Fanwork Archiving

[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.

Comments

[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?)

[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.

[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.)

[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.