#back up your stuff
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.
This is well-timed, because I logged on there a couple months ago to back up all my old fics. Put in my username and password. Someone else’s account information loaded up. I literally logged into some stranger’s account with my own user info. My fics were there, but the profile (including the user ID number) was someone else’s. I took a bunch of screenshots and sent in a support email aaaaaaaand nothing. I managed to snag all my fics and that’ll be it for me for that site. I don’t know wtf is going on there but it ain’t good.
Reblogging again because my friend mentioned being locked out of her account and ff.net blocks people from copy pasting, so she was afraid her fic would be lost forever when the site eventually goes down.
If you are in danger of losing all your old things, I found a reddit thread with a number of work arounds so you can get your fic off the site.
As of 26 March 2021, the staff of FictionPress have confirmed they are migrating FFN to the same server - which is extremely bad news for that server and for FFN as a whole.
Lots of technical stuff is going haywire too based on using the Inspect tool in Google chrome.
Get your fics while you can.Hey! If you didn’t know you can copy and paste from ffn’s mobile site. If you want to copy paste from the browser for convenience sake go to m.fanfiction.net
My friend @phantoms14 shared this on twitter but honestly I have a feeling there’s some truth to this since the site has been buggy as hell this year and any emails I’ve sent asking for help with one issue or another have gone unanswered. Like there’s virtually no communication with the admins, not even a generic message. So just to be safe I’m backing up all of my fanfics but sadly I’m not sure if I can copy other fanfics I enjoy for personal use since some of them are either super old or incomplete. It’s hard to say what will happen in the near future but it’s definitely a good idea to make back ups of your own stories if nothing else. Also whoops, I didn’t realize it was 2am already. Better finish backing these up before going to bed…
