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!
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 Now’s The Time and there’s 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 ‘can’t copy-paste things’, replace the ‘www’ in the url with ‘m’, 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 ‘you need to retype it by hand’ 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.
https://fichub.net is working as an exporter / downloader as of 9/20/22.
