fanfiction.lol^{fun, silly, low-stakes fandom}

Hello, again! I did not expect to make another admin post so soon. It seems as though SquidgeWorld Archive is also currently down. Meaning that fanfiction.lol is the only open-registration general multifandom AO3-fork currently online.

EDIT: SquidgeWorld is online again, yipee!

And I deeply appreciate everyone who is here! Writing fics, reading, commenting, and leaving kudos. It is wonderful to see my little archive do its job and give people a home for their writing, however temporary.

I have been keeping a close eye on fflol's server, and I have removed all non-fflol services and programs to give the site top priority. Things are going well! For all of the spaghetti, the OTWArchive codebase scales well. Doing the napkin math, I expect my current set up to be able to handle a few several thousand fics and users. The entire site right now only takes around 400MB of storage!

If we scale exponentially moving forward, I will require buying additional hardware, and you can support me in that! But right now, I am totally okay as-is. A big thank you to those who have gave support already!! <3

Moving forward, I am being a lot more considerate and careful. I have cron jobs set up to rsync backups of the site to multiple machines via ssh hourly. In addition, I've set up a testing/development server to work on and then deploy finished changes to production.

In a worst-case scenario (like getting DDoS'd or whatever), it would be trivial for me to spin up a VPS and load it with the site and the most recent back-up. I will do everything in my power to ensure fflol stays online.

Beyond that, I am going to be working on a few quality of life tweaks that I've been putting off, such as finishing the dark mode theme and adjusting the default theme for better readability.

More Housekeeping

I covered most of the important stuff in the previous post, but there are a few additional things I want to make note of:

• I absolutely think you should write whatever the hell you want, but please only upload your own work to fanfiction.lol! Do not upload the work of other people, or anything generated by LLM chatbots.
• Please practice good infosec: use anonymous emails, never reuse passwords, and use a VPN online. These aren't just recommendations for fflol, but for the Internet in general. I will try my best to be diligent about safety and security, but AO3 did suffer a security breach of unknown magnitude.
• Be kind! This is like the one big rule here. And so far I think everyone is following it really well.

The site does have an official email: [email protected] and I will be checking that regularly, but I do check my personal email [email protected] more often.

And if you have any questions regarding tag wrangling specifically, you can mail our tag wrangler at [email protected].

I'm sure the site will get rather quiet again once AO3 is back up and running, but I hope some of you decide to stay and help build this little independent community into something long-term and lasting. :)

Finally, I'd like to do a little plug: build your own website to host your own fics! The independent web is a wonderful rabbit hole to jump into. My friend Coyote even made a web template specifically for Archive of Our Own that you can try out.

Hi there, as you know from the homepage, my name is Brennan :) I decided since we've doubled in size in the past day due to the AO3 outage, I thought it would be good to write a post to get new folks up to speed.

Unlike all the other (wonderful and awesome) AO3-fork fan archives, we are very new! I only started this website around half a year ago. We are small, and most likely going to stay small. I'm a writer myself, and you can read some of my thoughts on why I started fanfiction.lol here:

• Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3
• The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators
• Be a Lover: Make Sure the Quiet Wheel Gets the Grease
• I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep

That said, we have no invitation queue. Feel free to register and start posting your fics to your heart's content.

Key differences from AO3:

• I run this site on a computer in my basement, meaning that it must abide by Canadian law—this has nothing to do with morals or judgment. Please read our terms of service and content policy. Other than what's illegal, please write and share anything! Fanfiction.lol is designed for beginners, experiments, and anything else.
• We try to be inclusive, and have a lot more options in regards to both content warnings and pairing options. If you feel like there's something we've missed, please let me know! Regarding warnings, these are to inform users—again, irrelevant to morals or judgment.
• We have a blanket generative AI ban, meaning you must write everything you publish here.
• We do tags rather differently here! My Head Tag Wrangler Jar wrote a detailed and helpful guide to our tags you can read here, with follow-up posts on ambiguous tags and AUs and poly ships.
• Similarly, we only have one full-time tag wrangler, so please be patient as she tries to organise everything.
• This is a multi-language archive, and we add new languages when requested. If yours isn't listed as an option, please contact me!

A note on performance: this site runs on modest home hardware, and the sudden influx has meant some upgrades. I've migrated the app server to Puma with multiple workers (plus a worker-killer to keep memory in check), and put rate limits in place, which means downloads are limited to 10 per minute per IP, and there are throttles on commenting and general requests to keep things responsive for everyone. If the site ever feels slow or you hit a limit, that's why. Please be patient, it's my basement PC doing its best.

I have been trying to deal and remove all the annoying spam comments regarding commissions that I've written about previously, but we have had a new influx of these as well. Please report them if you see them! On the technical side, I've added a custom keyword-based spam filter that runs alongside Akismet, it uses a list of phrases common to these commission scams (Discord handles, "add me", fanart pitches and the like) and automatically rejects comments that match, which catches things that Akismet misses. Offenders get banned and their IPs blocked. If a spam comment slips through, please report it rather than engaging.

The wonderful and awesome SquidgeWorld Archive mentions that they "survive on about $3,000 in donations per year - what AO3 takes in in about an hour during one of their fund drives." Fanfiction.lol survives on nothing! And that's okay with me :) Our only expenses are the yearly cost of the domain name, and more recently, a Resend email premium plan due to the uptick in emails we need to send out, which is $30CAD/mth.

If you would like to donate and support, here's my ko-fi, but it is very unnecessary even with all the new users.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to email me at [email protected]. Despite the fact this makes me no money, I am dedicating most of my time to ensuring this site stays online and works as an alternative until AO3 is back up and running.

Please have a happy and wonderful Halloween!

We just hit 500 works on the archive! Thank you to everyone who's posted, imported, read, kudosed, and commented :)

Under the Hood

We've done a round of infrastructure maintenance over the last while:

• Rails upgraded to 8.1 and Ruby to 3.4, keeping us current with upstream security and performance fixes
• Various smaller fixes. Multi-chapter AO3 imports now work, wrangler permissions are tightened up, and tag/category display got some polish

The goal is that you shouldn't notice anything different. So far so good!

Spam Report: Zero

After the September spam wave, we put Akismet plus a local keyword filter in place and no spam has gotten through since. Knock on wood.

If one does slip through, please report it via the Report Abuse link.

Jar Needs Wranglers

Our head tag wrangler Jar is looking for help keeping the tags organized.

If you enjoy organizing things, making canonical tags behave, or just want to learn how tag wrangling works behind the scenes, check out the call for volunteers here.

Happy Halloween!

Halloween is only a couple days away, so consider this official encouragement: write the spooky, freaky, monster-filled fic you've been sitting on. Ghost AUs, monsterfucking, haunted houses, things with too many teeth. Whatever floats yr boat!

— brennan