When stories disappear - back again

[skaredykat]

I've posted about this before, but thanks to debris_k calling it out, the topic has been brought to the forefront of my mind again.

Someone wants to set up a community specifically for the sharing of deleted stories. Okay, it says "There would be rules. Rules against post[ing] a fic where you KNOW[*see footnote] the author doesn't want it posted" -- but

Comments

[soukup]

So, vickyblueeyes has screened my comment as spam. Regardless, I'd like to thank you very much for being a voice of reason in this discussion; your post (linked in metafandom) was what made me aware that this was going on. Here is the comment you inspired (it could have easily gone here, and is mostly about what "know" means, as you discuss above).

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Speaking as a fanfic author myself, I really don't like the idea of removing something from circulation that I worked hard on and have enjoyed sharing with other fen. If I were dealing with online privacy troubles/stalkers/bullies or my pseudonym had been linked to my real life identity, I'd still probably feel a certain reluctance to take down my work. I'd guess a lot of other fen feel the same when they face this situation, so I think it's safe to say that most people who are contemplating leaving fandom altogether probably try to think of some way they might leave their fic behind anonymously, with no connections to their former handles/pseudonyms.

There are a bunch of ways to do this. An author could orphan their fics on the AO3. Many comms offer anonymous posting. And even an author who's not aware of either of those options will surely realize that they could create a brand-new, anonymous journal to act as a storehouse for their old their fics, with no identifying details in it and no ties to their old handle(s). Of course, none of these methods is foolproof (because there's always the chance that an old reader in the know might spill the beans about who wrote something, linking the work to its author once more). But they are there, and authors know about them.

My point is, authors and creators work hard on our fanworks. By and large we are, if anything, much more attached to them than are the people who read/view them, and we don't want to remove them if we can possibly help it. And I think it's safe to say that most of us try really hard not to -- we consider our alternatives, we weigh our choices carefully. But if an author has thought all of this through and come to the decision that deletion was called for, that's something the rest of us need to respect. It's a choice that won't have been easy or fun to make, and it speaks for itself: the author has removed their fics because they don't want them circulating anymore. I don't really see how anyone could be in doubt about what that gesture means.

tl;dr: No means no. So does deletion. Simple.

[skaredykat]

Thanks for commenting here, and sorry it's not showing up over at vickyblueeyez post too! (Though it may be that LJ's "exciting" new mark/screen-anything-from-non-friends-with-links-in-it-as-spam-by-default spamfighting "feature" is hiding more comments there than vickyblueeyez is aware of, given that she said she turned her own comment-notification for that post off?)

I am very pro archiving&orphaning at the AO3. But even that option may not feel right to an author. And in that case...

Yes, there are often ways for dedicated readers to still track down or obtain copies of writers' deleted fic. But when a writer has taken the step of actively removing their fic, I have this weird notion that it would be more courteous or responsible to support keeping it a little difficult/requiring more effort to find those traces than to, um, boldly go making it quite a lot easier and more public to find those stories.

*rides tiny hobbyhorse in little circles, off into the sunset* ;)

[jedinic]

(Also here via MF.)

Just wanted to offer an alternate POV on 'deleted fic'. Someone leaves fandom & they delete their journal/website. With it go the stories. They don't necessarily care if the stories are out there or not, but they honestly can't be bothered uploading the stories anonymously/elsewhere.

It's much easier to delete than restore.

I know that for myself, I stopped paying for webspace and the site was deleted. I honestly don't care if the fic's out there or not but since it's old, I'm too lazy to restore it.

[azurelunatic]

(also also here via metafandom)

If I deleted or privatized my journal, it would probably be for personal-life stuff, rather than fannish reasons, and unless the personal-life stuff touched on fannish stuff, it would probably be too much trouble to specifically sort out the fannish/innocuous stuff and leave it accessible. The LJ/DW mass privacy edit tool doesn't have that sort of fine-grained control, and I am far more likely to trust the onsite tool rather than a security-editing client.

I've run into locked-links a few times where people clearly did a mass-locking run, and I've occasionally gone to their single public entry and left the link and let them know that I was coming back to read this and very politely asked if they would be comfortable unlocking or sending a copy, and the worst response I've had so far is a lack of response, occasionally an unlocked entry.

[skaredykat]

Right. Fine-grained control is hard, and restoring something once's it's deleted is often more work than the action of flocking or setting to private all entries or not re-upping hosting or moving website pages to another place if the place they were hosted at (e.g. Geocities) goes away.

But letting a writer know that their old work is appreciated and asking them if it's either okay to share saved copies or would they mind if fans re-archived it with their permission (and with their pseud attached or not per their preference), certainly won't always but may get a response of "Okay as long as it's discreet" or "I'm at a place in my life where it's too much trouble for me, but if you or other fans want to do it, go ahead." :)

[skaredykat]

My big concern with the proposed comm and some of the discussion around it is about deliberately deleted fic.

If someone's fic has gone offline semi-inadvertently, well, in not all but many cases it should be possible to find old contact information for the writer (or someone who's likely to have it) and ask "Hey, did you mean to deliberately delete your fic or not? If the disappearance wasn't deliberate, would you be willing to still let fans share copies of it, or maybe even re-archive it somewhere -- with your (former) pseud attached or taken off, per your preferences -- or not?" If fans are interested enough in that particular writer's fic to want to spend time asking for a copy of it or send copies out, I hope they'd be willing to spend a little time trying to contact the writer and seeing if it might be possible to get the okay on either sharing or -- if it wasn't deliberately taken down, the in my mind even better option of, with permission -- re-archiving it for the writer from their saved copies. :)

I realize that deliberate takedowns (except for certain fandoms, as I'm learning from some of responses at vickyblueeyez's post!) may be only a small subset of the fic that goes offline, I just worry about the privacy issues that surround making their fic more obviously easily accessible again for that subset of writers for whom it is or would be problematic and against their wishes -- without checking with them first, and thus assuming an opt-out rather than an opt-in model.

If the culture throughout fandom had always clearly been "once you post a story, know that it's going to be easily searchable and findable (and later possibly connectable to your other identity/ies) forever and will be actively, non-discreetly shared by readers even if you take the copies you as the writer have control over offline" I'd be more sanguine, thinking/hoping that more writers had always been aware of the not just present-day but later risks.

But as it seems that that is not the standard that all parts of fandom have always operated by, creating a centralized multifandom resource that could (unexpectedly, to former writers) make a change in default assumptions and behavior around sharing more prevalent -- that (as you can no doubt tell from my going on about it) makes my privacy-concerns antennae come to unhappy attention.

[soukup]

I see your point. There's no clear solution.

I think points of view very much depend on the author's background. I have always assumed that anything I put online might be around forever. So if it's something I've not wanted associated with my real life identity, from the start I have kept it separate, with unlinked psuedonyms.

I realise that not everyone does that.

[skaredykat]

Exactly. Not everyone doing that may not be the wisest in today's assumed-to-be-extremely-interconnected internet era, but some writers may not understand even now how (even more) interconnected things may later become, and for others they may have posted things when it was far from obvious that copies might persist forever.

Which is why I'm so boring/earnest/repetitive about the "please please please in a culture that did seem to promise some respect for privacy when many fans joined it or started writing, let's make renewed much-more-obvious-than-it-was access to their offline fic more opt-in than opt-out, given potential privacy implications and changes about them over time" thing. :)