extrapenguin

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extrapenguin

In light of recent OTW revelations (full receipts at

synonymous, tl;dr is their Trust & Safety practices are a nightmare and their response to a whistleblower is to have Legal commit defamation by implication heavily implying that volunteer was behind the CSEM spam attacks last year):

satsuma posted about posting, sharing, and saving fic outside AO3; the most useful might be

melannen's How to Make Your Own Fanfiction Archive (using NeoCities), and

nianeya's AO3 works downloader (apparently it'll page through all subpages automatically? neat)

I might spend the weekend scraping the HTML of my works from AO3 and then making my own NeoCities page –

tei has even set up a fanfiction webring! – as a form of participating in a past I skipped over. I might also slide into other applicable archives. (Melannen is archiving small book fandom fic! I have a bunch that fit the bill.)

ETA: I made one! Extremely bare, but upcoming.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lannamichaels

I've been using nianeya's tool the last couple of days and I will note that it's very finicky. I couldn't use the most recent version of python, and had to go back to 3.10.8 instead. I've also had to delete and re-unzip a few times, including once when I mistyped my password. Having a password is only to get locked fics, so I gave it the username and password for an old account I'd made once when I was testing things.

It does page through all subpages automatically, but you should check the counts to make sure it got everything. I've had to rerun it to get everything, but it doesn't redownload fics already in its folder, so it won't get everything a second time. I clear out the fics anyway and put them into folders by fandom and author, but if you want to re-download a WIP that updated, make sure to delete the old file first.

Its killer features for me are 1) the fics are retitled so it starts with the fic ID, which means I don't end up with "Double Drabble.pdf" and "Double Drabble (1).pdf" from other download methods cropping the file names, and no idea which is which, or, worse, overwriting, and 2) it will download the HTML easily. My original method of AO3 downloading was to shove all the links into my download manager, but it ignores html files. And then I used the DownThemAll firefox extension, but that had the same issue with file names. That program automatically retitling the fics and putting in the ID number is worth the headache of getting that program to work.

From:

melannen

Does it download just the web pages, or does it download the actual export downloads? I'm hoping to do a lot of epub downloads from AO3 once I get some ducks in a row, but I couldn't tell from a skim of the docs what that tool actually downloads (I assume just the webpages?)

From:

lannamichaels

It gets the download files from the download button. You can tell it which you want; I told it html, epub, and pdf. And it will remember those selections, which is nice. I'll send you an email with a sample, which will also show you what the auto file names are (don't trust it to necessarily get an author's full username).

It's a really cool tool! But I very nearly gave up on it from trying to get it to work the first time.

From:

melannen

Oh, cool! Well, maybe it'll be worth fighting it to work, then. (I have a tool I was playing with that could do the scraping the page and pulling downloads - but I couldn't figure out the password security stuff, which is well beyond my coding ability.)

From:

extrapenguin

FWIW, I had an extremely easy time downloading all my fics. I'm not sure how setup is on Windows, but for Linux, it was smooth as a dream.

From:

extrapenguin

None of my fics are archive-locked, so haven't had to fuss around with passwords or anything. It also seems my chronic lateness in updating, well, anything has finally paid off, as my python was 3.10.8 already and usage went swimmingly. Thank you for the warnings, though.

From:

dhampyresa

Thank you for the links.

From:

extrapenguin

You're welcome! It's been fun setting up my own little archive. So far I've done all the art and IF, most of the vids, and absolutely none of the fic.

From:

trobadora

I really love that we're reinventing webrings, OMG.

as a form of participating in a past I skipped over

Hee! Great way to put it. I never had a website back when that was the thing, but I'm feeling very nostalgic over it all as well. *g*

From:

extrapenguin

I had a very casual non-fannish website that absolutely no-one ever looked at (well, I guess it was the filehost for the one time I wanted to link someone to a document I'd written?), so I'm not new to manually writing HTML and am in the sweet spot of being nostalgic for the thing without having any inconvenient memories of the real era.