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How to do the fandom thing in 2016

probablyintraffic:

  1. Save. Save everything. Look, everybody is conspiring against fandom archival right now. Tumblr is letting people change their names and break all the links, LiveJournal is objectively a piece of shit for long fics and anything behind the 18+ wall, and I don’t even know if AO3 is good in the longer run. As AO3 is getting more popular more people are going to lock their stuff up, and locked stories can’t be archived by Pinboard. The link you saved 2 years, 2 years! ago is probably shit now.
    1. I don’t know what the solution is, other than firing up MySQL and building your own database or something, which AO3 isn’t making easy for us because it doesn’t want to put out a fucking API. Incidentally, what is up with their donation scheme? I’m getting really worried.
  2. Don’t fandom and politic at the same time? People in fandom have this funny way of making you think you are being political even though you really aren’t doing anything. Fandom has politics like trigger warnings and cultural appropriation; what about politics that change lives and challenge the capitalist structure? Don’t fool yourself, is what I’m saying.
  3. Finally, if you’re not having fun, stop. And you know, prioritize. It’s so, so easy to lose perspective in fandom, because the unsaid thing about fandom is that none of this actually matters. You think it matters that you defaulted in Yuletide, two years from now? You think it matters that this actor said that dumb thing, even a week from now? “Ruining” somebody’s “enjoyment” of something is not a crime anywhere except in fandom, and then saying the thing out loud will make it sound preposterous in and of itself. 
    1. All the gears in fandom, you know, are built to sustain the fiction that fandom matters, and the greatest punishment will be meted out not to the people who act like assholes, but to the people who see that the emperor has no clothes.

Re point 1: Whether committed to paper or digital, everything conspires to erase fandom culture. (this is also true of the rest of life so to be clear - we are not special snowflakes in this regard).

To my horror, we’ve found out that many of the old fandom archives that were backed up via the WBM are now being retroactively erased. When a bulk domain reseller snaps up the domain name of some long lost fan website, they put up a no robots.txt file and the WBM honors it and erases everything.

But the WBM is the best we have for now, so use the WBM on demand button and save that webpage. And back it up to your hard drive.

Wikipedia writes: “A quirk in the way the Wayback Machine operates means archived copies of sites sometimes become unavailable, for example, the Freakonomics blog previously hosted at freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com. Those URLs were then excluded from archiving by the New York Times’ robots.txt file. This had the unfortunate effect of also rendering the previously archived content unavailable.”