this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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It seems like this person wanted to help with AO3 being down in their own way, but somehow decided that scraping the internet for fanworks and hosting them on a new site without asking permission from any of the creators was a good idea.
It seems similar to those people who will dump a 40k LoC Pull Request on an open source project that they vibe coded. Wanting to help, but misunderstanding every step, or like, how to interact with an established group. The article does say that the guy who made the vibe coded site is 17, so I don't wanna be too hard on him, but maybe he should have reached out to OTW to see if there was anything he could do to help first.
Also this kind of stuff is wild because a lot of websites aren't really built to handle the insane traffic from bot crawlers.
The thing is, in any fetish and fanfic community there will be a body of works accumulated over the years that contains many classics but the authors are only a nickname. Sometimes there's an email listed that stopped working decades ago.
The sites that host the works are usually run by enthusiasts. Over the years they lose the incentive to maintain them. Whenever a site goes down and others take its place there's always a dilemma about what to do with that body of work.
Technically speaking, yes, any site that's not the site where each author originally uploaded their work is in breach of copyright and/or licensing for those works. On the other hand, if you were to attempt to contact each author and only carry forward the works where you get an answer and permission... only a tiny fraction would qualify, and massive portions of the literature would be lost in each move.
Thats a good point. Things do go down forever and its nice to have backups to preserve history. Though in this case it seems a bit premature because OTW and AO3 are just down afaik, not like, gone gone.