Find your tribe in a Sea of Creativity
hey so uhhhhh just a heads up: ao3 may or may not be in deep legal trouble. specifically for mistreatment of volunteers and lax compliance with certain laws, afaict.
i highly recommend you back up any stories you have and any favorite stories/authors you'd miss.
here's how i'm doing it:
download calibre. it's an open source ebook reader. link here.
it has a plugin called fanficfare. download that here.
open calibre and go to the dropdown next to "Settings", and then select "Get plugins to enhance calibre"
Find and install FanFicFare (sort by title and scroll down to F to find it easier)
go to the dropdown menu next to the fanficfare icon in the top bar and select "Get story URLs from Web Page"
when prompted for a URL, you can post any URL that displays a list of stories, e.g. "https://archiveofourown.org/users/[username]/bookmarks?page=7" or "https://archiveofourown.org/series/[number]" or "https://archiveofourown.org/users/[username]/pseuds/[username]/works"
click "Yes", then wait for it to gather the metadata and download the stories (you can give it another URL to grab stories from once it's done with gathering the metadata if you want)
it will give you a little popup in the lower right corner once it's done, telling you how many it was able to download (usually all of them) and how many it didn't.
if it misses one or two, you can click to see the details and find out which one didn't get downloaded, and go back to the page you got it from and download those yourself if you want.
tell it to update your library.
voila! all the stories on that page are now backed up on your computer.
notes: it will skip any fics that are locked to archive users only (the ones with a blue padlock next to the author's name in the listing), and you'll have to go back and grab those yourself. if your whole account is under archive lock, i highly recommend unlocking it for the duration of the time it takes to grab and download them (a few minutes to a few hours, depending on whether you have <20 or multiple hundreds like i do lol) before locking them again.
back up everything you love!! back up everything you moderately like!! back up anything you wouldn't like to lose!! even if the ao3 mess pans out to nothing, it's always good to have a "just in case".