A less ranty (or so I've tried) and more simple notification from my last post... that can be  C&P / Link to this / whatever....

Over the years many fen have had reasons to remove their fanwork from online, or to dissociate their identities from that work.... maybe they are embarassed by their old work, maybe the law in their country (or one they moved to) considers some of their work (eg: chan) to be illegal and they fear for an Ex finding it out and using it to have their children or job or even freedom taken away, maybe they want to file off the serial numbers to turn it into pro-fic...

Pre-AO3 (and even after AO3) many fen had their own websites, and/or used small fandom or pairing specific ones, and they may have protected the site  from being archived into, for example, 'the Way Back Machine' (Archive.Org) by having a simple Robotos.txt excluding them.   Recently, Archive.org (and I have since learned several other 'archive' sites such as Archive.is and Webcite) have decided to ignore these Robotos.txts.    I  was horrified to find that tens of thousands of pages from several domains I own were suddenly public on these websites.... not just all our fanfics in entirity, but tons of personal, professional, hobby related and original-creative works. 

As for Webcite, I understand its purpose, but even forFanlore, there is NO REASON to use Webcite to archive EVERYSINGLE STORY on our website (probably as many words or more than all of HP series canon itself) just to provide a refrence that it exists - so if the archival sites have violated your robots.txts / TOS, better check that no one has misused Webcite, Arhcive.org. Archive,is, etc to copy all the work you may have had reason to take down or remove old versions that  had your name on them.  Fortunately, Webcite recognises archival of an entire cite and of certain types of creative or personal work doesn't belong in their archive and you can request it to be taken down if someone has misused their service as a way to keep copies of all their fav fanworks against the creators' wishes.

Please Alert your friends/reading list about this insensitive and illegal violation of personal space/wishes and legal copyright, so that if they took their work down, and wanted it to stay down, they can take action to remove it.

I was expecting The Archive.Org to be backlogged and slow with this, but I am rather pleased to say that if you send a Take Down Request to them, they are not that slow.  It was just a few days before I got a reply and the reply says that all pages should be removed from the public within 24 hrs.  ALthough I am pleased this was addressed promptly, I am still pissed that they did this in the first place.... if they felt Robots.txt didn't work for archives, they should have created and agreed to follow an 'archive.txt' and then provided a transitory time (say a year) for website owners to alll find out word of mouth about this and how to impliment it..   In comments on DreamWidth, I've included a copy of my Take Down notice to Archive.Org with personal info removed, to help anyone who isn't familiar with how to fill them out.

Some of the other archive (Archive.is etc) are acting like they are above international laws, and I'm starting to look at other possible avenues to deal with it (EFF, lawyers I dunno).  If you have experience with this or similar archives that could be of help, please let me know!

ADDITIONALLY, anyone affected by this should be aware that FANLORE, which claims to be about, by and for fen, is disrespecting fen, by using these illegal archives on their wiki.   For example, TELANU left Snarry fandom and removed her work from online. THe Fanlore page states she removed her work from online at the very top, and then in the info box right next to it, it links to Archived links that have copied her entire site!  Demonstratingly, they don't care what her wishes were, just that they can still access her work, in entirity, without knowing if it humiliates her, endangers her/her family, or dashes hopes for turn it into profic.  There is no excuse for ignorance when the fan's wishes are spelled out and Fanlore and its editors are all well aware of it!  

In my case, I had it written, on the Splash page and on the index page of all the stories/artwork the TOS ever since Intertexius first opened in 2003 that NO MATERIAL WAS TO BE ARCHIVED ANYWHERE and that if we died or something, someone we trusted had instructions on how to either maintain the site and/or where and how to archive it- furthermore, we are easy to contact if someone really felt something deserved archival or they wanted to use it in a presentation etc (And respectful academics HAVE done so, and I almost always agree to terms we are both happy with).  It wasn't even just screen caps of the splash page or an index of the stories to show what existed on the site/dates- there were links archived copies of EVERY SINGLE PAGE- every single story in entirity, all the artwork created both by us and our fans- EVERYTHING.   Sure, some of it technically is JKR's but its mixed up with a lot of original stuff (eg: Bernice the wandering rock) and those things do belong to us and fall under OUR copyright.  For all their own faults, as an editor on wikipedia since practically forever, I have to say that overall, people on wikipedia have treated me better than those on Fanlore- for example, when I myself uploaded my own original photos for use in an article, the other editors working on that article double checked with me that I understood and was OK with the GNU/CC terms given that my website prohibitted copying/archival, instead of just, YAY STUFF, *TAKE IT* and then goes to my website and takes the rest of it without permission, because, why not.  In comparison, Fanlore just strikes me as a hungry monster that doesn't care who/what it sucks in and hurts; it is just out to grow and profit at our expense/safety.

The burden of staying SAFE should not be dumped on the Fen's shoulders!   Fanlore's very description of purpose and ethics claim that they understand the sensitive nature of fen's ID and connection of that with their work.   Fanlore should be following as default, a policy that RESPECTS the fen their wiki is about...  DO NOT LINK TO ARCHIVES THAT IGNORE ROBOTS.TXTs!  DO NOT ARCHIVE MATERIAL IF THE SITE HAS A 'DO NOT ARCHIVE' TERMS OF SERVICE. ... In otherwords, don't break the law, do not endanger fen, respect the people your wiki is built on!  And don't lock/block people/pages for simply taking care of their safety first by removing those links and telling them to go dig through the site's verbose FAQs and info pages to try to figure out who to talk to, and worry about how long it will take to get the endangering material removed!

If you took your work down and find it is now public in Archive.org, archive.is, webcite etc, check Fanlore as well.   Remove any links that are to illegal copies, on the 'talk' page explain your purpose for doing so and that you are sending Take Down notices to those locations.  Sadly, as was I, you may find yourself and/or your pages blocked/locked and being told to go talk to staff like this is some kind of petty text-edit war (Yes, my protecting my copyright and personal safety was labelled by Fanlore as a petty 'Counter-productive edit war....'!).  I don't have the spoons for that atm, and I certainly have NO TRUST or FAITH inan organisation that treats the people they are profitting off of as shit, so why would I think spending spooons on contacting them will do any good?  What with my health, bugland's health, my grandmother's health, issues with the county violating ADA law, and now, dealing with a bunch of "we don't need to follow the law" Archives.  I really hate to think of the stress someone would be under if desperately trying to hide the chan they thought they took offline, and is now publically archived and made easy to find via fanlore, for fear of an Ex using it to take their kids away.

If others try to deal with them, I'd be interested to know what if anything worked, who you had to contact, how you had to phrase things to get yourself protected, and/or if they came to their senses and changed their policies to respect fen and their needs.