This is your daily reminder to archive your favorite fandom stuff!!!
I've been a voracious archivist/data hoarder ever since I first got access to a computer, and it's paid off more times than I can count. Just the other day I came across a PDF copy of an analysis post for one of my fandoms. The post was made on an old forum and is the most detailed and interesting analysis of a particular story element I've ever seen. Back in like 2012 I saved the post as a PDF, because even then I saved everything I liked.
Anyway, flash forward to 2025 and I decided to see if the URL included in the document was still live. I wasn't very surprised to see that the forum is long dead. However, even the Wayback Machine had no record of this thread. If I hadn't saved a copy of it way back when, I would have never, ever been able to read this analysis again!
The Internet Archive is sadly not infallible, especially when it comes to things like forum threads. You can do your part by manually saving things to the Wayback Machine, but I also recommend keeping your own archives. Aside from just saving pages as PDFs, I highly recommend a browser extension called SingleFile that lets you archive pages as HTML files.
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*deep breath* FICLAB HAS AN OPTION TO DOWNLOAD A STORY WITH ITS REVIEWS!!!!!
Omg this is huge. For me anyway. I think fic reviews are just as important a part of fandom culture as the fic itself, like itās good to see what the atmosphere surrounding an ancient fanfic was, yāknow? Like how in archaeology/paleontology itās equally important to study the soil an artifact or fossil was found in as it is to study the artifact or fossil itself.
Itās gonna take forever to download, but Iām finally gonna be able to save all the original Embers reviews in their ridiculous proto-discourse glory.
I just wanted to say that I love you tag system! It is so easy to find older posts as well. Thank you for your service. š
Thank you! I had a lot of inspiration from actual archivist bestie @dirtydirtychai whose tags I often rely on too š„°
and shout out to @nattaphum @mellowroxy @gaelley @applenattawin @kinnporschedaily and more (sorry if I missed you! you're a rock star) for all going through and doing the consolidation/archivism too. There's so much content and it moves so fast. even tumblr has its flaws, it's still way more sensible to actually look back upon what happened.
in an ideal world someone could do proper consolidation and archivism like @luckydragon10 has for kp meta but that's such a large task to take on for the volume of stuff we get.
I just want to make sure at least a few things get properly documented before it's lost to the volume of noise on Twitter, and is properly retrievable via tumblr tags š«
Iāve never felt so small yet so powerful to an exhausting degree when it comes to archiving fandom content. Iām learning most of this from scratch and thereās so much to save and so much I started too late to grab, yet every download is a relief, a need to be remembered almost fulfilled. There is so much and my work is so far from done but itās here, in my hands, and for right now itās safe, not as safe as Iād like, but itās safe and mind and I can hold deleted videos and buried fics and make sure someone remembers them, that these stories can live for a little while longer.
I hold the future of what is thought to be forgotten and I am oh so powerful in my work yet oh so small in the sheer amount of quantity let alone any moral conundrums. Still I persist though, one person fighting the tide of history so maybe the stories I loved can be known to just one more person, āWe are here!ā I cry, I hold the ruins of fandoms that used to be bustling and alive and I yell to fill it back up with echoes of what once was āyou will remember us and what we have doneā
Okay, I think Iāve finally found my groove for fic archival. Of course I only figured out what settings and storage style I wanted after Iād already downloaded a few hundred fics, but downloading a few hundred fics was part of my brainās figuring-it-out process, so it canāt be helped. Currently Iām re-downloading everything Iād already downloaded, this time using the parameters Iāve decided upon. Once thatās done...Iāll just keep downloading more.
Iām really liking FicLab - all the settings options left me paralyzed with indecision at first, but after some pondering and reading the advice in the notes of this post, Iāve settled on settings that prioritize preservation.
Save Reviews: Check. Obviously, the reviews are half the fic experience and Iām so glad to have finally found a tool that lets me download them.
Enable Cover: No. Itās a cool feature, but not necessary, and lots of fics on FFdotnet donāt have covers anyway. Iād rather save the filespace.
Paragraph Style: Space Only. Neither FFdotnet nor AO3 use indents as default, and frankly I get a little weirded out when I see indents used in a ficās format cuz itās just so unusual.
Font Style: Sans-Serif. Thereās some back-and-forth on whether serif or sans-serif fonts are more readable, but sans-serif seems to be better for people with dyslexia, and both FFdotnet and AO3 use sans-serif by default.
Punctuation: Original. FicLab is geared more towards creating a pleasant reading experience than it is to archival, so to that end itāll clean up basic punctuation issues. I donāt care about that; Iād rather have these fics saved as they were posted, punctuation mistakes and all.
Scene Breaks: Unchecked. FicLab will try to detect where authors left things like ~oOo~ and insert a proper plain-line scene break there instead; Iām more interested in archiving the fics as-is and saving these whimsical scene breaks authors came up with for posterity.
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I then save at least two copies of each fic I download - one as PDF, one as EPUB. In some cases I also save additional copies without reviews if 1) The fic has more than 200 reviews, 2) The fic has more reviews than words, or 3) I just feel like it.
FicLab names files as āAuthor Name - Fic Nameā and Iām sticking with that, with the addition of ā - with reviewsā for any fic Iāve downloaded the reviews of, which is most of them. Figure itās good to have that info right in the title. Sorting fics by author first seems to be a good approach as well - I went on a fic-downloading spree back in 2017 and was saving things title-first and that was just...a mess.
So my current setup is Fandom Folder > Author Folder > Fics. Not perfect, but itāll do. Organizing fics by author gives me the added bonus of being able to index things better, too - once Iāve downloaded all an authorās fics, I create a rich text document in their folder and copy/paste all their fic titles and summaries in alphabetical order. So at least I have some idea at a glance of what kind of stories that folder contains. For good measure Iām taking a screenshot of the authorās profile too. Yāknow, for posterity.
Can you believe before FicLab I was manually going in and saving every page of reviews as a webpage? Ugh that was so labor-intensive and inefficient space-wise, it made the folders look all cluttered...Iām so glad I found FicLab. Iāve been procrastinating on downloading fics because I didnāt want to download them without also saving their reviews; Iām so glad I no longer have that excuse. Itās so much easier this way!
Iām still glad I went on that fic-saving spree back in 2017 though, because...several of the fics I saved back then are gone now. Looks like the authors just deleted their FFN accounts or something. These were old fics too - I wouldāve thought theyād be safe, but it just goes to show that you never know when someone will just delete everything and disappear. Iām glad Iāve got copies of those fics in some form, even if not with my new efficient system.
As an aside, lo-fi on youtube apparently does wonders for my concentration on this project. This is tedious work but I feel nice and calm. Funny; normally I canāt stand music while Iām working, or doing anything in general.
Looks like Iāve re-downloaded everything to my liking now, so Iām gonna start spelunking through the depths of FFdotnet to find other fics to save. Idk what Iām gonna do with them, exactly. No grand plans. But FFdotnet will go down someday, and when it does, I want to be able to say that I saved everything I loved from it. An archive of my own, lol. Itāll be a drop in the ocean compared to what weāll inevitably lose, but every little bit of fandom history counts.
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Itās gonna be a while before I get through the next 4 pages of Lu Ten fics, but once Iām done I have a few more ideas for how to organize my archiving batches:
Download everything in the Dai Li category (obviously)
Other minor characters to focus on: Song, Jin, Teo, Haru, Kuzon
Find every Ursa fic from before The Search was released
Search āsongficā and download whatever comes up
Search ācrackā and download whatever comes upĀ
Search āhigh schoolā and download whatever comes up
Find the Crossroads of Destiny spitefics
Find the series finale spitefics
Download whateverās gotten the most reviews I guess
Itās been a while since I last did any fic archival and Iām in the mood to trawl around FFdotnet today. Anyone have any suggestions on fics I should save? I mainly archive ATLA, Tolkien, and Star Wars, the smaller and less known the better.
Iām using FicHub since FFN went and broke FanfictionDownloader, if anyone else wanted to go save their old faves.
