We're Back on the Wayback Machine

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2017-03-23 16:13:46 UTC

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We're pleased to announce that after seven months, the Archive of Our Own is once again available on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine!

Late last year, the AO3 suddenly vanished from the Wayback Machine, a non-profit archiving service. We reached out to its maintainers several times during this period, to find out why AO3 pages weren't archived anymore. The project's director contacted us this week and explained the problem.

Rather than excluding only pages belonging to users who had asked for their content to be taken down (e.g. their profile page or specific works), the entire archiveofourown.org domain had been mistakenly excluded. The folks at the Wayback Machine have corrected this problem and the AO3 is available there once more. (Check out the Archive homepage from 2010!)

While the Wayback Machine is a great service, and another useful tool in the efforts to preserve fanworks and fan history, this is a good reminder not to keep all your eggs in the same basket. Download works you might want to read again in a year, crosspost your own works to other sites, and be sure you save back-ups locally and/or with a trusted online service.

If you're concerned about the public availability of your works, check our "How can I hide my works from non-Archive users?" FAQ for information that can help protect your privacy.

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Account Deleted Fri 24 Mar 2017 04:19AM UTC

Very happy to hear this. Cheers.

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Gociak (SomethingWittyThisWayComes) Fri 24 Mar 2017 08:42AM UTC

Really cool! Good to know! Thank you for updating us!

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ClementineStarling Fri 24 Mar 2017 03:24PM UTC

I see how this is a nice feature for readers - but then it also means for me as an author that I won't be able to delete my fic without also having to contact the wayback machine and ask them to take down the mirror, right?
PS: thanks for enclosing that link to the FAQ but I'm still wondering if there is any way to circumvent my fic being copied to the Internet Archive without posting it as 'archive only'? More precisely: Would it be sufficient to select 'hide from search engines if possible' or not? (And yes, I'm aware that for example Google is caching websites too)

Last Edited Fri 24 Mar 2017 04:10PM UTC

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1. SnickerToodles Fri 24 Mar 2017 04:36PM UTC
  
  I might be wrong, but until you get an answer from someone smarter (hehe), I don't think hiding from the search engines would help. I think the Internet Archive's crawler visits the URLs directly, not through Google. So removing from search engines would only deny you possible viewership.
  The fact that your works are restricted should be enough. The crawler isn't going to have an account, so when it visits the page of your story, the only thing archived will be a "you need to be logged in" page.
  
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2. 1. ClementineStarling Fri 24 Mar 2017 05:05PM UTC
    
    Ah, thanks for your answer. :3
    Tbh I don't want my fic to be visible for registered users only but I also don't want it to be saved where I can't delete it - Google updates its cache regularly, so if I take something offline it will disappear after a while.
    Ugh... this goes against all of my compulsive tendencies :/
    
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  2. 1. SnickerToodles Fri 24 Mar 2017 05:27PM UTC
      
      Well, if you take them off restricted, then you will have to contact the archive and ask for the pages to be taken down.
      However, due to copyright law, they will probably restore that page 70 or 80 or 120 years after your death... And if you're at all popular, people will make their own copies and possibly publish them. Such is the nature of the internet. Once you post something online, assume that it will never disappear.
      (Of course I'm having a hell of a hard time trying to find my old, cringy fics from 2010 that I deleted out of embarrassment, thanks to FFN denying web crawlers, so you shouldn't worry too much. >_<)
      
      Last Edited Fri 24 Mar 2017 05:27PM UTC
      
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    2. 1. ClementineStarling Fri 24 Mar 2017 05:47PM UTC
        
        Hm. Idk. A lot of data has disappeared over the last 20 years, so it's not that the internet never forgets anything. I think on the long run it will be pretty unlikely that everything will be saved, because most of the stuff on the net is either ephemeral or simply rubbish.
        In this particular case I'm just a bit nonplussed to what exactly the gain of my fic being mirrored elsewhere should be when I already archived it here. I can see none, unless of course I would choose to delete my work for whatever reason and people still want to read it (which is pretty hypothetical since it's not particularly popular).
        I'm really not super concerned about copy right but it's somehow weird that AO3 celebrates this undermining of my control over my own content as a victory for fandom.
        Maybe I've just not understood properly what this is all about, so... *shrugs*
        However, I do appreciate your attempts to comfort me in my woes. <3
        
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      2. Arianwen (Guest) Sat 25 Mar 2017 03:43PM UTC
        
        The issue is mainly that if AO3 ever crashes really badly, or just dies a natural death, there'll still be a copy of it on the Archive. You've lost some control, but on the other hand the stuff you're proud of / indifferent about will be (relatively) safe.
        
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        ClementineStarling Sun 26 Mar 2017 12:46PM UTC
        
        Yes but.
        Idk. Can you really rely on Archive.org? AO3 has almost three million works right now and starting from the assumption that the Wayback Machine supposedly stopped crawling AO3 less than a year ago (?) there are pretty few copies of actual fic from earlier years on there. (I checked some stuff that was posted in 2011 for example, which wasn't archived either.)
        So I'm wondering what the criteria are whether a fic will be saved or not.
        I would also love to have some insight in what the option 'hide my work from search engines when possible' actually does or doesn't do. Even if it's not fool-proof, no one can expect that; but in the current phrasing it sounds like it's not working at all, with anything. Like, in this particular case, does Archive.org respect the setting or not?
        Also while experimenting a bit with my account preferences I realised that AO3 is showing an apparently random number of my works on my profile even after I marked them as 'accessible for registered users only' which is a strange privacy setting. I don't care too much about this, because I simply don't want my texts to be archived elsewhere, but still. It's p. weird.
        I mean, don't get me wrong, I love AO3, I actually think it's pretty perfect as it is, but I find it superconfusing that there's no info on these questions and everyone's just behaving as if we're standing on the Titanic which is about to sink every moment, and that seems a bit overly dramatic.
        
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        (4 more comments in this thread)
Performance Sun 26 Mar 2017 03:37PM UTC

Thank God

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an author (Guest) Mon 27 Mar 2017 09:15PM UTC

While I understand the concerns about preserving fanworks, I wish there was an opt-out for individual authors (as on LJ) where there is the option to add the noarchive tags to their works. People always say that once you put things online they're there forever and that is the risk that is taken. We all understand this.
However.
Things change, and what's fine now may not be fine one, two, five years from now. People change too. I would never deny anyone the ability to save anything of mine - that's their right. But I would like ao3 to consider the other side too - especially as they do know how much people harass and target authors.

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Pslasher Sun 02 Apr 2017 05:30PM UTC

Wow that 2010 archive is a blast from the past!

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Mikkel Larsen (Guest) Tue 02 Jan 2018 11:31PM UTC

Awesome

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Keefa Sat 24 Feb 2018 10:38PM UTC

Hi! Question, whenever I try to view a fic on the Wayback Machine, AO3 asks me to log in, and then tells me the fic doesn't exist. Is there any way around this?

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1. Account Deleted Wed 28 Feb 2018 04:43PM UTC
  
  That shouldn't happen :/
  The only problem I've had is with M/E-rated fics, where the agegate can trip up the Wayback Machine. I've never seen a 'fic doesn't exist' error. But as long as it's a valid URL, the Wayback Machine should be able to archive everything. Does this link work for you?
  https://web.archive.org/web/20150917062824/https://archiveofourown.org/works/4344557
  Because for me, it shows a work that was archived on September 17, 2015, when it had 67 kudos.
  
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2. 1. Keefa Wed 28 Feb 2018 04:53PM UTC
    
    That link works. I dunno, see I was trying to find a fic by an author who deleted. I got to their account, but any link I tried to click I got a screen saying I have to log in, but when I do it's like it kicks me out of the Wayback Machine and into ao3 proper, or to an error page on the Wayback Machine.
    
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  2. 1. Account Deleted Wed 28 Feb 2018 05:04PM UTC
      
      If I had to guess, it sounds like you’re trying to view a work that was marked as “Only show your work to registered users”. Since the Wayback Machine doesn’t have an AO3 account, when the crawler found that story, it got redirected to the same page all unregistered viewers see, informing them that it was inaccessible.
      “Logging in” doesn’t actually do anything if you’re viewing a page saved on the Wayback Machine – it’s a frozen page, not something you can interface with. In that case, you’re pretty much out of luck.
      
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    2. 1. Keefa Wed 28 Feb 2018 05:06PM UTC
        
        D: here i was, thinking i'd hit the jackpot and could read some of my favourite fics again.
        it's a shame, but thanks for trying to help! i can get some of the fics (weirdly) but not all of them. I can live with that.
        
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SideQuip Wed 14 Mar 2018 02:40AM UTC

is ao3 off of wayback machine again? i've been trying to save fics, but it just says that the site's robot texts do not allow it.

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1. iwritesinsnotsmut (Guest) Thu 12 Apr 2018 06:36PM UTC
  
  I'm wondering the same thing. Had just settled in for a long night of saving fics, and "Page cannot be displayed due to robots.txt." showed up :/
  
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psychedelicpurrs Tue 31 Jul 2018 09:14PM UTC

This is amazing! But, what do I do when only 3 out of 9 chapters are available on the web archive, and the fic is deleted from ao3? Is it hopeless?

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Lonielizabeth Mon 31 Dec 2018 02:24AM UTC

I think I had a fic in my bookmarks but it’s not there anymore and when I try to search for it the links don’t work. Is there any way to find it? It’s the tax evasion series by the author standinginanicedress

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Account Deleted Sun 10 Mar 2019 04:45AM UTC

Nice, but it does not help me out.

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MyAccountGotDeleted😤😤 (Guest) Mon 30 Sep 2019 04:10PM UTC

Did anybody downloaded the story Vows by Delilah_delmart??
I would love to read to again

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lazy_kunoichi Thu 28 May 2020 06:31AM UTC

how do i recover a story i deleted?

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for spite (Guest) Sat 19 Dec 2020 11:09AM UTC

When I attempt to access a story on The Wayback Machine it briefly loads the story, then redirects me and I get stuck on the "Accept our terms and services" page as it won't allow me to check the box saying I accept terms and services. Particularly odd as I've already done that on the AO3 site proper.

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ItsYourLife (Guest) Wed 26 May 2021 05:26AM UTC

I deleted some stories associated with the username and email I’m posting with. Is there any way I can recover them?

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