this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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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.
Exactly, there is every intention of them coming back up again. It seems at most like their servers got hacked, and at least that they need (to schedule) maintenance to keep things running smoothly.
If they were gone forever, or there was no published information on what is going on, I imagine much fewer authors would have an issue with their creations being carried on (in good faith) on a new site.