WillowDarkling

As the forum moderator, I want to thank you, very much for your kind words, and I am so happy that the sites have been a help in troubled times. 
I decided to pin your post for the time being, so it will remain at the top of the forum, so our hardworking archive moderators, our admin and the rest of the crew can see it. 
Thank you, again, for such lovely words. 
 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

While the Archives are in Read Only mode the Head Archive mod is unable to delete any accounts. 
Therefore, if you do wish to have your account deleted please leave a post on this thread, linked here: Wish To Delete Account Thread
This is in order to keep all of the deletion requests in one place, to try and make things a little easier on our Head Archive mod when we get back up and running. 
We will need your username in the archive, and a link to your profile would be awesome. Also, if you have a forum profile that will need to be deleted too, so a forum username and link would be brilliant as well. 
 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

No, the Archives are still in read only mode so users cannot upload their stories at this time. 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

No, the Archives are still in read only mode so users cannot upload their stories at this time. 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

Dear gods.
You need to report this to WebNovel: dmca@webnovel.com  I recommend including links to the stories here on AFF as well as your profile links showing dates of initial posting of the stories in question. He’s got your damned name on the “cover” of his story, ffs. He’s not even shy about being a thief.
I’m not finding that pen name here on AFF, sadly, or I’d kick his sorry ass off my archive.

This jerk stole 2 of my stories and a few others from AFF and posted them on Webnovel. Lady Freelove (author of one of the stolen stories) alerted me, and I’ve alerted the other authors.
https://www.webnovel.com/profile/4304588891?appId=10

I posted the final chapter of “Smooshed” on AO3 a couple of days ago. The reaction to that and to chapter 1 of “Out of Hand” has been substantial, which is delightful.
Less delightful was some news I got the other day: My friend Lady Freelove let me know that my story “The Power Arcane” was plagiarized and published on Webnovel.com under the plagiarist’s name. I created an account there and reported it; we’ll see what, if anything, comes of that.
On the writing front, I now have 3 priorities: the final chapter of “Depravity Falls,” chapter 2 of “Out of Hand,” and the final story of “The Power Arcane.” Which doesn’t mean that I’m not also working on a bunch of other stuff.

The Donations link should be working. It’s under the Site section of the new menu.
As Willow said, all donations go towards the hosting costs and to defray the costs of updates to the site. No one, from the owner on down, ever gets any money for doing what we do for AFF. We donate our time because we all believe in what AFF stands for—free expression  and acceptance.

Thank you so much for that, Donkingkong.
I know that before all of these attacks we had a donation link in the Archives, and all donations went towards hosting costs and such things. But I don’t know what the status of that is at the moment. We’ll have to ask @DemonGoddess or @manta2g or @BronxWench about that, I’m afraid. 
But I am certain, whether it be now, or after we’re back up and running, all donations would be so greatly appreciated. We’re all volunteers here, so all donations go towards the site in full. We do not get paid for maintaining the site. 

Whenever The Pit decides to enforce its mature content rules, we get bombarded with new members, and hundreds of new stories daily. The archive can handle it, and I’m going to be exploring recruiting additional moderators since I seem to have misplaced most of the current ones. (And now @Desiderius Price hurries to find a good hiding place…   )
 

I try.

I wasn’t so much saying that the mods should somehow intervene. It’s more wondering if it makes sense to be judicial about things.

If 200 people login the second it’s available, all of them posting at the same time, can the archive handle that?

Probably not going to happen but it might be good to think about.

Maybe I’m being optimistic about writers and their ability to get things done, but this occurred to me.

Because the site has been down for a while, some of us have written a bunch of stuff. We might have a lot of content to post.

There’s the possibility that a bunch of people will want to post new stuff. Should we try and not to add too much for the site initially?

Unfortunately it’s been a bit of a battle with the attacker… the two times I’m aware of the coder *trying* to bring the code live, the attacker repeats their attack and we’re left with our website redirecting visitors to unsavory locations on the internet.  Crossing my fingers the third time’s the charm for our coder.

Thank you for that.
We had to implement the 10 line rule in the Requests and Challenges forum, because of the disclaimer and copyright issues, but haven’t really needed to enforce it elsewhere. 
But I figured that little previews could be allowed while we’re in Read only mode. 
I’ll have to add that rule to the Forum TOS eventually. 

I’m unfortunately going to have to ask you to reduce the amount of story content in the above post. We can’t allow story content in the forums, due to disclaimer and copyright issues. 
But, because of the archives being down, we will allow story content of up to 35 lines (instead of the usual 10 lines) of text. That means lines of text, so if a sentence needs a line or two extra to finish then that’s fine. 
So, please reduce the story content above to within that limit. 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

Thank you for that.
We had to implement the 10 line rule in the Requests and Challenges forum, because of the disclaimer and copyright issues, but haven’t really needed to enforce it elsewhere. 
But I figured that little previews could be allowed while we’re in Read only mode. 
I’ll have to add that rule to the Forum TOS eventually. 

I’m unfortunately going to have to ask you to reduce the amount of story content in the above post. We can’t allow story content in the forums, due to disclaimer and copyright issues. 
But, because of the archives being down, we will allow story content of up to 35 lines (instead of the usual 10 lines) of text. That means lines of text, so if a sentence needs a line or two extra to finish then that’s fine. 
So, please reduce the story content above to within that limit. 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

Ditto…
Yep.  I’ve seen other other writing (& self-pub) websites, lots will claim openness, but reading the TOSs and there’s a ton of restrictions that more or less deny reality, imply a sex-less “utopia” is upon us.

The clean-up is very nearly done (7 pages left of what was 109 pages of duplicate/triplicate/multiple accounts under a single email). Once we’ve finished that, manta can move to the next step.
I absolutely appreciate the offers of help—you all are wonderful!  It’s been a long road, but knowing that AFF has the best members of any fiction archive makes it easier, so a rousing thank you to you all!

Please do not under any circumstances delete my account.
For all the people who wish to have their accounts deleted due to the “extended denial of service” attack the AFF Archives have suffered, “you do you.”  I would encourage you to not have your accounts deleted just the same.  Abandoning your accounts or having them deleted serves only to empower the spineless CARB sewage-quaffers who are attacking this site to continue doing so.  There are damned few sites that allow erotic and semi/demi-erotic literature to be posted full-stop.  Allowing one to fail due to a lack of authorship means that there is one fewer site, without anyone lining up to start another one.
Good luck to all of you, whatever you decide.

Hi,
We’re still in read-only mode, so it isn’t you. We’re working as fast as we can to get things back up and running. We’re doing a massive behind-the-scenes cleanup of anything that might hamper the reopening of the site. Once that’s done, stay tuned for updates on what will come next as we get AFF back to business as usual.

From my side of things, I can report that we have completed just over 80% of the duplicate account clean-up process. I’m hoping, barring any more unexpected interruptions, to get that done this week. It’s time-consuming, but our concern is to not lose anyone’s data as we merge those multiple accounts using the same email address. Fortunately, making more than one account using the same email address is no longer possible, so it's a finite pool of accounts to review.
We very much appreciate everyone’s patience—we have the best members! 

Dagian is right. The site is still in read only mode, but coder is working very hard on getting us back up. The hacker has been relentless and every time our coder has come close to getting us back up, they attack again and we have to shut everything down again. 
But our coder and admin are working on it, and hopefully we’ll be up and running again soon. 
Thank you for your understanding and patience, and most of all for your continued support of the site. 
Willow Darkling, forum moderator. 

You should always keep your stories as files on your computer. I use Word, simply because it’s what I’m used to. 

Just got up for work, cleared it out.  this is driving batty….