seperis:

mikkeneko:

k-vichan:

k-vichan:

Take it from someone who has been around the fandom block: 

fanfiction.net is dying.

all the signs are there. 

if you have no other record of any fics you have there… you might wanna… like… do something about that. 

Whoops. I did not intend for this post to blow up in the way it did. I’m not saying this is gonna happen tomorrow or even this year. I don’t have any inside information, and I’m purely basing it off of past experience. They could surprise us. Who knows?

The signs I’m seeing are based off of watching other fandom-driven websites in their end days.

The biggest glaring red flag: they no longer have any visible active moderation team or admins that are working on Fanfiction.net specifically. Reports are going unanswered on everything from plagiarism to abuse to page-breaking ads. Emails are not returned. Twitter mentions are never addressed.

Based off of their limited Twitter activity, all of their resources appear to have been funneled to FictionPress, leaving Fanfiction.net to flounder. If a website does not have anyone actively attending to it, it will eventually die.

The abuse alone could drive users from the website. When users are receiving repeated death threats and they have no way of curtailing the abuse or banning abusive users from messaging them, users will eventually just leave. Admins would have the capability of blocking the IP addresses of people sending abusive reviews and messages, but… what admins?

The code update that went through a few years ago that broke many old fics was never fixed. Many users are reporting major issues in uploading fics. The more they leave the site unattended, the more things will break.

The domain is registered through 2028, but if they keep going in the way that they are sooner or later it’s just going to wind up as a barely-functioning corpse of a website.

I am convinced that the only reason they leave it up is to collect ad revenue. If users continue to leave due to abuse and unreliable service, that ad revenue is going to tank.

I’ve seen this happen to so many websites over the years, and they rarely - if ever - get a revival.

But again - they could surprise us. I’m not counting on it, though. Nobody’s home anymore.

I would like to introduce people to FanfictionDownloader .

It is a little program that does just what it says. You install it, open it, enter the story URL, and it will generate a file in your preferred e-reader format.

Whether the OP is right or not that FFN’s doom is nigh… I think it’s a good idea to back up one’s work regularly anyway, yes?

I’d recommend if possible backing up your fic sooner than later.

When the backend starts breaking down, the ads permanently break the stylesheets, or the front end starts decaying from lack of maintenance, your choices will be to save as html or copy/paste one.at.a.time.

I’ve had to do it on a dying archive and on my own site when it went down, and not only to my own fic but an entire archive; I’ve had to do it from goddamn wayback because a site was so non-functional I couldn’t get whole page load even in view source.

I still have nightmares about cleaning endless files of wayback and shitty site code to get the actual story.

To put it another way: ff.net is old, like among the oldest fanfic sites on the web.  It’s old and it’s huge and unless its deliberately taken down, it will die slow and messy; this is The Decline and Fall of the FF.Net   Do not wait for the Visigoths to invade, the Germanic tribes to unite, or a series of military coups to splinter the empire; that did not work for Rome and then we got the Dark Ages and no toilets or indoor plumbing in western civilization for a thousand years.

If you don’t want to go back to chamber pots, Bubonic Plague, and a sepia toned world, download your fic.