everything I want and isn't breaking every two seconds, so I thought it was time to share! I hope y'all get some use out of it.
note: this is a standalone desktop app that DOES NOT DO ANYTHING aside from automate clicking on buttons on the ao3 website. Everything this script does, can be done by hand using ao3's regular features. It is just a utility to facilitate personal backups for offline reading - there's no website or server, I have no access to or indeed interest in the fics other people download using this. No plagiarism is happening here, please don't come after me.
---
2024 update
This is now a fairly mature project that I've been maintaining for quite a while (3 years?? omg), so let's do an FAQ
Question 1: Wait, a python script? That's scary! I don't know anything about running python scripts!
Answer: You don't need to! When I published this program I knew that there would be people who would want to use it that did not know anything about running python scripts. To that end I have provided extremely detailed instructions (accessible at the link above), which have been fine-tuned over the last three years to make them as absolutely easy to follow as possible. Not only do you not need to know anything about python scripts to use this program, you don't even need to know anything about computers at all. Try it and see! ;)
Question 2: I already use Calibre and FanFicFare to download fanfics - isn't this the same thing?
Answer: Nope! In fact, one of the reasons I created ao3downloader is that I tried FanFicFare and found it unsuited to my needs.
- FanFicFare requires a lot of configuration to work well. I wanted something that would get out of my way and just do what I needed it to do with as little prompting as possible. ao3downloader has sensible default behavior that will do what most people want it to do without too much pre-work.
- FanFicFare doesn't handle multi-page downloads very well - you need to enter the link to each page of results individually. What if I want to download dozens, or even hundreds of pages of fanfic? (Honesly, even two pages is too tedious for me...) I want to download all of the results I'm interested in, not just one page at a time. ao3downloader can download up to five thousand pages of fanfiction in one go if you're willing to let it run for that long... and that limit is only because 5,000 is the maximum amount of pages that ao3 itself will show you in a search result.
- FanFicFare doesn't handle ao3's rate limit very well - you need to babysit it and fine-tune the amount of time it pauses between downloads. I want the downloading process to handle itself, so I can completely ignore it until it's finished. ao3downloader will automatically pause when it hits the rate limit, and automatically resume when the rate limit expires. You can also quit ao3downloader entirely, and it will do its best to resume at the same point you left off when you turn it on again.
- FanFicFare uses its own download format, which doesn't match the files I download from ao3 directly - I want them to be consistent. ao3downloader downloads fics using the native download buttons from ao3, so it's exactly the same file as if you downloaded them manually.
- FanFicFare has an option to check incomplete fics for updates, but it relies on you telling it which fics in your library are incomplete. I don't want to have to keep track of that. ao3downloader can scan your existing files for incomplete fics and identify them for you, then check ao3 for updates and only re-download the ones that have new chapters. (It can also scan for incomplete series, and do the same thing!)
Question 2a: That's all great, but I need Calibre's organizational features.
Answer: Me too! That's why I import all the fics I download using ao3downloader into my Calibre library after I'm done downloading them.
Question 2b: That's all great, but I prefer FanFicFare's download format and I don't want the native ao3 one.
Answer: ao3downloader has a special option for this which instead of downloading actual files, will simply harvest a list of links to give to FanFicFare. You won't get ao3downloader's rate limit handling or automatic update functionality, but you will get to avoid entering individual page links! If you choose, you can also include detailed fic metadata in the links download (such as title, author, summary, tags, etc) which will be saved in spreadsheet format.
Question 3: Do I need to enter my ao3 login information? What happens when I enter my login information into this program?
Answer: You only need to enter your login information if you want to use ao3downloader to download archive-locked fics, or to download a page that is only accessible when you are logged in (such as your history or subscriptions). Hopefully the reason behind this requirement is obvious. If you don't need those things, you can simply skip the login prompt and the program will work fine! That said, if you do log in, here's what will happen. 1) ao3downloader will save your login information to a file so you don't have to enter it every time. (If you don't want your login information to be saved, you can turn this behavior off using the included .ini file - just open up the file named settings.ini and read the instructions inside to configure it.) 2) then, ao3downloader will use your login information to log itself in to ao3... aaaand that's it. It's not stored or sent anywhere other than your own computer and archiveofourown.org. In fact, there is absolutely no tracking or spyware in ao3downloader of any kind - I don't even know how many people have downloaded it, let alone what you type into it. And that's the way I like it!
Question 4: I thought of a feature that doesn't exist yet that would be really cool! Can you add it?
Answer: Very possibly! Feel free to contact me via one of the options listed in the readme (that's the page linked above) if you have a feature request.
Question 5: Do I have to pay you?
Answer: Never.
Question 6: But I really want to pay you... do you have a ko-fi?
Answer: Yes. It's on the github page in the sidebar.
Question 7: Does it work on mobile?
Answer: No. :( but watch this space... there may be certain things on the horizon. we'll see!
I feel like I need to share this because idk if Europeans are familiar with the presence of Aldi in the US, but at least especially in my area they’ve been growing a lot recently. Like Aldi bought out some local failing grocery chains where I live (Louisiana) and have opened Aldis in all these somewhat rural communities and small towns, which for the record I’m fine with
But as a result of this they are advertising a lot more in my area and also in many cases, the people in these areas have never been confronted with Aldi or any European grocery store. So the ads that Aldi is pushing out to its new US customer base feature a cowboy shopping at Aldi who is explaining to new Aldi customers how Aldi works. Like this cowboy is explaining you gotta put a quarter in the shopping cart and why there are very little name brands. A cowboy is how they want to reach their American customer base. They gave us a cowboy
when i was a tiny baby queer (aka a 24-year-old), i went to my first pride festival probably three months after i kicked ex-gay therapy to the curb and came out to my parents. being the people they are, my parents came with me. they weren’t really sure about this whole gay thing, but they loved me and wanted me to be safe and happy and wanted to be involved in what was important to me, so they came along. (i also think my mother still might have thought i might get drugged or murdered or beaten by a protester of which there were plenty.)
anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.
i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”
and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.
“What?” i say.
“…it’s a cock and a pussy, Jules,” she says flatly, and that is the story of how i died at the age of 24 while attending my first pride festival.
when i was at walgreens (at 3 in the morning which explains all of this) the cashier was talking to her coworker about how shed rather be a werewolf than a vampire because vampires are condemned to hell but werewolves arent and then she asked me what i thought and i said vampire because im already condemned to hell and she said in the nicest tone of voice “i dont think anybody is condemned to hell….” paused, stared at me for a few moments, and added on “…not even gay people”
“It's the best and the worst thing, all at once. It's like the only thing. It's the only thing I've ever felt. It's like I'm fucking... high off of you, or something” Half Man, 2026
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
snowghoul
kaledo-art
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
janainaart
gummygunk
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
titsay
