It's not cringe anymore (it SHOULDN'T be cringe anymore), just do it. You're doing something you enjoy, who cares what anybody else says! So spread the words my fellow internet brethren.
Right now it's a victim of DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing. This means that a malicious party is trying to steal traffic from FFn by purchasing a very similar domain.
Correction:
The new "fake" site that people are seeing still belongs to FanFiction.net—they just misconfigured their servers and are not redirecting traffic from the bare fanfiction.net to the main site at www.fanfiction.net. There is likely no malicious agent. Didn't mean to scare anyone! Just wanted to let people know the site wasn't deleted!
So if you want to read fanfiction and not see leaves, you have have to type out "www.fanfiction.net".
Friends -- this is what fanfiction.net's front page looks like right now.
@beautifulfic advises (and I can confirm, I just checked it) that the mobile version of the site, m.fanfiction.net, appears still to be up. STRONGLY suggest that if you have material there that's not preserved elsewhere, you go in via the mobile gateway and archive it NOW.
Please reblog so others can take action.
ETA: @mylittleredgirl advises that if you attach “www.” to the front of the URL, the site displays correctly. But this is still concerning, and suggests somebody’s either monkeying around with their .htaccess file—a fairly important piece of under-the-hood "equipment" for a website—or has possibly misconfigured the site in some other way.
At the moment there's no telling what's going on. Meanwhile, if I had anything over there, I’d back it up anyway.
I cannot blame them for pulling their works, in fact I'm proud of them for doing so. Fanfiction is a community of gifting. As authors we write fics and share our works for free. Fanfiction is a weird, fragile, liminal space that can crumble at any time. This fragility needs to be respected.
If you want fanfiction to be around for you to enjoy, then the rules need to be respected!
You can bind fics. You can gift bound fics. DO NOT SELL BOUND FICS!!
Or soon we won't have fanfiction anymore and the world will be much darker for it.
I understand the reassurances that have been going around mean well, but no, the situation with fanfiction.net is not just a case of ordinary domain spoofing.
You cannot purchase a subdomain separately from its parent domain. If fanfiction.net and www.fanfiction.net are currently resolving to different sites, it's because whoever has control of the parent domain, fanfiction.net, fucked up.
This doesn't necessarily mean anything untoward is going on. For example, the site could be in the process of changing hosting providers, and whoever was responsible for updating the domain's configuration accidentally pointed the bare domain and the www subdomain to different places. That happens all the time.
Given that the preponderance of evidence is that fanfiction.net's hosting has not been actively maintained for some time, however, this could also be a sign that things are falling apart even further. It'd still be a good idea to back up your stuff, just in case!
My dudes, let your fave Fanfiction writers know you love and miss them.
I literally got my shit together and wrote a new chapter for my 50+ chapter long incomplete fanfiction after not updating in two years, just because I got a new review from a reader who said they missed me and hoped I was okay.
Your reviews matter, we cherish them, and they can bring your fave Fanfiction writers back from the dead.
Dear God, I visited fanfiction.net after god knows how long because the author of a fic I was interested in told me that they are updating it faster on ff.net
First of all, I had to wait here for like five minutes
But then it gets worse...
That's a small, tiny paragraph broken with TWO huge-ass ads!
Ao3 comments: FHDIDJFNDJ I loved this fic so much!!! do you want my first born? because ID GIVE YOU MY FIRST BORN
Fanfiction.net comments: Honestly, I’m quite disappointed with the dialogue- it felt very stale to me. How familiar are really you with the source material? Any, I will not be recommending this-
TOP 10 ANIMANGA ON FANFICTION.NET BASED ON NUMBER OF FANWORKS (1999-2022)
To make this bar chart race, all series titles in the Anime/Manga Section on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.
In 1999-2001, FFN used Anime as a catch-all tag for all anime that didn’t have their own category yet before it was removed in 2002 onwards.
In 1999, fanfiction weren’t divided into sections like Anime/Manga, TV, Books, etc. yet. It was just a small list of mixed fandoms.
Originally, the fanfiction list was sorted alphabetically too, but was changed to number of fics at around early 2013.
By November 2013, FFN started abbreviating numbers above 1,000 to K, so exact numbers aren't available for series with more than 1,000 fanfiction.
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏
Edit: This bar chart is all made with the assumption that the numbers listed in section are correct. I can't seem to get the same numbers for some for these series when I go to the specific series' page and filter everything to All though... I don't know if I'm missing something or not...
For example, currently, the anime/manga section says Naruto has 439k fics, but going to the Naruto page and filters, ratings and language to All, it says there's only 413k fics. There's also 37.3k crossover fics, but adding would be equal to 450k fics... If anyone can clue me in on how FFN calculates these numbers, I'd be very grateful.🙏