I mean... with all this stuff re: denise in mind, *is* there an alternative if the archive goes down? if otw is so abusive and incompetent an org as to be unsalvageable?
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We would disperse to various sites.
Nothing current and good has the ability to host the level of traffic AO3 gets.
No. Nothing is ready to take up AO3's workload.
Squidgeworld.org is the closest. It doesn't have the same capacity but it does have the same structure, and it would try to beef up capacity.
The OTW is not going away.
The OTW was designed, at its core, for stability. For the ability to withstand any level of fandom drama (internal or external), media attention, or hostile activism from religious nuts, conservative politicians, or assimilationist "progressives."
Some events that shaped the structure of the OTW:
Strikethrough/Boldthrough, when "concerned citizens," not happy that Livejournal was brushing off their complaints, complained to advertisers about the horrible stuff their ads were being shown next to. So the advertisers complained to LJ, and LJ responded by deleting hundreds of journals that were not, until that point, in violation of their TOS. OTW decision: NO ADVERTISERS. Ever. Of any sort. Also no external host company, because that's subject to the same problems. We are done with letting outsiders tell us what is and isn't fit to put on a website.
FanLib: A "fanfic hosting" site with contests sponsored by tv shows. NSFW was hidden from public view; you had to be logged in to even know it existed on the site. Fics were rated 1-5 stars; you could search for the highest rated stuff. (Not: Highest-rated per fandom. It didn't really separate fandoms.) The contests were full of "you give us permission to use this work in any way we want, forever, no take-backs, but if you win, you get a t-shirt and your name in the scrolling credits after a tv episode." Its forums were a tangled mess of drama. The site lasted less than a year and then evaporated when the owners found a buyer for their software. OTW decision: No option for buy-out, ever. Nonprofits cannot be converted to for-profit companies; if Disney decides AO3 is the next best source for movie scripts and wants to give the OTW twenty million dollars for it... the OTW can't accept.
Detention: a Snape/Harry fanfic archive. (This one's less well-known, but several Snarry fans were among the core group involved with AO3's founding.) This was, at one point, the premier ship archive for Snape/Harry. Everyone loved it. But. The owner got into a fight with her co-mod and yanked the whole site one night with no warning. Snarry fans spent weeks crawling through Google to find cached versions of the stories, sometimes to give to the original authors who didn't have copies of them. OTW decision: No single person will have pull-the-plug permission. No amount of internal fighting amongst the board, committees, volunteers, paid staff if there ever is any, will have the right to say "nah I quit" and pull the archive down. (Some people do have pull-the-plug ability, but not permission. There are people on the coding side of things who could wipe the archive. But (1) they'd be in legal trouble for doing so and (2) there are backups.)
(Side note: the OTW decision parts are not all directly related to the causes mentioned. These are "three things that happened" and "some things the OTW built into their structure, partially inspired by these three things.")
In 2015, a few days after the election, the entire existing board resigned, leaving the whole org in the hands of the two new electees (who had to appoint 5 more people to the board).
Most of fandom today does not know this, because an event that would destroy most nonprofits was barely even noticed outside of the official communications channels.
Some of the OTW's problems - a lot of the OTW's problems - are the glacially slow pace at which it makes changes.
"Hey this would be a good thing to do" comes up, goes around gets agreed on, someone volunteers to look into the practical logistics, someone else mentions how it would affect this-or-that committee and yet another someone else starts putting together a list of feature requirements, and then there's costs to discuss, and legalities, and hey now we have a different committee head here or there and they need to be brought up to date on the project, and someone publicly posts some rumors they've heard about it so another committee has to be brought in to explain what's really going on, and then there's rumor-squashing both internal and external to deal with, and somewhere in that mess is a need for actual progress on the original plan. Which is slow. Very slow.
Note that all of this is unpaid volunteers working in their extra time. Sometimes whoever was managing most of it has a life event - change of jobs or address, gain or lose a family member, gets sick, goes to school/graduates, etc. - and the amount of time they have to pour into the OTW plummets.
The OTW is designed to function, business-as-usual, while all of that is going on.
It is possible the current round of communications, complaints, activism, are the start of another 2015-esque org-wide shakedown and changeover.
...If so, that won't be visible from the outside, until a handful of new features get released. They won't be obviously connected to the changes.
Even if Denise is correct about the OTW being out of compliance with various data laws... legal action about that kind of thing can take years to process. There is no "what if the OTW goes down tomorrow;" the OTW is not megaupload (and takes care to not become megaupload) (which, although it did vanish overnight, also had years of legal complaints involved... it wasn't a secret that it was at risk of gov't action).
If you trust nothing else about the OTW... believe that it knows how to say, "This problem? WIP. Not abandoned. Will update eventually."
Whether or not it updates is a separate problem. But it sure does know how to sit there in a holding pattern.
Itâs pretty hilarious how many people donât remember the whole Board quitting.
