mini's fanfic stuff?

[ffnpreservationproject]

Time to get to work.

Before anything else, we need spreadsheets. This is quite the endeavor, so if you want to help, I'd be much appreciative! (Please don't just start a sheet on your own. There's a method I've got going.)

The plan is to give each genre its own spreadsheet document--so anime will have one, books will have one, TV shows will have one, and so on and so forth. Within these, each genre will have 28 tabs: one for each letter of the alphabet, one for titles beginning with a number or punctuation mark, and one for fandoms over 100 works long. Why 100? Because that's about the point I estimate we'll have to start breaking a fandom down into chunks for people to save. Obviously you can save as many as you want, but you'll be limited to claiming chunks of 100 at a time.

Here's why I'm asking for help with this part of the project: in the anime/manga section, the letter A alone has easily 100 titles. And that's just one letter, in just one section. The letter S looks to be three times that. You can imagine having to do this for nine separate genres. So if a couple of people could help me, I can grant access to the master sheets and get examples filled in. All you'd have to do is copy the template and start copy/pasting titles. It's time-consuming, but easy.

Please respond TO THIS POST by 21 September 2022 if you're interested in helping with this stage of the project! I'd like to be able to start collecting an actual archive of saved material by 30 September, and the more hands onboard the less we all have to do to make that happen. Please do not indicate your interest by DM or asks--while I appreciate the people who've reached out to me that way to get started, it's really hard to keep track of.

Let's get moving!

[minimaul]

Hey - if you're serious about archiving FFN, please reach out to me - we have a whole fanfic archivist community that automates this work, rather than doing it by hand.

We have multiple people with pretty complete copies of FFN for fanfic (not communities or reviews, atm) - not just one or two categories, but all ~12k categories, with >7 million fics.

I'm the operator of portkey-archive.org as well, so while that's a lot smaller on scale, we've learned a lot since then! edit: I'm not super familiar with tumblr, but I'm also active on reddit and discord.

[rosethornewrites]

Lots of Reddit threads on FFN recently having trouble.

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

[into-september]

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

[alexseanchai]

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

[into-september]

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

[trainsinanime]

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.)

[flightfoot]

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.

[beatrice-otter]

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.

[prismatic-bell]

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.

[comradesepsis]

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!

[werewolf-cuddles]

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.

[anannua]

this is like watching the titanic go down

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

[minimaul]

There’s a whole community around archiving fanfic - it’s fairly private because it can be quite controversial in fan communities, but it’s a thing.

I operate portkey-archive.org already, and that one was much less organised than FFN (that’s why there’s more broken data). It’s perfectly possible for a competent solo developer to scrape the whole of these sites. For example, I have a full archive of FFN already - currently 7307039 stories. This gets updated generally *daily*, and I've been capturing content since early 2013. There are other independent ones too that update on their own schedules.

We’re not reliant on people manually saving stories to keep this all archived - by all means, save what you want to personally keep, but I don’t think there’s a real risk of it all disappearing from the internet.

The FFN app is still pretty actively developed - that’s where their time goes right now, and why the site is so stale - but it’s the same data as the site itself. Given that, I don't think FFN is really much at risk of suddenly disappearing.

But if it did, I think an archive site for FFN would pop up pretty quickly :)