Pictured: An archive preventing another archive to do archiving
This is a bad idea. This is a monumentally bad idea, not to mention ever slightly sinister. I can go through all the reasons why AO3 might have done this, but they all falter before the central fact of fandom archiving, which is that fandom archiving is hard enough right now. Do the people who made this decision even remember when we lost entire fandoms? I thought this was the same group of people who distrust website owners who like to make on-the-fly, by-the-seat bloodless business decisions that destroy communities and fandoms overnight.
Because this is asking all of us to trust AO3 a whole lot, okay? This is asking us to trust a single point of failure, and even if we decided to invest our life savings in the good intentions of the folks at AO3, that much trust–AO3 could still fail. There are many many ways an organization like AO3 could fail; the fact that all of their money is in a Paypal account, for example.
Think about what happens if AO3 fails. Then we would truly have no backups or fail-safes, so we must do all that we can to ensure AO3 does not fail. Donations. Volunteering. The near-deification of AO3 that we already have right now that prevents us from being critical of what it’s doing. I don’t even believe that this was the purpose of this decision at AO3, but this is the consequence, intended or not.
Being an archive doesn’t mean being a single, monopolistic archive. It means that you do all that you can to facilitate archiving. And this is the opposite of that.
For some reason, the Internet archive thinks that the AO3 is set to “no index”. They’ve been trying to work with the Internet archive for a while to get it resolved but so far they .have not found a solution. Definitely let AO3 know that this is a concern of yours and poke them to see if there’s an update. My information is about a month old but it is of concern to anyone who wants to preserve fandom history.
