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fanficrants This edition is really just me throwing a temper tanrum in my lj. That one has more discussion in comments, including meta and discussion by other posters.
I've accepted that a great many fic authors will willfully pull their fics from the net, rendering current readers incapable of re-reading them and future readers incapable of finding them (and, most importantly, making it so I can't read them), but for the love of all that's holy, people, don't go one step further and make it so the Wayback Machine can't archive your webpages. Most especially don't go back and retroactively make it so that the Wayback Machine can no longer pull up your old webpage with now deleted stories that was available via the Wayback Machine six months ago.
Yes, it's possible for you to have your pages excluded from/removed from the Wayback Machine, but just because you can use robots.txt doesn't mean you should, unless there are pressing legal reasons. I personally find it more than just annoying. I've come to realize, as I searched for a particular author's fic this evening with steadily mounting irritation, that I actually find it offensive. Not just on a personal level (as a sort of passive-agressive "fuck you" aimed at other fans), but on a professional level, as both a history student and an archivist-in-training. You are essentially not just making your work unarchivable, you are doing the online equivalent of going into an archive and removing and destroying part of its contents. I'm overstating things out of annoyance (well, out of frustrated and irrational rage), here, but the same basic principle applies. You're destroying fannish history, removing your work from the fandom equivalent of the literary landscape, and, in the case of small fandoms, sometimes cutting the amount of fic in the fandom in half. And all because you don't like your story anymore?
There is a special place in Archivists' Hell reserved for those who destroy information solely from personal prejudice/preference, where they will spend eternity beside people who put cellotape on 19th century documents, people who write on original manuscripts in ink, computer techs who mass-deleted months of archived emails in order to free up server space--and without saving copies--after the records management department specifically asked them not to, and Stephen Joyce.
And really, ask yourself why you're even deleting the fics in the first place. Even if you've left fandom, or moved on to a new fandom, the readers in your old fandom are still there (and if you want to disavow contact with said old fandom, that's what a new pseudonym is for). Even if you've published an original novel drawing heavily on said fics, that doesn't mean you have to destroy the evidence of your creative process--when a painter finishes a painting, does he then turn around and burn all of his sketches? Especially if he's already shown them to people who enjoyed looking at them? Unless your reason is something along the lines of "my boss found out that I write fanfiction, and now I have to remove my NC-17-rated Harry Potter chan from public view before the state school system finds it and fires me," or "Anne Rice sent me a C&D letter," I don't buy it as valid. (Or you could make that "fail to understand why you'd want to destroy your own hard work and deprive other of the ability to see it").
The term "Bonfire of the Vanities" mentioned in this rant's title is a reference to a mass cultural/intellectual purge practiced in 15th century Florence, wherein a religious zealot named Savonarola bullied and persuaded the people of Florence into burning their sinful or luxorious possessions, from fine clothing to jewelry to any books Savonarola's followers didn't approve of. Among the "shamefull" things consigned to the flames was a collection of Botticelli's sketches and oil paintings, paintings that would be worth a fortune today, and that art historians would weep to get their hands on, which were laid on the fire by Botticelli himself, because Savonarola had threatened him with hellfire and social disgrace if he didn't destroy his work and all evidence of it.
Still want to erase that 200k fic from the face of the internet forever? Fine, but the Special Archives Hell is waiting.
And the really personally irritating thing is, the author whose no-longer-online fics sparked this epiphany of annoyed hatred is one I'd previously enjoyed reading a great deal. Now, though, every time I see her name, I will picture that original printing of the Confederate consitution I saw in the NARA labs, the one covered in browned cellotape that has bonded with the paper and turned it brittle and transparent, and will wince in mental agony. I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person and that I'm over-reacting and being unfair, but my subconscious has now irrevocably associated her with wanton destruction of historical documents.
[2nd Edit] This seems to have started up its own bonfire of wank. Since I'm very busy with grad school right now, I'm not going to be responding to any more comments (aside from the responses at fanficrants), but feel free to debate with/agree with/argue with each other.
Oh, nevermind--I can take three minutes away from that research project.
This post was originally typed up at three a.m. or so, right after I finished screaming profanity at my computer screen after a fourty minute search failed to turn up evidence of a fic I'd previously read in a library computer lab (via waybacking it from a rec) and wanted to track down and save. Hence the seriously confrontational language and hyperbole (hey, I left the "God damn motherfucking bastard sonuvabitch where the hell is it!" bit out. Well, until now). I won't say which fic and which author, because that would make this whole thing into a personal attack, when it's really meant to be more of a generalized temper-tantrum.
I found it annoying as all get out, obviously, and the principle of the thing--not just deleting one's own personal website or journal, which is something I can understand (sometimes family or cowrokers find your lj. Sometimes websites get to be a pain to keep up and/or you're tired of paying server fees), but going back and erasing it from archives run by somebody else, and from digital preservation efforts--struck me as going beyond just the digital equivalent of taking a book out of print. Removing fic from the wayback machine as well as from your webpage is like pulling your book from print and then asking the public library to take it out of circulation. Unless there are real-life legal reasons for it (C&D letters, being outed to one's boss, etc.), it seems prima-donna-like and inconsiderate of one's fellow fans. At least, it does in situations like the one that prompted this, where the author is still active in another fandom (which argues against there being real-life "about to lose my job for writing slash" reasons behind it).
fanficrants This edition is really just me throwing a temper tanrum in my lj. That one has more discussion in comments, including meta and discussion by other posters.I've accepted that a great many fic authors will willfully pull their fics from the net, rendering current readers incapable of re-reading them and future readers incapable of finding them (and, most importantly, making it so I can't read them), but for the love of all that's holy, people, don't go one step further and make it so the Wayback Machine can't archive your webpages. Most especially don't go back and retroactively make it so that the Wayback Machine can no longer pull up your old webpage with now deleted stories that was available via the Wayback Machine six months ago.
Yes, it's possible for you to have your pages excluded from/removed from the Wayback Machine, but just because you can use robots.txt doesn't mean you should, unless there are pressing legal reasons. I personally find it more than just annoying. I've come to realize, as I searched for a particular author's fic this evening with steadily mounting irritation, that I actually find it offensive. Not just on a personal level (as a sort of passive-agressive "fuck you" aimed at other fans), but on a professional level, as both a history student and an archivist-in-training. You are essentially not just making your work unarchivable, you are doing the online equivalent of going into an archive and removing and destroying part of its contents. I'm overstating things out of annoyance (well, out of frustrated and irrational rage), here, but the same basic principle applies. You're destroying fannish history, removing your work from the fandom equivalent of the literary landscape, and, in the case of small fandoms, sometimes cutting the amount of fic in the fandom in half. And all because you don't like your story anymore?
There is a special place in Archivists' Hell reserved for those who destroy information solely from personal prejudice/preference, where they will spend eternity beside people who put cellotape on 19th century documents, people who write on original manuscripts in ink, computer techs who mass-deleted months of archived emails in order to free up server space--and without saving copies--after the records management department specifically asked them not to, and Stephen Joyce.
And really, ask yourself why you're even deleting the fics in the first place. Even if you've left fandom, or moved on to a new fandom, the readers in your old fandom are still there (and if you want to disavow contact with said old fandom, that's what a new pseudonym is for). Even if you've published an original novel drawing heavily on said fics, that doesn't mean you have to destroy the evidence of your creative process--when a painter finishes a painting, does he then turn around and burn all of his sketches? Especially if he's already shown them to people who enjoyed looking at them? Unless your reason is something along the lines of "my boss found out that I write fanfiction, and now I have to remove my NC-17-rated Harry Potter chan from public view before the state school system finds it and fires me," or "Anne Rice sent me a C&D letter," I don't buy it as valid. (Or you could make that "fail to understand why you'd want to destroy your own hard work and deprive other of the ability to see it").
The term "Bonfire of the Vanities" mentioned in this rant's title is a reference to a mass cultural/intellectual purge practiced in 15th century Florence, wherein a religious zealot named Savonarola bullied and persuaded the people of Florence into burning their sinful or luxorious possessions, from fine clothing to jewelry to any books Savonarola's followers didn't approve of. Among the "shamefull" things consigned to the flames was a collection of Botticelli's sketches and oil paintings, paintings that would be worth a fortune today, and that art historians would weep to get their hands on, which were laid on the fire by Botticelli himself, because Savonarola had threatened him with hellfire and social disgrace if he didn't destroy his work and all evidence of it.
Still want to erase that 200k fic from the face of the internet forever? Fine, but the Special Archives Hell is waiting.
And the really personally irritating thing is, the author whose no-longer-online fics sparked this epiphany of annoyed hatred is one I'd previously enjoyed reading a great deal. Now, though, every time I see her name, I will picture that original printing of the Confederate consitution I saw in the NARA labs, the one covered in browned cellotape that has bonded with the paper and turned it brittle and transparent, and will wince in mental agony. I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person and that I'm over-reacting and being unfair, but my subconscious has now irrevocably associated her with wanton destruction of historical documents.
[2nd Edit] This seems to have started up its own bonfire of wank. Since I'm very busy with grad school right now, I'm not going to be responding to any more comments (aside from the responses at fanficrants), but feel free to debate with/agree with/argue with each other.
Oh, nevermind--I can take three minutes away from that research project.
This post was originally typed up at three a.m. or so, right after I finished screaming profanity at my computer screen after a fourty minute search failed to turn up evidence of a fic I'd previously read in a library computer lab (via waybacking it from a rec) and wanted to track down and save. Hence the seriously confrontational language and hyperbole (hey, I left the "God damn motherfucking bastard sonuvabitch where the hell is it!" bit out. Well, until now). I won't say which fic and which author, because that would make this whole thing into a personal attack, when it's really meant to be more of a generalized temper-tantrum.
I found it annoying as all get out, obviously, and the principle of the thing--not just deleting one's own personal website or journal, which is something I can understand (sometimes family or cowrokers find your lj. Sometimes websites get to be a pain to keep up and/or you're tired of paying server fees), but going back and erasing it from archives run by somebody else, and from digital preservation efforts--struck me as going beyond just the digital equivalent of taking a book out of print. Removing fic from the wayback machine as well as from your webpage is like pulling your book from print and then asking the public library to take it out of circulation. Unless there are real-life legal reasons for it (C&D letters, being outed to one's boss, etc.), it seems prima-donna-like and inconsiderate of one's fellow fans. At least, it does in situations like the one that prompted this, where the author is still active in another fandom (which argues against there being real-life "about to lose my job for writing slash" reasons behind it).
From:
no subject
As for serving the purpose of an archive, I totally get that. I've taken several of my own, older stories down from my personal archive. But I wouldn't ask anyone else to remove those stories from their archives, if they'd previously asked for permission to post them, nor would I go through the trouble of backing the work out of auto archives, like the Wayback.
I think the difficulty we're having here is between Can and Should. Of course you CAN, and who am I to tell you that you *shouldn't* try to wipe the stories you wrote off the face of the earth? But. And it's a big, er, but, you also can't, and shouldn't, fault someone for being very annoyed when you take away a toy which you gave them, just because it no longer suits your purpose for them to have it.
And again, I think it's naive to think that *anything* we put into webspace can be erased forever. Believe me, I feel your pain around wanting old stories to be forgotten. I just try to look at their continued existance as a way to measure how far I've (hopefully) come. Or at least get a good laugh from.
From:
no subject
Absolutely, and it was not my intent to state otherwise. That was a part of my issue with the original poster's stance.
Can versus Should is more an issue of how far one is willing to go to accommodate the wishes of readers versus their own wishes. I'm not faulting anyone for enjoying my stories. That's very flattering, and in the case of these older stories, something of a bittersweet flattery. But flattery all the same.
I'm more faulting this particular case of someone stating that persons who choose to remove stories and clean up broken links are being malicious and should be condemned.
From:
no subject
Hm. I guess that wasn't my interpretation of the OP. I read a frustrated rant by someone who takes archiving, and storytelling, pretty seriously. I identified with her frustration.
And I wish she would come on back and discuss. Stupid real-life having. ;)
From:
no subject
I hope she'll come back and discuss as well. As much as I read her post and disagreed with parts of it, I do see sympathize with her frustration.
Thanks for your very gracious presentation of your thoughts. It's very rare to disagree with someone while simultaneously wanting to draw hearts around them for being awesome. *sketches a few around you*
From:
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What's your de-archiving fandom, btw, if you don't mind my asking?
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Right there with you on the stronger part. I wrote a lot in that fandom, and I can almost find the exact moment in a story when I got it. It being the underlying thing *hand wavey motion* that I was trying to accomplish with this writing stories business. Once I hit that point, everything before it felt false, even though at the time, it wasn't. I had to write all of those older stories to reach that point, so they did serve a purpose for me, in the grand scheme of things.
From:
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Do you keep your old stuff at all, somewhere? Even a hard copy?
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And yes, yes I do. I'm a completist. I keep the stories, the notes, the drafts, even the dead things that seemed like a good idea until I (thankfully) had the sense to see otherwise. It's odd, because I can't even pillage them. I can read them and find that headspace again, 99% of the time, but a good line in an otherwise awful story can't transplant into another story for me.
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And now we have totally hijacked this poor girl's LJ to talk writing process... So the lesson here really *is* nothing in cyberspace is yours. Hee.
From:
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*snickers and toasts* And it came full circle, didn't it? Well met!
From:
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Yay for random meet ups! :)
From:
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Yay, indeed! If it's all right with you, I'd like to add your journal to the list of people that I read on a daily basis.
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Looks like we have some friends in common already.
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Wise, yes. Possible? Hell no. There are times when I behave in similar ways to the character in my icon. Other times, I'm housebroken. *cackle*
From:
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See icon. *snurfle*
I wonder if the OP got completely scared away. If she's lucky, she at least turned off comment notification.
From:
no subject
And I'll second the thanks for being civilized about disagreeing with me/each other. While I've not read all the comments, it looks like people are at least debating politely and not slinging insults, which is a relief, since seeing the 60+ comments notification made me fear starting a flame war or turning up on fandom_wank.