Subject: Not really?
Author:
Posted on: 2021-01-29 14:26:00 UTC
Jason Scott and the rest of the Internet Archive are literally trying to preserve all the things (Jason has a website where he preserves old textfiles that were posted to BBSes and does software and print archiving for archive.org), and it seems to be a common impulse amongst internet users to try and save the parts of the internet they have a connection with.
Webs to Shut Down March 31st, 2021
Free Webs accounts will not be migrated unless the owner has a Vistaprint account to move to, or makes one later. After March 31st, free Webs accounts will be unpublished.
I think we already had most if not all PPC content on Webs backed up on Wayback Machine and/or Archive.today due to their annoying habit of unpublishing inactive sites, but let's double-check, yeah?
And, FYI for hS, I noticed this because someone noted on the wiki that the PPC History site is down (again), and I went to see if I might be able to complain at Webs about it. So, now's the time to relocate that stuff if that's the plan, I guess. My deepest sighs and sympathies.
~Neshomeh
I am now an official Supporter of Neocities, because... they're really good, and deserve a bit of money (& also it lets me have multiple sites that way).
The PPC Histories are finally transferred to GDocs. Sorry to anyone who really loves reading them on mid-grey.
I've transferred all my site archives over to the new Multiverse Monitor Archives. That's where all the grey went. The Monitor is also hosting the Temple of All Faiths, and will include the Freakish Five archive once I... er... find the account details for it. ^_^
FanficLand/World are backed up, but not rehosted yet. I'll need to fix them first. Plan is for a third Neocities site with both of them plus a Shipfic Archive, but we'll see.
I've backed up all (most?) of the random pages I still had hosted on Webs. I still need to rehost my Alternate PPC stuff, but that shouldn't take too long.
I've created a backup copy of the second issue of the New Multiverse Monitor, but the first issue seems to be down. Does anyone have a copy?
If anyone has any early PPC-adjacent websites they think should be restored from the archives (not necessarily on Webs), point me at 'em and I'll see what I can scrounge up. I've got space for them. (I also need to pull together some more of the Misssandman.com material; my archive is pretty sparse so far.)
hS
Crashing Down and all the Alternate PPC stuff is rehosted. I was amused to see that both Reorg and CD are > 60k words; they could be NaNos!
I've added the TOS prologue archive to the Monitor, because, fun! I've also updated the TOS Badfic Archive with authors from the chapter headings - including the fact that the author of 'Mithril' and 'Gwendolyn' totally died and was replaced by her cousin who writes just like her - and tweaked the TOS timeline slightly with a surviving review for 'All Souls Night'.
I've started transferring the FanficLand/World material to a stable format, but it's a long task, so don't expect that for a while. I'm kind of tempted to just upgrade the author pages and leave the stories as they were originally formatted, but there'd be a bunch of author names still needing updates... hrm.
I also stumbled across Architeuthis' FFn profile, which reveals that she was born in 1963! Did not expect that.
hS
I do have seven Word docs-worth of Miss Cam stuff, though. (Labelled "OFUM 1," "OFUM 2," "OFUM site," "OFUM LJ," "World of Dreams site," "PPC agents," and "Mary Sue parodies.")
I don't remember what's in the World of Dreams that I decided to save, but everything else seems pretty self-explanatory. I can email you any/all of them if you want them?
—doctorlit
It should be: https://app.box.com/s/m66hndt6ev8ud8i6n98r
That works. I have now fixed it on the wiki page.
I only have a few misssandman-related files: "31 Ways to Kill a Mary Sue," "Ashes to Glory," the evil smiley pic, and the Miss Cam pic. The pics are in use on the OFUM and Miss Cam pages, respectively, but I'm happy to email them if needed, too.
~Neshomeh (who keeps forgetting that you can't use Markdown in subject lines)
In the Misssandman.com archive I have the PPC section fully backed up (all links either work or never worked). For OFUM I only have the main page and the fanart page, but the rest should all be on the Wayback Machine.
I still want to grab Suedom (since it's all broken and Waybacked nowadays); maybe I'll even recreate the Suedom website. And I'd like to grab some of Cam's fanfic too.
I also also need to go through and check the links... I know my Webplex and your Tripod archives are linked in various places. It'll all get done at some point...
hS
Which is to say, I'll remind myself how to use Auto Wiki Browser to convert the many dozens of Histories links ASAP. Should be fun. {= )
~Neshomeh
Except for the cast list.
I noticed that a few stories that seemed to belong to the End of the Beginning series aren't there, but are on the Non-Missions page under Becomings (and are Gdocs rather than being hosted on-site). Most of them are Selene stories, IIRC. I guess that's because they became canon?
Also, while the Rest of the Beginning hub exists and I updated the link, I think all the stories there appear on the main End of the Beginning title page. Not sure how you want to handle that.
Also also, at least some of the banners still link to Webs.
~Neshomeh
Originally "End of the Beginning" was everything my agents did after they retired, including the Prime Timeline future of the Sundering. Then I split the timeline, and bumped the now-alternate stuff over to Rest of the Beginning.
/Then, /about when I migrated to huinesoron.webs, I decided "End of the Beginning" was better as a title for the alternately stuff, and moved the rest to what is now Becomings. "Rest of the Beginning" became redundant.
As for the links... yeah. A lot of those go back to when PPC History and DOGAplex were separate sites (the Timeline actually still said 'external link' when cross-referencing). The latest Kludgetool should let me finally fix that (if I don't just finally migrate it all to GDocs).
hS
I've done a lot of link conversions! Turns out I can do multiple F&Rs at the same time, but I've grouped them in batches so I don't get confused along the way. So far, I've done Fish Custard's and Tomato's stuff and most of bonsaimallorn.webs, all of bonsaimallorn2.webs, and nearly all of huinesoron.webs and ppchistory.webs. There are a few things I couldn't find new links for, mostly because the Webplex still links to old URLs:
https://bonsaimallorn.webs.com/Timeline.htm
http://huinesoron.webs.com/Netilardo/Deep17.htm
http://huinesoron.webs.com/Netilardo/index.htm
http://huinesoron.webs.com/PPC/Data.htm
http://huinesoron.webs.com/PPC/Other.htm
(I'm sure the Netilardo ones have new links, I just can't edit the blog comments where they're used on the wiki. The other two are on your User page, and I don't think there are direct analogues to them anymore.)
I think the Twisted Skein cast list and cast trees are also MIA.
~Neshomeh
And finding a bunch of other broken links along the way...
Thank you for finding all these! They are pretty much all things I neglected to move across.
The ones on my userpage, you're right I need to fix; I should probably tidy up that page altogether...
The various cast lists... I will have to think about what to do with. The family tree is archived, but the bulk of the cast lists ought to be redundant to the Wiki.
hS
I can put one together pretty easily if you give me an idea of the format.
hS
TBH, I don't think so. I'll be getting a list of old URLs to update from the wiki's external links search, and I can get the new ones to put in their place from the source (and check said links in the process). Since I don't think I can run multiple find and replace operations at once (I seem to recall trying without success, though maybe PEBKAC), I don't know if there's any particular benefit to collecting all of them in a table.
The format would just be find X, replace with Y, anyway. I'm not clever enough with this sort of thing to do anything fancier. I might be able to use regexes to find either http or https at the start of a URL if I review the rules as they apply to AWB, but that's about it. {= )
~Neshomeh
When I click it, it just reloads the main page.
I completely spaced that I haven't actually done that one yet... I'll sort it. Thanks!
hS
Because I'm pulling webpages from my own sites, it's really easy for me to get a list of what pages exist. Actually saving them requires right-click saving each file, which for things like FanficWorld (190 pages) is a bit extreme.
So I've kludged together a tool to do it for me. The Archive Dumper is an Excel file which reads a set of URLs and the filenames you want for them, and then - look away, techies, you're going to hate this - manually opens every page in an invisible Internet Explorer window and saves them all. ^_^
It runs incredibly slowly - I used the same code for a full archive dump of All PPC Stories Ever and it took hours - but it gets it done. The biggest flaw is that, for most of my pages, the IE 'Are you sure you want to leave this page?' has to be clicked every single time (they stack, so you can leave it for 30 seconds and then just hammer them). Oh, it also seems to break when faced with anything that isn't a htm/html file - CSS files are just opening in TXT and crashing the archiver. But it's fine.
This version is set up for FfW; it's automatically creating the filename column from the URLs, but that code won't work for other sites. Oh, and make sure the path to your archive ends with a \, or you'll wind up prefixing the last folder onto every file. In other news, all FanficLand pages now have very similar names... ^^
hS
Still in Excel, so prep for more screaming.
The Linkrot Fixer takes the same list of old files and new addresses, but now has a column of old text you want to swap for new text. Because it's just running them as text files, it's a lot quicker! It does split the source text up based on the > symbol, so it can't replace whole chunks of HTML, but for fixing links (I've been using it to replace the old Author[number].htm with [Authorname].html) it works pretty well.
Fingers crossed, I can use it to clean up at least the Fanfic Land portion of the badfic archives - and then maybe to sort out all my broken links elsewhere. I'm very put out to see I've got hard-coded Webs links in the AW site...
hS
That is... terrifying.
For those of you who wish to archive websites through... less horrifying means, wget exists, and can accept a list of pages in a text file to do this. Alternatively, wget -mkp yourwebsite.com backs up a snapshot of your entire website and will edit all the links for you to link to uour local versions.
For what it's worth, The Kludge was designed to work on a work computer which I'm not allowed to install programs on.
Also, last time I tried to do any script-based archiving, it turned into several hours of emailling Tomash which still got me nowhere. At least when Excel breaks, I stand a chance of knowing what's wrong.
But please, everyone who can - follow Thoth's suggestion instead!
hS
A lot of those are on the Complete List of PPC Fiction, because Hieronymus Graubart thought the dead links might be useful for future reference. I... disagree. I think we want links to be functional first. And, if we want to know the old URLs, they're preserved by Wayback Machine and Archive.today. Nothing will be truly lost if I update them. Everyone on board with this?
My search keys were http://*.webs.com and https://*.webs,com, so I may have missed any links still formatted in the older style of webs.[domain].com or, heaven forbid, anything still lingering as Freewebs. The wiki external links search only allows the wildcard "at the start of the hostname" for some reason. I'll figure out some other way to check for stragglers. Individually if I must.
~Neshomeh
I have most of the spin-offs listed here saved in my folder of Word documents. Things I know I'm currently missing:
All of Huinesoron's pages (bonsaimallorn, fanficland, huinesoron and twisted skein) because that's going to be a long, multi-weekend task . . . but of course, hS already has them all backed up, so I haven't felt any need to do so : )
delta-mike-lima, which was of course deleted by DML years ago and is probably gone for good, to my endless frustration
and unfortunately, the mini-Balrog cookbook at the never mind, I do have that one!
Which leaves the following urls that I can't find/identify (not including the http://www.webs.com base site and myimmortalrehost, which presumably had no actual PPC content):
dutyofafangirl (although that one sounds so familiar . . .) freakishfive pirateuniversity reicheruskittypowers xdallyx
Any idea where those ones are linking from?
—doctorlit, in scramble mode
delta-mike-lima does have a couple pages saved on Archive.today: https://archive.vn/http://delta-mike-lima.webs.com/*
duty-of-a-fangirl is Keily Shinra's site, and is at least partly saved: https://archive.vn/http://duty-of-a-fangirl.webs.com/*
freakishfive is hS's and presumably safe.
pirateuniversity is the, er, other PotC OFU's site. A couple pages are saved here: https://archive.vn/http://pirateuniversity.webs.com/*
reicheruskittypowers is the website of "Blood Raining Night." The main page is backed up... and I might just save the rest of it if I have time. >.>
xdallyx seems to be the home of "Face the Strange," to which I have no particular connection, and it's only linked from someone's Talk page anyway. I'm not worried about that one.
I haven't checked any of these in the Wayback Machine yet.
~Neshomeh
We're fans of a 19-year-old Web Original canon, but we're not just trying to preserve one story, or even one series: we're trying to preserve everything ever written in the setting. Doesn't matter who wrote it, how good it is, or even if it's been explicitly removed from continuity: we want it safe and sound somewhere.
Is that weird? It feels weird.
But also hilariously cool.
hS
Jason Scott and the rest of the Internet Archive are literally trying to preserve all the things (Jason has a website where he preserves old textfiles that were posted to BBSes and does software and print archiving for archive.org), and it seems to be a common impulse amongst internet users to try and save the parts of the internet they have a connection with.
Specifically fanfic-related, there's the Organization for Transformative Works (the folks behind AO3), whose mission is "to preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures." The top two posts on their front page right now are both news about importing the contents of other archives to AO3 for safekeeping.
PPC stories represent our history and our culture. Even if it is all a bit weird. {= )
~Neshomeh
... but all those examples are archive projects, not just... a handful of the people in a quirky fandom.
...
Except that fan archives are started by fans, I suppose... yeah, you're right. :)
Speaking of archiving: what should I do with Fanfic_Land and Fanfic World? I can grab them easily enough (I think I already have, in the Grand Archive), but both sites are varying degrees of broken. Is it worth making the effort to build a third FFn knockoff to put them up on?
At least this'll finally get me to transfer the Histories over to Google Docs...
(Current progress: I've backed up Netilardo because it was easy to grab-and-drop, and have downloaded a few miscellaneous games and such. Will probably snag my archives next, since again they're pretty compact.)
hS
Something minimal and functional for a hub would be fine, I think. Just so we can find, point at, and laugh at the best of the bad stuff when we want to. {= )
Was the Very Odd Day series ever on there? I seem to recall having trouble finding the original(s). Maybe add them?
~Neshomeh
... fanficVERSE exists now. ^_^
All stories from both FFL and FfW are repaired and backed up, and accessible either through the new ffV Stories page or cleaned-up versions of their own home pages. I've also archived all the in-character Badfic Game announcements on the Stories page, because the battle against Liechtenstein should not be forgotten. [Dramatic teardrop]
Author pages are being created to a standard template; so far I have 15 up, with another 70(!) to add. The author pages have a ribbon with symbols for each year they've posted stories/chapters (+ the year they signed up). Just today, I finally got JayBird's bestest friend brandywine_baby89 added. ^-~
Everything's been stripped right back - the new story format (you can find one example at the very bottom of JayBird's page) puts all chapters and reviews in a single column. My hope is to go on to archive the missing games, and maybe even keep ffV running when the Games next roll round... well, I can dream!
hS admin@fanficVERSE
... Oh, bother, I had that Agent Aurora image hosted in a Photobucket account that no longer exists. Lemme see... Aha! I thought I'd put it somewhere else. I think you can download it, or you can just get the image address and use it as is. I've done that with some of the images I use on my own website; dA doesn't seem to mind.
I gotta say, that old Fanfiction.net theme makes me smile. {= )
Are all the story IDs and stuff the same? If so, it shouldn't be any trouble updating links (unless any are broken, in which case I'll let you know).
Here's my list:
Of your stuff, I think that just leaves freakish_five stuff untouched.
~Neshomeh
Thanks for the image! I'll get her page fixed up today. :)
freakish_five... I dunno what I'm doing with. I'll get there.
hS
... is now on the new Shipfest archive. I've formally adopted the 'five fics into the Shipfest, along with "Huinesoron and Quelleharmiel"; I think they were actually written before the shipping list, but they clearly fit the concept (and Bjam & BiD were working on both, so the boundary is blurry anyway).
I'll dig out Odder Day and Oddest Day and add them in; according to the Wiki, they'll probably be the only fics for their respective years (likely '05 and '06).
hS
... when is the next Shipfest anyways? I kinda wanna participate and smash together Pairing That Will Never Ever Happen, but that's different :P since I didn't get to last year.
-Kittyauthor
I think it tends to be around March... yeah, t'Wiki agrees. Generally someone does a setup thread, then follows with the game itself a week or so later.
hS
I swore it was in February.
Must be something in the Honors classes going on in February, then.
-Kittyauthor, mixing up dates (again :P)
/Definitely/ one for the Shipfest. "Oh no - what are you all doing here at the same time??"
hS
Long as it's SFW.
Kittyauthor, who was expecting an honors joke.
(Edited a confusing part. I just prefer any shipfic with me in it to be SFW, if that's okay.)
There is/was an event on Dragon Cave (Valentine's day event) where one dragon had this exact problem.
Link to story for citation's sake (it won't work if you're not on Dragcave)
And the screenshot of the specific quote (I don't own the quoted content, quote merely used to compare situations) below the line.
They're Shipfic, not Badfic. I don't have many principles, but boy howdy, I stick to my filing systems!
... oh stars, the Shipfest banner on my site is a corset. XD
Um, but yeah, I should put together a hosting solution for old and classic shipfics too; I've got a bunch of them squirrelled away. Even just a single GDoc per year would do.
hS
I thought it was this site that was going down.
I'll... ugh, I've left half my stuff up there, I'll have to pull it out to GDocs and relink from Neocities. It'll be fine, it's... fine.
Good news is, I do have an auto-collected archive of every PPC story as of about six months ago, so anything we miss should still be safe.
But /ugh/. Thanks Nesh for catching this.
hS