Fanlore and Archival and fucking war on drugs i mean the disabled - fuck you fucking world
ETA: I made another less ranty post that you can link to; please do as you may have people on your Friends/reading list whose safety, wishes, legal rights may have been violated and the other post includes info on some of what they can do about it in the comments. http://alchemia.dreamwidth.org/304207.html
I've just lost almost all respect for Fanlore and the WayBackMachine. Especially Fanlore- they at least should have the common sense to know that fen who work with certain subjects or live in certain countries, have personal safety issues that should come before a 'must archive everything just in case link rot, so we can grow our website, is the most important thing before the safety/wishes/rights of the people our site is about' Talk about being exploitive!
And other so-called archival sites that consider themselves not just above robots.txt, but ignore copyright law and TakeDown notices- words cannot express what I wish upon their creators, and the people that use them to violate the wishes and legal rights of other people.
I am absolutely exhausted at the moment because the fucking 'war on drugs' caused our dr to have to, understandably, to not loose their license, have a 3 day wait period between when we are are used to picking up our fentynal, and when we actually COULD pick it up this time. So we spent 3 agonising days in cold turkey withdrawal from 100mcg/48hr. I got clonidine to help with the worst of it, but it made it so I couldn't even stand up without passing out so I had to crawl everywhere. When we finally got our meds, I ended up in withdrawal from the clonodine- which basically meant that I couldn't fucking sleep for almost a whole week straight.
So you want to know more about my hate for Fanlore and Archive.Org, you can read the genesis of my thoughts here:
https://cathexys.dreamwidth.org/508696.html?thread=13464088#cmt13464088
Link direct to my reply. Yes I also am concerned about 'link rot'. On sites where link rot is an actual issue (eg due to the LJ migrations with all the meta over thre) but FFS, link rot doesn't take precedent over that of the safety/prefrences of the fen. Maybe some of them would even have locked those pages but lost access to the accounts, or left fandom and have no clue what they thought would stay on LJ is suddenly getting archived to a dozen different places that they would not want. I outline one possible solution to respect fen identitiy while preserving pages.
http://aethel.dreamwidth.org/362363.html
(my comment about 4 or 5 down) Disgust with Archive.Org (wayback machine) to after all these years, just BAM stop respecting robots.txt and make tons of stuff public. I just had to send them Take Down Notices forTENS OF THOUSANDS of pages/images (mostly personal, hobby and business sites; only intertexius is fannish)
Ending finally with this:
http://fanlore.org/wiki/Talk:A_Bittersweet_Potion
(I removed only the archived links for Intertexius , no others, as its up to LJ etc if they will permit archival of public pages. But it does make me think I'll be using the 'lock' feature a lot more in the future. Might have some great discussions, and historically I've been of the mind that I welcomed public reading, but I do NOT welcome public copying to where-ever without my knowledge/permission.
Insted of recognising that OOOPS, shouldn't have linked to a page that has a DO NOT ARCHIVE TOS in bold letters at the top of the page and the splash page, the person locks it, and dumps the burden on me to go resolve the issue with fanlore staff. Uhm, NO. What if I was in a country where the law just changed to include chan fic as child porn and I had to rush to track down everyplace that might have something archived that associated my name with chan because I don't want an ex-spouse to find it and use it to get the gov't to take my kids away? Fanlore is supposed to be AWARE of the unique issues fen deal with (Duh: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Identity_Protection ). You don't dump that on the fen because 'oh no, what about link rot' (and we're not talking about LJ type migration issues here, but a site that's been around forever and the owners are easily contactable to find out their wishes, or ask if they can hold onto an archive in case we died without a will for the site or something). Sorry, Fanlore FAILS. Why is it so difficult....? Just don't use links to Archives that break site TOS, break the law, etc and then: 1. you won't be supporting unethical archives and 2. Fen won't have to scramble with Fanlore on top of everthing else to figure out where they are exposed and how to hide it! Do what is RIGHT not EASY. Yeash. Good intentions, even worse execution that WayBackMachine because they can't claim ignorance about how such actions, that can connect people's identities with work that the general public may find "questionable", FUCKING ENDANGERS PEOPLE! I find it DISGUSTING that Fanlore allows linking to archives that have copied Telanu's Tea Series after she removed it from the snarry archive for whatever her personal reasons were- it even SAYS on the top of the fanlore page ( http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Tea_Series ) that she TOOK IT OFF LINE, and then in the info box right next to it, provides a bunch of archived links to the whole fucking story! You cannot claim ignorance, that's just plain disrespectful. Is her safety at stake? Her pride? Was she planning to file off the serial numbers to write pro-fic, and now thanks to some fucking SELFISH arses who think they have more right to her work than she who created it, she can't do that, because its easy for a publisher to see/find the connection and reject the work for fear of legal issues, so her hopes and dreams and possible career have been destroyed? WHO CARES WHO GETS HURT OR HOW!? YOU THE FAN ARE NOTHING TO FANLORE, YOU ARE THEIR COMMODITY, AND IT DOESN'T MATTER IF THEY HURT YOU, AS LONG AS IT MEANS THAT THEY GET TO 'GROW'! If they did care, like they claimed, they'd never permit links to archives that ignore robots.txts that once gave us control of our sites, and / or archives that don't have simple Take Down methods, or flat refuse to take down. OOOPs I guess I needed to rant a bit more anyway but now I have to get back to more fucking Take Down notices for yet other archive sites that, like Archive.is, think they not only can ignore Robots.txt, but they can ignore copyright, ignore TOS, claim they "cannot" "take down" pages because they are somehow "above" international copyright laws.... have to deal with 2 dozen other medical issues I don't even want to discuss here, injured service dog, and never mind whatelse right now.... I can't tell anyone what to do of course, but I highly suggest/hope that if you use Fanlore, donate to them, whatever, please stop, and tell them you won't resume until they stop putting "archival" and the growth of their website, before the safety, wishes and legal rights of fen, and stop putting the burden of asking them to respect us on us, instead of respecting the people their site is supposed to be about from the start. ETA 2: Cute! On the page's history the person locked it claiming that making an edit to protect my copyright and personal safety, is a petty ' Counter-productive edit war....'. Fanlore has greater responsibility than Archive.org because they KNOW links like this are not just illegal, but PUT FEN IN REAL DANGER, yet they ignore this for growth and profit. That makes them amongst the most disgusting, and despicable things existing on the internet. Even if I had not warned them as to why I removed the links, the fact is, the links are all rotten now or soon will be anyway; even if you ignore all the issues of safety and copyright violations etc, cleaning up link rot is not exactly an 'edit war'.
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