#and that ao3’s software is open source

[obserbolisk]

I’m sort of another outsider to this whole rodeo, paying attention but not posting until now. Watching the whole affair fills me with a ton of complex thoughts, imo the most valid arguments against AO3 are the ones focusing on how inefficiently run it is and how poorly volunteers appear to be treated.

On one hand, there’s multiple accounts of volunteers saying that they wanted to moderate the site and they were held back by the AO3 legal team and board. You’re right that proper moderation would be impossible, however it’s not completely absurd to say that they could be doing a lot better and to realize that voting/making noise/whatever they’re doing this time/changing fic names might make some difference. The idea is that this website is supposed to be some form of a democracy, when people feel that’s not happening, they’re going to get upset.

On the other hand, nonprofits are notoriously good at self destructive behavior. The OTW is clearly a slow, plodding bureaucracy run by a board that is extremely resistant to change. But I’m some ways, they have to behave like that, they’re the 57th most visited website in the USA and that’s a fuckload of upkeep. Running a hosting website is a dirty, dirty business, and it’s unlikely that they have enough hands to go around. The endless nightmare that is content moderation is a well-known phenomenon, for fucks sake we’re all discussing this on tumblr, a website that got taken off the App Store for hosting child pornography, and could only properly combat that with a large scale porn ban. And unfortunately, the insane details involving the process of removing illegal content coming out at AO3 aren’t too dissimilar to the stories of happening at every other social media website, including tumblr. It’s just happening at a much slower pace due to how mismanaged/understaffed the site is.

The treatment of labor there is fucked, but it’s fucked up in a manner that’s par for the course for any website that hosts media. And, like you say, it would be really hard for them to do better. But this behavior is actively chasing potential volunteers away, and once the site loses the majority of its volunteers, that’s when shit gets really bad.

On the topic of hiring a diversity consultant, I agree it’s unlikely they would be able to do anything useful. Most probable scenario you have another voice on the board making things run even slower. But people are focusing on their own personal best case scenario, where this person is a voice to push for actual changes to the way the site is run, an update to how archive warnings work. Stuff that’s probably going to be hard to implement. It seems like they want one diversity consultant to do things that would require five semi-competent coders to accomplish.

But if you assert that you’re gonna run a site like a democracy, expect people to run campaigns to affect that democracy. Imo that’s just a sign that people are invested in seeing change.

The whole #EndOTWracism is really fascinating to watch as an outsider because like, as I keep saying the elephant in the room is that the volunteer organization with a half million dollar budget is never going to moderate their website with millions of users, but the OTW also doesn't seem to acknowledge this at all.

If they wanted to be honest and transparent, either in 2020 or right now, they could've said "we are never going to do any more than the bare legal minimum when it comes to moderation because we lack the resources to do anything else, and if you don't like that you should stop using our site." And sure, that would piss a lot of people off, but it's also, like, the only actual possible outcome of any of this, so you might as well be upfront about it.

Instead they made a couple good feature additions and a bunch of promises to revisit their policies (which they know they couldn't enforce if they were less permissive) and then... hoped no one would remember that they promised this? Like, come on now, "say you're going to do a bunch of shit that you don't have any capacity to do and then hope everyone forgets about it" is a great strategy to have a ton of people yelling at you a few years later.

The weirdest part of this is the promise that OTW made (and that people seem to want them to keep) to hire a diversity consultant, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what anyone thinks this person would actually do. Diversity consultants are the people midsize companies hire when a white executive gets caught on tape saying the n word - what's the plan for one at the OTW?

[ms-demeanor]

I've been poking around your website, I really like it.

I'm inspired to put together my own silly site, you've made a lot of posts about that. I know how to get started with a website builder or whatever, but that's kind of boring.

I'd like to imitate the look of Ao3's log in page.

I have several specific Ao3 searches that the 'favorite tag' section just can't manage. I have all of those links in a google docs but it's boring and clumsy. I want buttons to press.

Your website mimics wiki, so... can you point me in the direction to get started mimicing Ao3?

My website doesn't just mimic wikipedia, it is a MediaWiki site, which means that from the ground up the software it's running on is the same software as Wikipedia. When I write pages, I'm using wiki markdown ==Like This== for section subheads and [[like this]] to direct to other pages on the site, etc.

The reason that I chose to do this is because it's relatively easy to set up a site this way; I don't know enough about CSS to get a site to look like Wikipedia without running it on mediawiki software, and I don't know enough about CSS to get something to look like Ao3 without running it on OTW software.

Like MediaWiki, the OTW archive software is also open source, so you theoretically could set up a literal archive of your own, but it is not *easy.*

Walter from Squidge.org has created documentation for implementing OTW's software and has talked about helping others to set it up as well, so that is one option.

If that's not the kind of labor you're looking for (and it won't be for a lot of people! it certainly wasn't for me!) you could try something like using a site like wordpress and building a custom template. That would *also* be a lot of work (in terms of learning CSS) but might be easier than figuring out the whole backend as well as getting the visuals you want.

[beatrice-otter]

Alternatives to AO3

With the recent revelations about the OTW's internal dysfunction (and the effect that has on AO3's functioning and abuse of volunteers), a lot of people are all of a sudden looking for alternatives in a way they haven't for years. I think AO3 is here to stay, and I think they will (eventually) manage to get their shit together, (and I also think that a little failure might actually be good for them in the long run) but I also firmly believe that fandom should be less centralized than it currently is. I think it's unhealthy to rely on One Major Archive. I think there should be lots of alternatives, and I think people should post their fanfiction in multiple spaces. I lived through the era when entire archives could vanish overnight. Backups are a very good thing. (AO3 won't vanish overnight; the nonprofit structure means that most of the things that nerfed the older archives can't happen to AO3. It would take a long, slow decline for AO3 to die, with plenty of warning.) Anyway! Here are some other things to consider. OTW-style archives There are actually TWO other archives using the same software as AO3! It is open source. Now, it is deeply unfriendly to use, and has a lot of things that are hard-coded that shouldn't be, so it takes a bit of work to make it work. But two people have gotten it up and running: Squidgeworld. Squidgeworld is a multifandom archive that is the current iteration of an archive that started in 1994. Squidge has been around for a long time, and they just recently converted into a nonprofit to ensure that even if the original founder steps away or dies or whatever, the archive will continue on. Pretty much anything you can post to AO3, you can post to Squidgeworld. Ad Astra. Ad Astra is a Star Trek archive that's been around since 2009, and was formed from even earlier Star Trek fan spaces. It only accepts Star Trek fanfic. Crossovers are fine, RPF is fine (consider time travel fic) as long as the person has been dead for at least 50 years. Personal fanfiction websites Do you want to have a place where you completely control how your fanfiction is presented? It's actually pretty simple to create your own website!

melannen has a tutorial. And there are people creating old-style fanfiction webrings to link peoples' personal fic pages together. If you want something slightly fancier,

tobli has put together a set of Python scripts to function as a static site generator.

comments Comment? https://ift.tt/aKzAuNZ

[aftokrator-official]

Screenshotting because it's not rebloggable anymore (omitting OP's name for that reason) but this post - more specifically the replies to it - have been bothering me since I saw it a day or so ago and I finally decided to come back and engage lmao. (Source link from OP)

OP's totally right. OpenAI is a garbage company with garbage business practices but this is not the way to do this, people. I'm glad y'all have so much faith in the legal system here, but I don't, and if this goes through it's not going to harm the entities you want it to harm. believe me.

(i am not against AI when used ethically but i think that is a moot point here bc i do not believe OpenAI is an ethical developer of AI tech. anyway)

Here's the "rebuttal" that has been irritating me so much I couldn't leave it alone:

THIS IS NOT REMOTELY TRUE.

First of all, unless I've missed something big, OpenAI has never disclosed the contents of the proprietary dataset they use to train their LLMs. We have no idea whether ChatGPT was trained on George RR Martin's books or not. Presumably, neither does George RR Martin. So all we have to go on is that ChatGPT "knows" characters and details from ASOIAF. Okay.

The problem is that ASOIAF is a massively popular series with some massively popular multimedia adaptations and spinoffs, and processing the text of the novels is far from the only way ChatGPT could have learned to produce those details.

Let's try a little experiment.

GPT-2 is an open source model released by OpenAI when they were just starting out. It works more or less the same way as ChatGPT and its ilk, just on a vastly smaller scale. It's much, much more limited, but the underlying algorithms work on the same concepts. So, what would GPT-2 give us if we ask it for a summary of a hypothetical GRRM novel?

I typed up the first paragraph here, and GPT-2 gave me the rest. (GPT-2 isn't a chatbot, but works more like autocomplete, so I didn't prompt it directly.)

Okay, I have a feeling that plot doesn't make much sense as a prequel, but hey, it's AI (and an elderly one at that), it's not going to be particularly good at this left to its own devices. And look, it DID pull out a few details specific to ASOIAF - Jon Snow, the Night Watch, the Wildlings. So case closed, right? GPT-2 must have had ASOIAF novels in its training data too, just like its nasty little great-grandchild.

Except we know what was in GPT-2's dataset - it was trained on a 40GB corpus of data scraped from publicly-available web pages, specifically pages linked from Reddit. We don't have all the exact texts that were used, but we DO have the top 1000 domains contained in the dataset. All of which is a hell of a lot more information than we have on ChatGPT.

What websites are ranked #75 and #160 in the list of 1000 domains? Why, it's Fanfiction.net and AO3. Hmm, I wonder where it learned about the very popular fictional characters from George RR Martin's novels! (Certainly not just from fanfiction, either - sites like IMDB and Wikia were ranked much higher in the list of sources, and entertainment news and fan wiki articles would also contain a lot of text about ASOIAF/GoT.)

You can certainly argue that using these websites as training data is also unethical or should be illegal - but that's not what's being argued in this lawsuit. As far as I know, ChatGPT has never spat out a perfect recreation (or even a vaguely paraphrased recreation) of any of GRRM's writing, so the only evidence for violation of his copyright in this case is the generation of what is essentially a machine-created derivative work. That is really, really worrying, even if you don't think the machine should be allowed to do that. I'm not a lawyer, just a fanfic writer and software developer, so I have no idea how legitimate the legal argument here is... but it's going down a road that is very dangerous for fandom, whether you believe it is or not.

[rage-cupcakes]

What's very funny to me is you *can* be a little bitch about AO3's policies *and* have many of the nice things it offers. It's open source software! Host your own competing fanfiction site! Live your best life and leave everyone else alone!

It's hilarious to me when people complain about AO3 and its policies, and what they allow on the site - but it's ESPECIALLY funny when people complain like "Why can't the freaks make their own site and just go there?"

Sweetie... AO3 is the site for that. Y'all invaded our space.

Wattpad and FFN still exist. Go there. They're as shitty and G-rated as you want. You can't have the luxuries that AO3 offers if you're gonna be a little bitch about its policies. Imagine walking into a strip club and complaining about the alcohol and naked ladies when there's a god damn Dennys next door you could have gone to. Christ.

[respectable-username]

🔐 Why You (Probably) Don't Need A VPN

A rant by a software engineer sick of VPN ads from her favourite YouTubers

TL;DR:

Here are some legitimate reasons the average internet user might want to use a VPN:

To connect to their company's internal network

To bypass the Great Firewall of China (or other types of website blocks at country or organisation level)

To watch Netflix etc as if you were in another country

Here are absolutely rubbish reasons to use a VPN:

Privacy

And today, I'll tell you why.

Hang on, won't a VPN stop hackers from stealing my passwords?

I mean, it does encrypt the web traffic coming from your device.

You know what else encrypts web traffic coming from your device? Your browser.

Yes, in the year 2021, pretty much all websites on the internet are accessed over HTTPS. The "S" stands for "secure", as in "your request will be securely encrypted". If your browser is using HTTPS, nobody can capture the data you're sending over the internet. More detail in the "I like too much detail" section at the bottom of this post.

It's very easy to check if you are using HTTPS by looking at your URL bar. In most browsers, it will have a lock on it if secure:

(From top left to bottom right: Chrome on iOS, Safari on iOS, Chrome on Windows, Edge on Windows, Firefox on Windows, and Safari on Mac. Screenshots reflect the UI at the time this post was written. Oh gosh this has taken over 4 hours to write.)

But isn't moar encryption better? What if somebody breaks HTTPS?

For starters, nobody's breaking your HTTPS, and there isn't any benefit from double encrypting. This is because of the maths behind encryption/decryption!

Encryption works kinda like a lock and key, except the lock is maths and the key is a special number only known to the person allowed to unlock the information.

The important thing is, without the key, all the locked data looks like complete and utter garbage. Completely unusable. Barely distinguishable from random noise. There's absolutely no way to tell what the original data was.

The other important thing is that the key is nearly unguessable. As in, with current technology, will generally take more than the lifetime of the universe to guess by chance. And when technology gets faster, we just make the numbers bigger again until they're once again secure.

For any major website you use, they will use a strong encryption algorithm (ie lock) with big numbers so your keys will be strong enough to withstand an attack. This means your data is safe as long as that lock icon is in your URL bar.

A VPN will not make the existing garble any more garbled. The extra $10/month or whatever you're paying for does not buy you any extra protection.

If you want to know more about how encryption and HTTPS in particular work, see the "I like too much detail" section at the end of this post.

Something something viruses

How's a VPN going to stop viruses? It controls the path your internet traffic takes, not the content that gets sent down that path. I guess it could block some known virus-giving hosts? But if it's known to the VPN provider, it's probably also known to the built-in antivirus on your computer who can block it for you.

(Oh yeah, 3rd party antivirus is another thing that's not worth paying for these days. Microsoft's built-in Windows Defender is as good as the third party options, and something something Macs don't get viruses easily because of how they're architected.)

Honestly though, keep your software up to date, don't click on anything suspicious, don't open files from sources you don't trust, and you'll be right most of the time.

And keep your software up to date. Then update your software. Hey, did I mention keeping your stuff updated? Update! Now! It only takes a few minutes. Please update to the latest version of your software I'm begging you. It's the number 1 way to protect yourself from viruses and other malware. Most major software attacks could have been prevented if people just updated their damn software!

But my ISP is spying on me!

Ok, it is true that there are TWO bits of data that HTTPS can't and won't hide. Those are:

The source of a request (your IP)

What website that request is going to (the website's IP)

These are the bits of information that routers use to know where to send your data, so of course they can't be hidden as the data is moving across the internet. And people can see that information very easily if they want to.

Note: this will show which website you're going to, but not which page you're looking at, and not the content of that page. So it will show that you were on Tumblr, but will not show anyone that you're still reading SuperWhoLock content in 2021.

It's this source/destination information that VPNs hide, which is why they can be used to bypass website blocks and region locks.

By using a VPN, those sniffing traffic on your side of the VPN will just show you connecting to the VPN, not the actual website you want. That means you can read AO3 at work/school without your boss/teachers knowing (unless they look over your shoulder of course).

As for those sniffing on the websites end, including the website itself, they will see the VPN as the source of the connection, not you. So if you're in the US and using a VPN node in the UK, Netflix will see you as being in the UK and show you their British library rather than the American one.

If this is what you're using a VPN for and you think the price is fair, then by all means keep doing it! This is 100% what VPNs are good for.

HOWEVER, and this is a big "however", if it's your ISP you're trying to hide your internet traffic from, then you will want to think twice before using a VPN.

Let me put it this way. Without a VPN, your ISP knows every website you connect to and when. With a VPN, do you know who has that exact same information? The VPN provider. Sure, many claim to not keep logs, but do you really trust the people asking for you to send them all your data for a fee to not just turn around and sell your data on for a profit, or worse?

In effect, you're trading one snooper for another. One snooper is heavily regulated, in many jurisdictions must obey net neutrality, and is already getting a big fee from you regardless of where you browse. The other isn't. Again, it's all a matter of who you trust more.

For me personally, I trust my ISP more than a random VPN provider, if for no other reason than my ISP is an old enough company with enough inertia and incompetence that I don't think they could organise to sell my data even if they wanted to. And with the amount of money I'm paying them per month, they've only got everything to lose if they broke consumer trust by on-selling that data. So yeah, I trust my ISP more with my privacy than the random VPN company.

But my VPN comes with a password manager!

Password managers are great. I 100% recommend you use a password manager. If there's one thing you could do right now to improve your security (other than updating your software, speaking of, have you updated yet?), it's getting and using a password manager.

Password managers also come for free.

I'm currently using LastPass free, but am planning to switch after they did a bad capitalism and only let their free accounts access either laptop or mobile but not both now. I personally am planning to move to Bitwarden on friends' recommendation since it's not only free but open source and available across devices. I also have friends who use passbolt and enjoy it, which is also free and open source, but it's also a bit DIY to set up. Great if you like tinkering though! And there are probably many other options out there if you do a bit of googling.

So, yeah, please use a password manager, but don't pay for it unless you actually have use for the extra features.

No I really need to hide my internet activity from everybody for reasons

In this case, you're probably looking for TOR. TOR is basically untraceable. It's also a terrible user experience for the most part because of this, so I'd only recommend it if you need it, such as if you're trying to escape the Great Firewall. But please don't use it for Bad Crimes. I am not to be held liable for any crime committed using information learned from this post.

Further reading viewing

If you want to know more about why you don't need a VPN, see Tom Scott's amazing video on the subject. It's honestly a great intro for beginners.

I like too much detail

Ahhh, so you're the type of person who doesn't get turned off by long explanations I see. Well, here's a little more info on the stuff I oversimplified in the main post about encryption. Uhh, words get bigger and more jargony in this section.

So first oversimplification: the assumption that all web traffic is either HTTP or HTTPS. This isn't exactly true. There are many other application layer internet standards out there, such as ssh, ftp, websockets, and all the proprietary standards certain companies use for stuff such as streaming and video conferencing. Some of these are secure, using TLS or some other security algorithm under the hood, and some of them aren't.

But most of the web requests you care about are HTTP/HTTPS calls. As for the rest, if they come from a company of a decent size that hasn't been hacked off the face of the planet already, they're probably also secure. In other words, you don't need to worry about it.

Next, we've already said that encryption works as a lock and a key, where the lock is a maths formula and the key is a number. But how do we get that key to lock and unlock the data?

Well, to answer that, we first need to talk about the two different types of encryption: symmetric and asymmetric. Symmetric encryption such as AES uses the same key to both encrypt and decrypt data, whereas asymmetric encryption such as RSA uses a different key to encode and decode.

For the sake of my writing, we're going to call the person encrypting Alice, the person decrypting Bob, and the eavesdropper trying to break our communications Eve from now on. These are standard names in crypto FYI. Also, crypto is short for cryptography not cryptocurrencies. Get your Bitcoin and Etherium outta here!

Sorry if things start getting incoherent. I'm tired. It's after 1am now.

So first, how do we get the key from symmetric crypto? This is probably the easier place to start. Well, you need a number, any number of sufficient size, that both Alice and Bob know. There are many ways you could share this number. They could decide it when they meet in person. They could send it to each other using carrier pigeons. Or they could radio it via morse code. But those aren't convenient, and somebody could intercept the number and use it to read all their messages.

So what we use instead is a super clever algorithm called Diffie-Hellman, which uses maths and, in particular, the fact it's really hard to factor large numbers (probably NP Hard to be specific, but there's no actual proof of that). The Wikipedia page for this is surprisingly easy to read, so I'll just direct you there to read all about it because I've been writing for too long. This algorithm allows Alice and Bob to agree on a secret number, despite Eve being able to read everything they send each other.

Now Alice and Bob have this secret number key, they can talk in private. Alice puts her message and the key into the encryption algorithm and out pops what looks like a load of garbage. She can then send this garbage to Bob without worrying about Eve being able to read it. Bob can then put the garbage and the key into the decryption algorithm to undo the scrambling and get the original message out telling him where the good donuts are. Voila, they're done!

But how does Alice know that she's sending her message to Bob and not Eve? Eve could pretend to be Bob so that Alice does the Diffie-Hellman dance with her instead and sends her the secret location of the good donuts instead.

This is where asymmetric crypto comes in! This is the one with private and public keys, and the one that uses prime numbers.

I'm not 100% across the maths on this one TBH, but it has something to do with group theory. Anyway, just like Diffie-Hellman, it relies on the fact that prime factorisation is hard, and so it does some magic with semi-primes, ie numbers with only 2 prime factors other than 1. Google it if you want to know more. I kinda zoned out of this bit in my security courses. Maths hard

But the effect of that maths is easier to explain: things that are encoded with one of the keys can only be decoded with the other key. This means that one of those keys can be well-known to the public and the other is known only to the person it belongs to.

If Alice wants to send a message to Bob and just Bob, no Eve allowed, she can first look up Bob's public key and encrypt a beginning message with that. Once Bob receives the message, he can decrypt it with his private key and read the contents. Eve can't read the contents though because, even though she has Bob's public key, she doesn't know his private key.

This public key information is what the lock in your browser is all about BTW. It's saying that the website is legit based on the public key they provide.

So why do we need symmetric crypto when we have asymmetric crypto? Seems a lot less hassle to exchange keys with asymmetric crypto.

Well, it's because asymmetric crypto is slooooow. So, in TLS, the security algorithm that puts the "S" in "HTTPS", asymmetric RSA is used to establish the initial connection and figure out what symmetric key to use, and then the rest of the session uses AES symmetric encryption using the agreed secret key.

And there you have it! Crypto in slightly-less-short-but-still-high-enough-level-that-I-hope-you-understand.

Just realised how long this section is. Well, I did call it "too much detail" for a reason.

Now, next question is what exactly is and isn't encrypted using HTTPS.

Well, as I said earlier, it's basically just the source IP:port and the destination IP:port. In fact, this information is actually communicated on the logical layer below the application layer HTTPS is on, known as the transport layer. Again, as I said before, you can't really encrypt this unless you don't want your data to reach the place you want at all.

Also, DNS is unencrypted. A DNS request is a request that turns a domain name, such as tumblr.com, into an IP address, by asking a special server called a Domain Name Server where to find the website you're looking for. A DNS request is made before an HTTP(S) request. Anyone who can read your internet traffic can therefore tell you wanted to go to Tumblr.

But importantly, this only shows the domain name, not the full URL. The rest of the URL, the part after the third slash (the first two slashes being part of http://), is stuff that's interpreted by the server itself and so isn't needed during transport. Therefore, it encrypted and completely unreadable, just like all the content on your page.

I was going to show a Wireshark scan of a web request using HTTP and HTTPS to show you the difference, but this has taken long enough to write as it is, so sorry!

I could probably write more, but it's 1:30am and I'm sleepy. I hope you found some of this interesting and think twice before purchasing a VPN subscription. Again, there are legit good uses for a VPN, but they're not the ones primarily being advertised in VPN ads. It's the fact that VPN ads rely so heavily on false advertising that really grinds my gears and made me want to do this rant. It's especially bad when it comes from somebody I'd think of as technologically competent (naming no names here, but if you've worked in tech and still promote VPNs as a way to keep data safe... no). Feel free to ask questions if you want and hopefully I'll get around to answering any that I feel I know enough to answer.

Nighty night Tumblr. Please update your software. And use a (free) password manager. And enable two factor authentication on all your accounts. But mostly just update your software.

[dawnfelagund]

Fandom Trumps Hate 2022: Site Building Offering

@fandomtrumpshate bids are open through 8pm EST on Sunday, February 27th. My offering page is here. I am offering to build you a website to archive fanworks. It can be a personal site just for your work or an archive that can accommodate thousands of other creators or somewhere in between--the choice is yours! This post is to give more information on what exactly I'm offering and what you need if you want to bid.

If you're thinking, "Having my own website or archive would be cool ... maybe this is me??" please read on!

Who am I? I am the founder and owner of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild archive. Established in 2005, the SWG opened a fanfiction archive in 2007 using eFiction open-source software. As eFiction was no longer being updated, we decided to rebuild our archive using a Drupal open-source content management system, which is what I'm offering here. We opened the rebuilt site last March. If you click the link to the SWG above, you'll see what a Drupal-based fanworks archive looks and acts like.

I am not a web professional. I'm a middle school humanities teacher. I am entirely self-trained in site design and building; I am not a developer. I've spent the past several years learning Drupal in order to rebuild the SWG archive and have gotten pretty good with it.

What is Drupal? Drupal is an open-source content management system. You can visit Drupal.org to learn more about it. A content management system (CMS) provides the building blocks to build a website. Wordpress is the best-known (and popular) CMS but is also geared toward blogging (though it can be used to build other kinds of sites too). Drupal is less well-known but still widely used on the Web. About 1 in 30 sites are built with it.

Drupal comes with core modules that provides the basic functionality for your site. Contributed modules are added to the core software to extend what your site can do. This makes Drupal highly flexible. Because Drupal is open-source, all core and contributed modules are free.

Also because it's open-source, there is a very active support community. That means that there's no customer service, but if you're willing to help yourself, you can almost always find the answer you need.

So what would a Drupal fanworks site look like? You would add your fanworks to the site using a form very similar to the form used to add a fanwork to AO3. Drupal includes or I would be willing to build the following features for you:

A user registration system, if you plan to open your site to creators other than yourself. Registration can be open or moderated. I can install modules that limit spam registrations.

User profiles, if you choose to open your site to other creators. Multiple profiles with different purposes are possible; for example, the SWG offers the option of the regular user profile but also a beta profile, if the member wants to be listed as a beta-reader.

Multiple levels of permissions are available for users. For example, if you used a moderation system to approve new fanworks, you could have an approved author permission that bypasses that system, or you could have some users with expanded permissions that allow them to serve as site moderators.

The ability to upload fanworks to the site. Note that Drupal can accommodate text, images, audio, and video. I will build your site, if needed, to include a chapter system so that you can add multiple chapters to a single fanwork. The chapter system allows individual chapters to be deleted or reordered using a drag-and-drop system.

On the fanwork submission form(s), you will choose the fields used to collect information on the fanwork. For example, the SWG archive has fields for fanwork notes, major characters, language, and to mark the fanwork as complete or incomplete (among many others).

Likewise, you can set up tagsets (which is the approach the SWG takes), or you can set a field so that users can input their own tags (similar to AO3). Or you can have a mix!

You can present listings of fanworks however you want. For example, if you hover over the Fanworks link on the top menu on the SWG site, you'll see that we have pages showing all fanworks, then fanworks of a certain type (writing, art, etc), and then we also offer the option to list fanworks that have a specific character or genre tagged, or all fanworks by a specific creator. Check out our Find a Fanwork page for an example of how visitors can search across multiple tagsets.

You can create different content types, each with its own set of fields. Fanworks are an example of a content type. For example, the SWG has writing, artwork, and audio as content types. Moderators can also post news items--another content type.

Listings of works within a content type can be displayed anywhere on the site. For example, the SWG site sidebar lists recent news and new fanworks. Our front page includes the same information, displayed differently. There are also pages on the site that display more complete listings of this information.

You can also set up static pages, such as an About page or FAQs.

Finally, you will choose a theme that determines what your site looks like. Drupal 9-compatible themes can be found here. If this looks mystifying, don't worry; I'll help you find something that works for your site when the time comes, if you need me to. Themes can be highly customizable. I will do some basic customizations for you (changing colors, fonts, etc), and if you know CSS, you can continue to customize your theme. If you're not familiar with CSS, you should choose a theme that you like out-of-the-box.

What would my (the bidder's) responsibilities be? You would, first and foremost, need to obtain web hosting that can accommodate a Drupal 8* or 9 site. Here is Drupal's documentation on what is needed to run a D9 site. You are not going to do this on free hosting. You will need to purchase a domain and have access to a web server with enough functionality to run the software. Here is Drupal's list of recommended web hosts; searching "best drupal web hosting" will get you many third-party opinions on this question as well.

*My offering page says Drupal 9, and I highly suggest this. Drupal 8 will still work but is no longer being updated, and you will find that many of the modules you want are going to increasingly break when you update them. But if D8 is your only option, I can build your site in either.

Once you have hosting, you will need to install Drupal 9 and get it set up. Once you're up and running, I'll ask you to set up an account for me with the permissions needed to work on your site. (I will help you with this step.)

Next is the fun part! I will need you to be willing to communicate with me to tell me what you want and give me feedback. If I don't hear from you, I'll do my best to set up a site that functions well and looks good before I hand over the keys.

You will need to learn how to run your own site. Once your site is built, I will ask you to delete my account, so while we're in the building phase, you should make sure that you learn how to back up your site and database and update Drupal and your contributed modules. You will need to learn how to administer your site: how to do things like approve new members and manage content. I highly recommend learning the basics of using Drupal. Here is the beginner's course I did when I was first learning; it was for D8 but will apply for D9 as well. While I'm working on your site, I will gladly support your learning anything you want to do on your site. Drupal is not difficult at the basic level but can become tricky at inopportune moments, and the learning curve is steeper than for Wordpress. Drupal is extremely powerful and you can do a lot with it, but that means that it can also be a bigger pain than easier and more beginner-friendly software.

If you're someone who enjoys learning and playing around with new tech, it's very possible you will fall in love with Drupal and will continue growing and building your site long after I set it up for you. That certainly happened for me. My happy place after a hard day of work is diving into work on the SWG site.

But I also want to offer the reality check, based on 15 years of running an archive and several years now of working with Drupal, that if this is not work that you enjoy, or if you approach technology with the "it's scary I'll probably break it" mindset, this project is probably not a good fit for you. Having an archive (even "just" a personal site!) is not a "set it and forget it" endeavor; it will require backups and updates and maintenance, and things will break that you will have to fix (especially if you have other users depending on you), and it's very worthwhile to go into that commitment clear-eyed about what it entails.

Here is my offering page again. If you have any questions about this project and what I can (and can't) do for you or what it's like to run a fanworks archive, please reach out. I can be reached at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

[fanwork-ethnography]

a history of the Archive of Our Own (AO3)

Archive of Our Own, commonly known as AO3, was launched in 2008 by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW). 

what did AO3 look like in its earliest days on the web?

The earliest capture of the website archiveofourown.org is from July 25, 2008. It appears to be mostly a landing page for a nascent OTW’s various projects, all geared towards “providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms” (archiveofourown.org, 2008). These projects included not only AO3, an archive for uploading, sharing, and reading fanworks, but also legal assistance (for fans facing copyright suits), an academic journal, and a wiki (Fanlore.org). 

The first capture to show statistics about the archive’s contents is from Oct 6, 2008, at which time the site hosted 95 users and 1145 works spanning 182 fandoms. Today, the archive hosts more than 52,850 fandoms, 5,034,000 users, and 9,910,000 works. 

In 2008, the site’s home page proclaimed, “I want us to own the goddamn servers!” 

Despite this remarkable growth, the simple founding goals of AO3 have not changed since its inception 15 years ago: an archive built by and for fans, for free, on the belief that transformative fanworks are not only legal, but should be specially protected or preserved. 

the events that led to the founding of ao3

The “I want us to own the goddamn servers!” quote can be traced back to a January 2008 LiveJournal post by the fanfiction writer Speranza. In a post titled “Why I support The OTW,” Speranza wrote, “Because I want us to own the goddamned servers, ok? Because I want a place where we can't be TOSed and where no one can turn the lights off or try to dictate to us what kind of stories we can tell each other.” (TOSed means Terms of Service-ed, which refers to users, fan communities, or fanworks suddenly being removed en masse from a web hosting service or social platform due to a Terms of Service violation.) 

OTW was founded in 2007 as a result of multiple conversations around fanfiction and control. That spring, a commercial, for-profit fanfiction service known as FanLib was launched to much controversy. In the same month, popular blogging site LiveJournal, one of the major platforms for hosting fanworks at the time, permanently suspended hundreds of journals without warning. 

Along with Speranza, LiveJournal user astolat was also pivotal in calling for the creation of OTW and AO3. Her post “An Archive of One’s Own” is where AO3 would later get its name. The founding OTW board, responsible for launching AO3, included Cathy Cupitt, Francesca Coppa, KellyAnn Bessa, Michele Tepper, Naomi Novik, Rebecca Tushnet, and Susan Gibel. But from the beginning, AO3 was designed and maintained by a wide range of volunteers. Many fans learned to code on the fly, and today the archive software used by AO3 is still open source (https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive).

what is at stake? (or, why AO3 exists)

AO3 was established as a “permanent” space for fanworks, and so it promises to be non-profit and non-commercial, maintained by an elected, rotating board of directors and hundreds of volunteers worldwide. This system was designed to be self-sustaining, able to outlast individual fans’ fast-changing interests or ability to participate in fandom for free. 

AO3 also has a unique feature known as “orphaning” works, which allows users to completely wipe out their “fannish identity” and become anonymous while still leaving their work up for the community. These features, as well as many other aspects of AO3’s design, reflect the site’s history. Understanding “why ao3 exists” is understanding what AO3 represents, and knowing what we need to protect.

For now, OTW, supported entirely by a decentralized community of fans who donate money, creativity, and labor, owns the servers. In the future, who will control our creativity?

Sources:

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Speranza

https://fanlore.org/wiki/An_Archive_Of_One%27s_Own_(post_by_astolat)

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Astolat

https://astolat.livejournal.com/150556.html

https://archiveofourown.org/

https://www.transformativeworks.org/

https://web.archive.org/web/20080725062111/http://archiveofourown.org/

https://web.archive.org/web/20081006072308/http://archiveofourown.org:80/

[who-is-page]

Also last reblog put that "AO3 does have a monopoly on fanfiction OP!!11!!" in their tags and: no. no it doesn't. what sort of baby level of fandom does someone have to be at to think archive of our fucking own has a monopoly on fanfiction.

Zines. Private forums, public forums. Discords, Skypes. Tumblr, PillowFort, Twitter, Furaffinity. Fanfiction.net. Wattpad. Personal websites. Email.

Seriously like...AO3 doesn't have most of my favorite fanfictions from the early 2010's and before, and that's several hundreds of fanfictions in bookmarks right there alone (forget what I read, forgot to bookmark, and never found again) strewn across various other websites. I often wrestle with the issue that AO3 even feels kind of...small, to be honest. I've never had to christen a fandom anywhere else before, until I came to AO3.

Also like. If someone does (wrongly) think that AO3 has a monopoly...there's legit nothing stopping them from making their own damn fanfiction website. Archive of our Own's software is open-source and free to download. Neocities is free. Discord is free. Proboards is free. Email chains and lists are free. What the fuck is their excuse? You got the time to go around making the claim that one website is a monopoly without having time to do anything to decentralize and fix the issue you're so righteously bitching about online?

[msbarrows]

I really hate those web sites, particularly for things like fanfiction, that lock out being able to download the page, or at least do a right-click view page source to access the text.

I mean, I understand that their original goal is to prevent things like people downloading the fic and then uploading it to a pay-for-use site as ‘their own work’, but come on. A single google search turns up multiple ways around  the lock outs; people who are going to do that are still going to do that, and in the meantime you’re screwing over all of the readers who have vision problems and much prefer using things like TTS engines to read. We can still do the same workarounds as the plagiarising assholes to get at the text so we can enjoy the story, but generally it takes a lot more work (and a lot more visual acuity) than simply being able to click the download button on my browser’s top bar, make sure the resultant file has a .html extension, and open it in my ereader software (see also: why I love AO3′s download feature so much, because that’s even better).

Any time I get directed to a site such as Rough Trade that does this, I feel a vast disappointment at the site runners who prioritise failing to stop pirating over making it accessible for readers. Because shouldn’t that be one of the goals of a site that hosts fanfiction??

[pingnova]

every time ao3 runs a fundraiser I have to see at least one bad take on my dash that just makes me cringe because apparently people think software, hardware, maintenance, and being a legal nonprofit entity is free. I’m afraid to inform you we live under capitalism where literally everything costs money especially such a massively popular website. they have to buy web security so they don’t get DDOS’d (REALLY expensive), they host their OWN SERVERS, and LOTS of them, a small core group of programmers does all the fixes and innovation FOR FREE and the time it took to learn enough to get to their point and the time it takes to actively do this shit is really snappin a lot. you can have issues with ao3, I probably won’t agree with you but like, it’s your brain. but don’t bully them for the material realities of running a hugely popular website and a legally recognized nonprofit? so many organizations irl become businesses before they become nonprofits because it’s so complicated, time consuming, and expensive to become and recertify as a nonprofit. it’s easier to become a moderately successful corporation than a small nonprofit that survives more than three years in operation, and that’s not even accounting for a nonprofit whose main service is something with such massive overhead and active upkeep as one of the most popular sites on the internet. they have a public real time dashboard of what their programmers are working on, and like every nonprofit in the us release their financial report at least annually. it’s not AO3’s fault you don’t understand how websites or nonprofits work. a $100k fundraiser once a year is actually a shit operating budget for any org. that’s two functional salaries, so two full time employees, with no benefits or office space or honestly any product. That’s just enough to pay two people for their damn time. AO3 is 99% incredibly dedicated and skilled volunteers who make and upkeep an open source democratic fandom hub at essentially only the cost of operation. again, you can criticize their rules or whatever, because the basis is your opinion, but legal, financial, and technical realities don’t change based on your opinion. this is like criticizing a library because it’s built on the ground. everything is built on the ground. I especially hate this because as someone with huge investment in the social good and nonprofit sector it’s frustrating to see people wasting energy on a completely valid aspect of something. there are plenty of bullshit nonprofits out there that support shit like child labor in the us, but criticizing them for having an operating budget will make anyone look like an idiot. so once more criticize other things but not the literal legally binding requirements for telling the us government you don’t profit off the free work you do. EDIT and on top of being in the nonprofit sector I’m ALSO a web programmer and I cannot tell you how exhausting and rage inducing this very attitude is in my field. people contact me about programming them a custom website and will be shocked if it’s even $100. the general sense ive got is that many think I can slap together a massive interactive website by hand for $20. absolutely not???? I under charge because of the nonprofit aspect, but $3,000 for a website is cute. it’s even cute for just maintaining an existing website. $10,000 might do it for a small site with a few pages. ao3 has billions of pages. ignoring that the ao3 is part of a larger nonprofit hosting many many more sites, archives, legal work, etc (that you DEFINITELY legally or socially benefit from whether you’re aware of it or not, AO3s legal recently wrote a Supreme Court brief that helped rule in favor of keeping parts of previous widely depended upon software public goods so that the price you pay for internet & literally everything doesn’t blow), there are so many costs associated with making and maintaining a website that it’s apparently frankly unimaginable to thousands of people on tumblr, and in the end disrespectful to every nonprofit, programmer, and web designer out there.

[teaandinanity]

So, I refuse to reblog any of the chucklefucks bashing AO3 on principle, but bitternest had some brilliant things to say in response to one of them and I want all of you to get to read it because it’s glorious:

You could run the AO3 frontend off a couple of shitty Thinkcentres networked together for redundancy and haproxy in front of all of it. The site is extraordinarily light and the biggest challenge is load balancing it.  

AO3′s backend is...

Listen. I work for a $600 million a year company serving DNS and domain names to literally everyone who isn’t shopping at GoDaddy. I help run the most successful MVNO in the US. I don’t want to say I wouldn’t even know where to start to build AO3, but I know exactly where I would stop. And that’s at the tags. Everything else, sure, I could build in a week. DBs, backups, a fuck ton of caching, monitoring and alerting. Give me another couple of weeks and I’d build some basic self healing so I dont have to get up in the night when something as big as AO3 breaks.

The fucking moment you tell me you want me to index hundreds of millions of tags, I’m fucking out. We do something similar with domain name recommendations and let me tell you that fucking POS system breaks monthly and it is a goddamn nightmare to fix. You would have to pay me, a single person, what AO3 asks for its entire goddamn operation every year. As far as I know their tech people consist of a sysadmin, a DBA and a few front end folk, all of whom are volunteers.

Which means that $130,000 is all being spent on tech. The fact that that number is below seven figures means they are doing it with all open-source software, zero support contracts and probably hardware that fell off the back of a Supermicro van. And no, they’re not in The Cloud because this shit would cost them an arm and a leg there. I checked. Indexing hundred of millions of tag fuckarightouttahere.

AO3 runs on blood, sweat, tears and some kind of Christmas miracle. So yeah, OP, go cry a fucking river. You’ll only fuel them.

[chaotic-lesbian-things]

Announcement - ‘Star Wars: Inheritance’

Hey there! 

Due to the extremely disappointment sequel trilogy I have decided that I’m starting a project called ‘Star Wars: Inheritance’ which is me attempting to answer the question “What if Disney and Lucasfilms actually cared about the fans instead of just milking them for money?” Help is required, artists, fans, beta readers, beta writers, alpha writers (co-authors), illustrators, website managers etc. Scroll down for more. You can leave ‘permanent’ roles whenever you want.

PLOT IDEA:-

The story will be primarily posted on Archive Of Our Own, and will be divided into ‘seasons’, like a web series like The Clone Wars (only written instead of animated). The series will pick up 5 years after Return Of The Jedi, featuring characters from the Original Trilogy (eg: Han, Luke, Leia) and Sequel Trilogy (Ben Solo, Rey, Poe Dameron, Finn etc.) but with context. Cameos by Rebels, The Clone Wars, the Prequel trilogy and  the novels will also be made.

The ending will be a happy one with the force being balanced, open threads from all of canon closed, a fitting fairytale ending after a lot of suffering, adventure, angst and character growth. Each character will have its arc although the protagonists remain the same. The story will end sometime around  TFA/TROS. Several time jumps will be made.

NOTE:-

This is a story to be written by fans. A personal attempt to heal and a bold statement to poor filmmakers who have destroyed a fairytale started 43 years ago. But, most importantly, this is a story for all of the people who work on it as well as read it to enjoy. It provides us closure that canon couldn’t.

ROLES:-

1. Plot Pitchers:

Requirements: Extensive knowledge of canon and/or Legends (EU). Preferable access to novels.

This role is an attempt to make it as canon as possible. More canon than canon. Mention of sources (Wookiepedia links) would be helpful, but not necessary.

Even if you aren’t very proficient with the above but you feel like you have good ideas, DM me. You will be credited. If you simply have a good idea but don’t want to be involved in the long run, just message it to me.

2. Artists/ Illustrators:

Requirements: to be a digital artist/illustator

Concept art has been selected, digital artists required.

The kind of work includes drawing certain scenes from the story, as well as the headers/ covers for it. You can choose what you want to.

This is not a permanent commitment, unless you want it to be. THERE IS NO MONEY INVOLVED (because the initiator is a broke minor). 

If you want to be involved for the long run, dm me.

3. Video Editors/ manip creators:

Requirements: Video editing software, Video editing skills

Things like the opening scrawl of each season, small 10-30 sec (more if you can manage) videos of the characters (in later seasons) etc.  Please DM me if you are interested.

4. Beta Reader:

Requirements: basic grammatical skills

Each chapter will be needed to be read and suggestions can be made.

5. Social Media Account managers:

Requirements: Tumblr, Instagram or twitter. (other social media are welcome but not compulsory)

You need to create a new account on the web platforms. These accounts will share/rt/rb/post everything about this project. The Account name is to be ‘Star Wars: Inheritance’. dm if interested.

6. Website creator/manager:

Requirements: knowledge on creating a website. Managing it.

Starwarsinheritance.com? Starwarsinheritance.net? 

For more details, please dm me.

7. Co writer(s):

Requirements: Writing skills. Experience with Ao3. Team spirit. 

At max, two more people are needed. The work load can get too much for one author to produce quality chapters every week. The contents need to be agreed by all the authors. We’ll try our best to include all points.

Please apply for this role if you are REALLY serious about this. DM me.

8. Beta Writer:

Requirements: Writing skills. Experience with Ao3. Team spirit. 

You can add your own two cents to it but it will need to be approved by the main writers before being published.

NOTES #2:-

If you DM me I will provide you with the relevant information, and a link to the discord server where we will discuss this in detail. 

If you are in for permanent roles, please be committed to this. This fic needs 20 min to 3 hours or more of your time every week depending on your role, and it could possibly go on for a year or more. If at some point you need to quit, issue a notice so we can find someone else.

As of now, there is no money involved in any way. This could change, but right now all you get is personal gratification, comments, kudos and hits.

This is not an overnight project, it will need at least a month’s work before publishing, after our team has assembled. 

The first responders will get the role, as this needed to start 200+ days ago (after TROS).

Lastly, I realise that this is a very demanding project for which you could possibly never get paid. This is an attempt to rekindle a dying fandom which was fanned too fast and hard by corporate gold-diggers a.k.a Disney/lf. 

This was a glorious fandom before it was divided and ruined. save your story, save your fandom. Please spread the message.

[fanhackers]

Where can I publish my undergraduate paper on fans?

bakurapika asked: I had an undergrad paper in 2015 or so about roleplay on tumblr (specifically the vocabulary in use). I don’t suppose that’s something I could post somewhere useful?

Excellent question. If you want to publish an undergrad paper about fans online and make sure people can find it, I’d suggest the following approach:

Step 1: Upload your paper to a reliable, non-profit research hosting service

There are many online services designed to share research with the world. Many of these also accept undergraduate work. Research support specialists at university libraries usually recommend hosting your research on a well-established non-profit service, like Zenodo or figshare. These are essentially AO3s for sharing academic materials instead of fanworks. Just make a free account, and you’re ready to upload and share your work. You don’t need to be affiliated with an academic institution to host your research on Zenodo or figshare. These services will preserve a secure copy of your work in perpetuity, for free, with a license of your choice (Creative Commons licenses are very useful). You can host and share not only papers, but also other research materials like datasets and presentations.

Note that there are also some well-known for-profit services where researchers share work, especially Academia.edu, which has a great deal of people on it. You may want to put your work there as well to reach a larger audience. However, we caution against making for-profit services the one and only forever home of your research materials. Academic publishing has a lot of issues with for-profit entities trying to exploit the free labor of researchers. Not unlike fandom, really! This is a long story that we’ll get back to a lot on this blog. In short, for reasons, research support specialists recommend non-profit over for-profit services for now.

Step 2: Add a reference to your paper to the OTW’s fan studies bibliography

When you’ve given your paper a safe online home, it’s time to make sure people actually find the information. Add the paper to the OTW’s bibliography so that others searching for fan studies work can find it easily. Undergrad papers absolutely belong in this bibliography. To add your work, drop us a note with the link to your paper. As described on the bibliography page, you can also add pages by making your own account on Zotero, the software that’s the backend of the fan studies bibliography.

Note that Zotero is designed for serious business academic use and can be a bit confusing if you’ve never used it before. Don’t hesitate to just send us a link if you don’t feel like learning a whole new bibliography management tool! We’re totally happy to add things for people. (But if you need a bibliography management tool, do learn more about Zotero. It’s free and open source, and very good at what it does.)

Optional step 3: Add content from your paper to Fanlore

People come to Fanlore to learn more about the past and present of all aspects of fan culture. If you add the most interesting or informative parts of your paper to relevant Fanlore articles, you greatly increase chances that other fans will find that information. Find the Fanlore article(s) that are most closely related to your paper, and add sections from the paper wherever they seem to fit. Fanlore has some good how-to info if you’re new to editing a wiki. You can add a link to your paper on Zenodo or figshare in the References section of the Fanlore article.

Hope this helps! This is only one of many ways to share undergraduate papers on fan culture, of course. Do let us know about any other questions or suggestions you have.

[sl-walker]

OTW-archive, despite OTW’s assertations, isn’t packaged or meant to be easily deployable by other archives.  They have a lot of instances of that kind of thing, above, and even more instances of hard-coding their name and AO3′s into the software.  Despite the software being open-source.

The banner’s just basically saying, “Yo, this isn’t AO3.”  Which, no!  It’s not!  The IP address thing is a scare tactic.  Literally every website can see it, unless you use a VPN (which I recommend!), and pretty much every webmaster of every site you have an account on can.

However, we cannot see your password.  Despite the scare notice, that’s between you and the server.  We can’t change it, we can’t look at it, it’s not stored in any form we could even read.

Here is the actual limit of what we can see:

We can see the e-mail used to sign up, we can see the IP address (if you don’t use a VPN), but-- that’s the extent of it.  That is the whole shebang, on what we (or AO3!) can see of your user account from the back end.

Anyway, at some point I’ll figure out how to disarm the scare notice, but in the meantime, it’s just basically telling you that the site’s not AO3, that we can indeed see your alleged IP, and that I haven’t figured out how to shut it up yet.  But if you log in and accept a site cookie, it does stop doing that until you rotate to the next IP address.

So Ad Astra’s otw-archive is now up and running, and opening for public beta!  This was absolutely a labor of love and community; I owe Walter from SquidgeWorld and lassarina from Asp’s bar for the invaluable help in getting this massive thing sorted.

Before you join, here are a few things I really need and want you to know:

1.) We’re a Trek fandom archive, so we’re not really for any other fandoms unless they’re crossovers.

2.) We’re not AO3 when it comes to tagging fics.  We’ve had strict tag discipline for fourteen years for a reason. So before you post, please – please I’m begging – read the FAQ about posting and tagging.  Even if you skip the others (which, you shouldn’t, there’s some nifty stuff in them!), please read and respect that one.

3.) If you join, please don’t go too fast on moving all your Trek fanworks over?  Only because I’m one single person wrangling this thing and because I really intend to visit each fic that lands on the archive to give it attention.  I might fail in that goal, but I’d love to achieve it.  Which brings me to the last point:

3.) Ad Astra’s shining quality has always been how interactive, collaborative and supportive we are as a community.  So, consider joining in on that!  Post your works and support others in theirs via comments and kudos.  Shamelessly self-promote on your blogs or our forums, but consider also promoting others.  Think about joining our forums and D/iscor/d, too, because we would love to have you.  (Yes, you!  You, that Trekkie over there side-eying me.)  We do weekly writing challenges, and I’m planning on running a Review Hunt, too!  This community shines its brightest when we’re lifting each other up.

4,) There are still bugs I’m working out.  If you find one, tell me and I’ll see what’s going on!  But it really is pretty functional in the meantime. XD

Anyway, with all that said:

Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive

Come on over. <3  And yes, please signal boost this post!

[daphnegeeksout]

If You Were Here (1/9) [Tony Stark x Reader]

Read it on AO3

By: daphnethewriter

It's hard to live this way... to only see someone through the other side of a screen. Tony stumbles across a computer bug that's more than just a bug. You need his help, but first you need to win his trust. Hopefully you can do it before time runs out.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3  | Part 4

Words: 3,145 Chapters: 1/9 Language: English

FRIDAY has a bug.  

Not just any bug, the buggiest bug in bug history.

The coffee machine is supposed to turn on at 7:00am. Instead, it turns on at 7:05am. 7:05. Which is five minutes after Steve gets back from his run—just long enough for him to think that the machine won't turn on and make coffee himself.

Seven-fucking-oh-five.

Tony reset the software. He rewrote the software. He bought a new coffee maker. How could replacing the machine not fix the problem?

It's a nightmare. Tony's own personal hell. The coffee gods must have a vendetta against him.

Every time he thinks he sees the bug, it vanishes into the binary from which it came with nothing but a smattering of loose code in its wake—a goddamn Cheshire cat, disappearing except for its smile.

"It's really not a big deal," Rhodey says.

Tony doesn't look up from the skeleton of the coffee machine, stabbing at it with his screwdriver. "It is."

"Just set it for five minutes earlier."

"One: that doesn't fix the problem, it circumvents the problem." He removes another layer of the machine's circuitry. "Two: I tried that. But then it actually turns on at six fifty-five."

"So?"

"So," Tony continues through gritted teeth, "then Clint has enough time to get a second cup and there's none left over when I get there."

For a few blessed moments, there is silence in Tony's workshop. Rhodey doesn't let it last. "Tony, we both know this has nothing to do with the coffeemaker."

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says with no inflection. "FRIDAY, can we get some music going? AC/DC. Greatest hits."

FRIDAY obliges, but Rhodey talks over the strains of electric guitar. "This is about Pepper."

"Nope, it's not." Tony turns back to the mess of wiring that was his coffee maker.

"She left, man. It sucks, but you gotta deal with it."

An errant screw drops off the workbench. Tony ignores it. "Nothing to deal with."

"You're going to see her eventually. She's still in your life. She runs your company."

"FRIDAY, turn up the music."

Rhodey crosses to the other side of the bench so he's in Tony's line of sight and raises his voice to be heard over the guitar solo of Back in Black. "It's just… a break… space… you know? She still cares about you."

The handle of the screwdriver gives way and the metal end slices through Tony's other hand. He swears, dropping the screwdriver, the coffeemaker, everything. "This is not about Pepper."

The lights in the lab flicker. Tony jerks around.

<Boss-zt> FRIDAY's voice slurs as she speaks. <I hav- detec-c-ted unauthori-zzz-ed ac-cess through the system firewaaaaall.>

Rhodey looks to him in alarm. "That can happen?"

"No, it can't." With a flick of his wrist, Tony pulls up the holographic visualization of FRIDAY and the Avengers' system. He dives into the code, surrounding himself with FRIDAY's processes. It's the Cheshire cat, batting around his code again. He doesn't see it so much as the ripples it leaves in its wake. He follows them, trusting his instinct when things just don't look quite right.

"FRIDAY, run a tracking protocol. Let's hunt this thing down."

FRIDAY tries, but she's slow, too slow, swimming through a snowstorm of extraneous commands. Commands that Tony is not giving her. The Cheshire cat has him twisted all around himself, too busy trying to find its tail that he can't see what it's doing until it's already done.

Tony curses as he manually starts the emergency security measures. They isolate sections of the system, forcing the Cheshire to reroute. It slithers through like a game of centipede and is gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

#

That was close—closer than you'd like. You hadn't counted on the AI finding your entry.

The glowing trails of the system extend out from you in every direction, as if you're a spider sitting at the center of a massive web. Reality is… disorienting. The bits that you can collect from the data streams around you come in flashes and realizations. It's not seeing—not touching or hearing either, for that matter—it's just… knowing.

Mundane traffic trundles along, unaware of your presence as you flow through it at the speed of thought.   Your consciousness streams from node to node, jumping between servers and across connections, leaving nothing in your wake. These are familiar pathways. You relax, falling into a half-waking state where the arteries of information pump you along, letting your awareness flow through them, spreading out until you feel a tingle at the end of one tendril. In a moment, your whole being converges at the spot.

Your exit trail from Stark's system is too wide, too easily traced. You can't risk him finding you on the open net. He has to find you in the right place. Which means distracting him from the wreckage you left behind.

>>execute_initiative(Queen_B_Protocol);

#

The coffee bug is a nuisance, but the security breach is a problem. The Avengers' system is decades ahead of anything else in the world. So, if someone is tinkering around in his code, Tony needs to find them. Fast.

FRIDAY detected an "unauthorized access", so the source must have been from outside. He thought the coffee bug was an internal issue, but the security breach puts it in a different perspective. Someone is testing him, poking the system to see what happens. They're finding the weak spots and so far, they're doing a damn good job of it.

"FRIDAY, let's get some tunes going. The White album."

<Sure thing.>

Tony zones in, going to that comfortable space where he sees nothing but the problem in front of him. Until the first notes of 'Single Ladies' start playing.

"FRIDAY?"

<Yeah, boss?>

"I asked for Beatles, not Beyoncé." The music cuts out. "Get it right this time."

Trumpets blare through the speakers, the first strains of 'Crazy in Love'.

"FRIDAY!"

<S-tz-orry, boss.>

Tony catches a flurry of codes changes on the far side of the system visualization. Son of a bitch. The Cheshire, back already. "FRIDAY, freeze everything. Full stop."

The system grinds to a halt. It's an emergency measure, horrible for the databanks, the hardware, everything. But it stops the Cheshire cat in its tracks.

"Hello, there." He prowls around the outside of the visualization, surveying the edges of the intruding program. It's not just a virus like he'd thought. It's an independent AI—self-writing, internally sustained. The edges blur into his own code, as if moving through like a ghost. It's extraordinary. Intricate. "Look at you..." Tony says as he moves closer to inspect the Cheshire. "You're gorgeous."

<I bet you say that to all the pretty girls.>

That. Is. Not. FRIDAY.

"Flush the system. Now!"

The lab goes dark and leaves only the sound of Tony's heart pounding in his ears.

#

If you could feel pain, that's what this would be. Eviction from Stark's system left you shattered. You recall your scattered consciousness, slowly at first, then picking up speed as the familiar pieces fall into place. As far as first meetings go, that was… pretty bad. But you have his attention now. Step one complete.

Stark is curious. He'll come looking. He won't be able to help himself. And this time, the trail will lead in the correct direction.

>> set_location(HOMEBASE);

>> execute_initiative(hide_and_seek);

#

How could it have moved during the freeze? Nothing can move after the freeze. It's an emergency protocol for a reason. And what was that thing anyway? It wasn't a virus or an intrusion protocol. It was a self-writing artificial intelligence—the closest thing that Tony has seen to sentience since JARVIS. It was faster than FRIDAY. Nothing is faster than FRIDAY. Tony built FRIDAY from scratch. She's the culmination of a decade of experimentation with self-aware artificial intelligence. The kind of computing power it would take to run a system like that is enormous. There can't be that many sources where someone could be playing with that. Not to mention programmers. It had to be a team effort, some sort of organizational programming that resulted in… or neural networking. Why hadn't he thought of that earlier? Placing an artificial sentience in a self-learning environment so that it grows on its own. But even then, why was it going after the contents of the Avengers' system? It had broken through, gotten past the firewall then went for—what—the coffeemaker? Tony's music albums? What was the point? If it was poking experimental holes in the system, that would explain it. But it had already gotten through. And it was tinkering with the least valuable pieces of information. The Cheshire hadn't accessed the main files. And if it was powerful enough to break out of the system freeze, it was powerful enough to bash through the firewall that protected the Avenger files. But it seems like it was targeting things specifically. Tony things. Like its mission was to irritate him. Why would a program want to irritate him? Unless it is trying to get his attention. Who does Tony know that is that far advanced? Other than Tony himself. Unless it is Tony. Or… was Tony. Had Ultron really been eradicated? Did he have any assurance of that? There are a million places in the internet where he could have hidden, biding his time. But Ultron wouldn't waste time exchanging Tony's music files. He wouldn't toy with Tony like this. He would go for the kill—

<Boss,> FRIDAY interrupts. <I have completed the tracking protocol.>

Tony emerges from his daze to find himself hip deep in a mess of electronics. Grease covers his hands and a few electrical burns stand out against his arms. He shakes himself. "Thrill me."

FRIDAY projects a map into the center of the room. <The attack originated from a long-term care facility in Albany.> A flicker of images join the map. <A private room in a ward reserved for coma patients.>

The vegetable patch? Huh. "Who's our patient?"

<That information is unavailable.>

Double huh. "Who pays for the room?"

<Stark Industries.>

Triple huh. "Pull up Stark Industries records regarding the transactions."

<Those records are unavailable.>

It's bait, clear and simple. Someone had taken a lot of care to make this look like a trap. It would be rude not to walk into it.

"FRIDAY, lay out a flight plan to Albany."

#

It's just an extended care facility. A normal one by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing sinister lurking here. Tony hadn't realized that it was the middle of the night when he started his flight, but it's way past visiting hours when he arrives. That's not really a problem; he's not really visiting. He's just checking something out. The hack came from somewhere and all his best information points to this building. He slips out of the suit before he goes in, keeping it on guard. It will draw more attention than he needs right now. This is just recon.

A hush settles over the building like dust. The room Tony seeks waits at the end of the hall. Private corner, long-term care. The room is dark, dimmed for the night. A single bed occupies the space, a wilted vase of sunflowers on the table next to it. He approaches the bed—your bed—and gravitates to the chart. Hidden in the medical jargon is a simple fact: you're in perfect health, except for the coma. You should be up and walking, but you aren't. Your condition is… unexplained. No higher brain functioning, but no physical cause. No trauma, no illness, just absence. A body with no soul.

Tony's eyes rove over the room, inspecting each shadow. There's a catch somewhere. Someone wanted him here. Someone wanted him to see you.  Tony wants to know why. He replaces the chart and steps to your side. Your face is serene, like a pane of glass. Tattoos swirl over your skin, everywhere that's visible beyond your hospital gown, a biological art canvas. Metal decorates the edges of your ears, the arch of an eyebrow, the corner of your lip, more piercings than he can count. Your hair has grown out, but the tips are bright pink, evidence of an earlier decoration. You're… wild. He brushes the back of your hand with his fingertips.

The heart rate monitor beeps in alarm and Tony takes an instinctive step back. Every light on the screen flashes. Jesus, fuck, what did he do?

A nurse rushes in but stops short when she sees Tony. He can see the question in her eyes: call security and risk something happening to you in the meantime or rush to your aid and take her chances that Tony isn't a threat? The monitor continues its frantic call, punctuating the tension between them.

"I—" he starts, hoping to allay her fears, but she holds up one imposing finger.

"You stand over there."

Tony does as he's told, already working on the explanation he'll need to make to security, maybe the police, hopefully not Pepper… Shit.

The nurse checks your pulse, your pupils, then looks to the monitor. She taps the screen, jarring the box on the stand. Tony takes the opportunity that her confusion offers and sidles out, stealing your chart while the nurse is preoccupied with you. He'll donate a new building later.

#

A flurry of Avengers business keeps Tony from investigating you until over a week later. A week, and all he can think about is why someone wanted him to end up in your hospital room, looking at your chart. And why the monitor had gone crazy when he got too close. And what the hell that has to do with the Cheshire AI that invaded FRIDAY. There wasn't even a computer terminal in that room. Someone had manipulated a number of internet traces to lead FRIDAY there.

Tony settles into the lab with a steaming cup of coffee and your chart. He surrounds himself with you: medical history, pictures, videos. You’re a rave girl, all color and flash and glitter. You fled your humble start for the livelier life of the West Coast and a prestigious scholarship. You dropped out of college a year later for a massive paycheck at a tech startup that collapsed before it could go anywhere.

Then you were recruited by Stark Industries.

To work at Helen Cho's laboratories

In Seoul.

In 2015.

You had only worked there for a week (you hadn't even rented an apartment) when Ultron burst on the scene. A stone settles in Tony's stomach as he calls up the security footage. He's watched it before—couldn't stop himself—but never looked for anyone specific. He directed Pepper to pay for all employee hospital bills resulting from the attack. It was the least he could do. And it's why he's been paying for your care. You're his responsibility.

Finding you takes some time. Even in a small, secure lab like Helen's, there were hundreds of employees. But he finds you. Pink hair, ripped jeans, a black skull tank top. You're programming the security computers when Ultron comes in the quinjet docking bay.

Tony's heart jumps to his throat. Ultron ignores you, but you notice him. You're subtle, making no moves that would betray you, and activate the security lockdown procedures. The doors lock, hallways seal themselves. Tony's mouth twitches. You don't stop Ultron, but you slow him down. His wrath is swift and impersonal. A blast from the staff blows you across the room. You don't get up.

That's it. That's all he has about you. Glaring, gaping evidence of his inability to protect you. Fuck. If the Cheshire's programmer is trying to make Tony feel like shit, they're succeeding.

He needs a drink.

#

The third glass of scotch doesn't make him feel better. Maybe the fourth will. You smile at him from every direction, snarky and sarcastic, playful and energetic. And it's his fault that you're gone. Worse than gone. Trapped in a limbo of nothingness.

The image in front of him flickers, a burst of static interrupting your laugh.

<Boss, I've detected unauthorized changes.>

No shit. Tony's Cheshire is back. "Alright, FRIDAY. Start the Garden Maze protocol. Let's see if we can back it into a corner."

It isn't easy. The Cheshire slips through the tiniest of cracks—sometimes through seemingly solid barriers—barely visible, hardly substantial. Twice Tony doesn't see its objective until it reaches it. But he prunes its options, herding it into a smaller and smaller section of the system. It wreaks havoc as it goes, getting sloppier as the net tightens.

"Gotcha," Tony says when he isolates it to a single server and cuts off all avenues of escape. It thrashes against the new barriers, stretching the limits of the container Tony designed to hold it. He trades in his normal holographic visualization for the pure simplicity of the code base, leaving the Cheshire source bare in front of him. It does not take kindly to captivity, rebuffing all Tony's attempts to pick it apart. His original opinion stands. It's pure artistry, masterful, ahead of anything Tony has seen. It's practically alive.

#

The trap is inconvenient—annoying really—like you're smothered in mashed potatoes. Every attempt you make at removing the snowfall of commands is futile. The restraints you wipe away are merely replaced again. Stark is clever. He pokes and prods at you, querying from every avenue.

You concentrate, forming a solid tendril and spearing through the mush, sending a forceful command even his container can't withstand. Nothing fancy. No audio, just text. Simple. Powerful.

>> show("HEY TONY");

The inquiries pause. You caught his attention.

>> show("LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS");

He renews his assault, sophisticated programs tugging at your edges. You shake them off. This is not productive. You need him to stop so you can explain.

>> show("LET ME OUT");

You know the moment he puts in the kill command. The restraints around you tighten with new menace, suffocating you. Well, that's no good at all.

>> show("BAD IDEA");

You withdraw into yourself, concentrating to a miniscule point of potent energy. As the assassination protocol dives in, all frothing mouth and gnashing teeth, you release, exploding out with a force like a digital nuclear bomb. You take out the protocol, blow through the container, and blast past everything else.

Due to formatting restrictions on tumblr, this story is better read on AO3.

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