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Fanfiction finale
The continuing changes to Fanfiction.net (documented only on their Twitter account, which has also become inaccessible as of mid-December, but where a Google search will at least show a preview of the most recent Tweets) now mean that since the 6th of January I haven't been able to view any stories at all without being blocked by "DDoS protection" stuck on a permanent loop, and it's looking increasingly unlikely that access will return.
Edit: and I'm not the only person having this problem:
Weirdly, I still seem to have intermittent access to users' home pages (i.e. the 'protection' sometimes allows the page to render on reload) but attempting to click on any of the story links from there produces the same errors. And as of January 9th I have been unable to send any PMs or post to forum pages on the infrequent occasions that I'm actually able to access them -- previously I was able to view the story archives less intermittently than the site forums, now they seem to be blocked permanently. I'm still checking periodically, but I don't hold out much hope; what I assume will happen is that the rest of the site will be transferred across to the 'protected' servers, and that my current bursts of access take place only when my query happens to arrive at one of the remaining 'old' servers which are still handling those specific sections.
(And yet this isn't a banking website that merits super high security; it's a public archive that displays vast amounts of mainly very bad fiction with zero content control!)
This leaves me with 23 stories in my favourites still left stranded and 152 successfully downloaded. I was counting on all those in my favourites also being in my Raoul-collection, but I'm not sure that's necessarily true -- and I recognise several of those titles among the 23 missing ones anyway :-( I went as fast as I possibly could over many, many hours; I downloaded 1,132 pages individually, including reviews (for most stories but not the longest). I probably could have done more if I'd just gone through clicking at maximum possible speed without attempting to *read* anything as I went, but I was afraid that doing it mechanically would be more likely than ever to trigger the anti-bot protection.
There is also the case of "Jeeves and the Opera Ghost", where I discovered that Chapter 5 of the version on the website had been corrupted, and notified the author, who responded by deleting the entire story -- which in consequence has now vanished from everybody else's links, plus all its reviews! Apparently she can't find the original files, but of course I'm not now in a position to continue the PM conversation we were having; I also have an 8Kb PM reply discussing Harry Potter lore that it seems to be impossible to send.
And I'm afraid this probably is in effect the end of my fan-fiction-writing career, and probably of my writing career in general; I can upload chapters here or to my own website (where they are even more invisible, since weekly hits are now approaching zero) and probably attempt to copy and paste them across by mobile phone into my FFnet account, but there really isn't a lot of motivation to do it when I can't see the page view statistics, let alone the reviews, to which I can't in any case reply. It's not as if I've been exactly bubbling over with inspiration these last few years anyway -- it has felt more and more exhausting, and the ratio of the amount of time it takes me to write something versus the amount of response I get (on Arctic Raoul, of course, that has been years versus zero) is ever-increasing. And without even the small amount of guaranteed exposure provided by those fans who are prepared to check anything uploaded the right site with the right label on it, I really can't see myself launching back into original fiction at this date.
I want to finish work on Hertha because I don't like abandoning stories, but of course the effort needed to keep struggling on with that is even harder to find when the outcome is pretty much indefinitely deferred -- a bit like trying to keep up my singing practice when I have long since worn out the exercises I was set before Christmas, and the prospect of an actual lesson to work towards appears to be constantly receding. I have to set *myself* work if I'm going to achieve anything at all, and it's easier just to let the deadline slip by every evening.
And my food possibilities are steadily closing down; I was hoping to get some more oil on Monday, but after cycling six miles I found the stall was not there. (I could have bought rabbit...) I don't know how long I'm going to be allowed to buy meat, milk and butter, either. I can theoretically live without all four for several months by severe rationing of what I've got, but not perpetually.
(Of course 'everyone' has access to online supermarket ordering, just as everyone who isn't a robot can read a page protected for the site's own security -- my life consists of a succession of more and more extreme workarounds for problems that simply aren't regarded as legitimate issues by anyone else, with the result that I end up not only feeling trapped and desperate, but paranoid.)
Edit: and I'm not the only person having this problem:
- Help! cloudflare accessing fanfiction.net endless loop
- Usersgetting stuck with a 'cloudflare checking your browser'
Weirdly, I still seem to have intermittent access to users' home pages (i.e. the 'protection' sometimes allows the page to render on reload) but attempting to click on any of the story links from there produces the same errors. And as of January 9th I have been unable to send any PMs or post to forum pages on the infrequent occasions that I'm actually able to access them -- previously I was able to view the story archives less intermittently than the site forums, now they seem to be blocked permanently. I'm still checking periodically, but I don't hold out much hope; what I assume will happen is that the rest of the site will be transferred across to the 'protected' servers, and that my current bursts of access take place only when my query happens to arrive at one of the remaining 'old' servers which are still handling those specific sections.
(And yet this isn't a banking website that merits super high security; it's a public archive that displays vast amounts of mainly very bad fiction with zero content control!)
This leaves me with 23 stories in my favourites still left stranded and 152 successfully downloaded. I was counting on all those in my favourites also being in my Raoul-collection, but I'm not sure that's necessarily true -- and I recognise several of those titles among the 23 missing ones anyway :-( I went as fast as I possibly could over many, many hours; I downloaded 1,132 pages individually, including reviews (for most stories but not the longest). I probably could have done more if I'd just gone through clicking at maximum possible speed without attempting to *read* anything as I went, but I was afraid that doing it mechanically would be more likely than ever to trigger the anti-bot protection.
There is also the case of "Jeeves and the Opera Ghost", where I discovered that Chapter 5 of the version on the website had been corrupted, and notified the author, who responded by deleting the entire story -- which in consequence has now vanished from everybody else's links, plus all its reviews! Apparently she can't find the original files, but of course I'm not now in a position to continue the PM conversation we were having; I also have an 8Kb PM reply discussing Harry Potter lore that it seems to be impossible to send.
And I'm afraid this probably is in effect the end of my fan-fiction-writing career, and probably of my writing career in general; I can upload chapters here or to my own website (where they are even more invisible, since weekly hits are now approaching zero) and probably attempt to copy and paste them across by mobile phone into my FFnet account, but there really isn't a lot of motivation to do it when I can't see the page view statistics, let alone the reviews, to which I can't in any case reply. It's not as if I've been exactly bubbling over with inspiration these last few years anyway -- it has felt more and more exhausting, and the ratio of the amount of time it takes me to write something versus the amount of response I get (on Arctic Raoul, of course, that has been years versus zero) is ever-increasing. And without even the small amount of guaranteed exposure provided by those fans who are prepared to check anything uploaded the right site with the right label on it, I really can't see myself launching back into original fiction at this date.
I want to finish work on Hertha because I don't like abandoning stories, but of course the effort needed to keep struggling on with that is even harder to find when the outcome is pretty much indefinitely deferred -- a bit like trying to keep up my singing practice when I have long since worn out the exercises I was set before Christmas, and the prospect of an actual lesson to work towards appears to be constantly receding. I have to set *myself* work if I'm going to achieve anything at all, and it's easier just to let the deadline slip by every evening.
And my food possibilities are steadily closing down; I was hoping to get some more oil on Monday, but after cycling six miles I found the stall was not there. (I could have bought rabbit...) I don't know how long I'm going to be allowed to buy meat, milk and butter, either. I can theoretically live without all four for several months by severe rationing of what I've got, but not perpetually.
(Of course 'everyone' has access to online supermarket ordering, just as everyone who isn't a robot can read a page protected for the site's own security -- my life consists of a succession of more and more extreme workarounds for problems that simply aren't regarded as legitimate issues by anyone else, with the result that I end up not only feeling trapped and desperate, but paranoid.)