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.
AO3/OTW have been trying to contact the Internet Archive team repeatedly for the past couple of months, and haven’t heard back. We have no idea what’s wrong, but it’s nothing on our end /o\ The AO3 definitely wants to be archived! You’re very welcome to contact them as well—please ask them to look into this, too!
Speaking as the co-chair of the AO3 development team, I promise there’s nothing sinister going on here! As @christycorr mentioned, this wasn’t our idea, and we’ve been asking what the problem is since at least September (we’ve sent emails, too). We’re sad and frustrated we haven’t gotten a reply.
On the off chance anyone reading this knows someone who can help, please let us know! (You can use the Technical Support and Feedback form on the Archive, a contact form on the OTW site, reblog this with a note, poke me here on Tumblr – whatever you prefer.) We’d really like to be archived again.
Hey, folks! Like sarking (aka sarken) said, this isn’t the way we want things to be, we don’t know why it’s happening, and we’re trying to change it. We’re sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to use the Wayback Machine to access older versions of AO3 at this time.
I’m sorry, I don’t understand this. Has someone on the AO3 team gone AWOL (not responding to messages for MONTHS) but has also sabotaged the archive by blocking it from being archived on the Wayback Machine? And the rest of AO3 can’t do anything about it? I have about a hundred stories on AO3 - and this is very worrying. A little reassurance that the problem is in hand would be very welcome.
The answers to your questions are in the tumblr thread.
This is not AO3’s plan or fault. It is the WayBack Machine.
“Speaking as the co-chair of the AO3 development team, I promise there’s nothing sinister going on here! As @christycorr mentioned, this wasn’t our idea, and we’ve been asking what the problem is since at least September (we’ve sent emails, too). We’re sad and frustrated we haven’t gotten a reply.
On the off chance anyone reading this knows someone who can help, please let us know! (You can use the Technical Support and Feedback form on the Archive, a contact form on the OTW site, reblog this with a note, poke me here on Tumblr – whatever you prefer.) We’d really like to be archived again.”
and
“Hey, folks! Like sarking (aka sarken) said, this isn’t the way we want things to be, we don’t know why it’s happening, and we’re trying to change it. We’re sorry for the inconvenience of not being able to use the Wayback Machine to access older versions of AO3 at this time.If you have any insight into this problem, you can contact our Support committee, contact our Communications committee, or send us an ask on Tumblr.”
