BronxWench

Access to the database itself is strictly controlled. Only DemonGoddess and manta2g have direct access. My moderating staff is exceedingly small, and doesn’t have the limited abilities that I have as lead moderator. I’ve met most of them in person, and I am entirely sure that none of my moderators are responsible for this series of attacks. Further, I myself run Malwarebytes Premium daily on my computer, and take every precaution when I have occasion to visit other sites in the course of my moderating duties. I know it’s easy to point a finger at human beings, and wonder if they are the proximate cause of the issues, but in this case, you’re way off base. The idea of using immoral means to achieve what a person believes is a moral end is neither improbable or unheard of, in my experience. Hypocrisy is as much a common human trait as any other, and the same people who email me demanding that I remove a story they dislike would scream the loudest if I removed a story they did like. It’s naïve to think otherwise.

I don’t think we need to escalate to the point of firearms. However, we are not the only site that hosts adult fiction, and I don’t think the attack is because of our content. I do think we need to secure the site as much as is possible against this sort of incursion, and I do think we need to, at the very least, report the attacker to his/her ISP if not to the Federal authorities who investigate cybercrimes. There’s no financial gain to be had from attacking us, and the attacks appear to be intended to disrupt the normal operations of the site. The attacks redirect our members to sites of dubious provenance and probable malware, which is my concern. We value our members, and don’t want to have our site used to harm them. So, once again, NEVER CLICK ON LINKS THAT YOU DON’T KNOW and make sure your antivirus/malware protections are up to date. Secure yourself with two-factor authentication, and change your passwords regularly if you’re not using two-factor authentication. This is something we all need to do to protect ourselves.

Argh. Maybe we need to enlist that fellow on YouTube who hacks phone spammers…

It will depend on what kind of documentation we can put together, but I’d be more than happy to deal with IC3 and their endless bureaucracy. I’m used to Federal agencies and paperwork.

The archive is back in read-only mode at the moment. Our attacker has been quite persistent, and our coder and tech admin are working as quickly as possible to close off all vulnerabilities so we can once again operate normally. Unfortunately, our coder has had to use back-up data to restore the archive even in the read-only mode, which may be why the new chapter is lost despite your having gotten reviews on the story. Bear with us, please. Our coder and admin are working on this as fast as they can, given the time constraints of their actual employment and other obligations.

We are unfortunately back in read-only mode for the time being, while our admins deal with the latest round of attacks. I can’t tell you when that will end, so please be patient with us.

It’s due to the site being in read-only mode, most likely. From what I can see, your email is only registered once. Bear with us. We’ll get the site secured and live again, and get this all sorted for you.

It’s a continuation of the attack on the site. Our staff is working on getting the site fully secured, so please be patient while we work on the issues. In the meantime, practice safe surfing and DON’T CLICK ON STRANGE LINKS! The Internet can be a dark place and hackers don’t send you to safe sites.

We are aware of the issue, and our coder is working on securing the site yet again against our persistent attacker. In the meantime, practice safe surfing and DON’T CLICK ON STRANGE LINKS! The Internet is full of dark and nasty things.

Hello, Because of the recent attacks on the site, some features have been disabled temporarily. I am unable to activate your account right now, but once our staff has finished securing the site, I will be able to activate your account. Please be patient a bit longer, and thank you! With apologies for any Google Translate oddities: Bonjour, En raison des récentes attaques sur le site, certaines fonctionnalités ont été temporairement désactivées. Je ne suis pas en mesure d'activer votre compte pour le moment, mais une fois que notre personnel aura terminé de sécuriser le site, je pourrai activer votre compte. Veuillez patienter encore un peu et merci !

Thank you! Believe me, we’re all as eager as you are to get things running again, and it really is appreciated to get a thank you!

All I can say is manta is working as fast as she can. She has a regular job as well as doing coding for us, since we’re not exactly in a position to hire her full-time, and the paying job needs to take precedence. And as Des pointed out, this is a line-by-line fix, which is tedious and time consuming. If I had any ability at all to help, I’d pitch in, but quite frankly, I’d probably make a bigger mess than whoever launched the injection attack.

The green rectangle button won’t allow you to modify your lists, but if you click on your pen name in the menu on the home page, on the left, you should see an option to edit your profile. At the top, in a green bar, are the links for Recommended Reading, Recommended Authors, Currently Reading, and Stories Written. As manta said, right now only the Recommended Authors is working, but the others are in the works. We’re all finding our way around the new features, but if everything goes as planned, we’ll have some great new one-click features that many members have been asking for.

Don’t use any old links you might have for the control panel. As I found, if you click that grouping of green rectangles, it should open a control panel page for you for that subdomain. For example, if I click on the green rectangles to the right of the subdomain “Books” I will see the control panel with my two stories displayed and the option to add a new story, just like before.

I have to admit, I can’t seem to find my Control Panel either. I’m getting used to the new layout and features, but this one is eluding me as well. EDIT: Nevermind. I found it. @Krulos you need to click the little green rectangle icon that looks like a layout page, next to the archive where you want to add the story. Your Control Panel will open up when you do that. It was too damned obvious, and I was looking for something on my actual profile.

I believe profiles are now fixed. The amazing @manta2g tells us that any page with a green bar at the top of the page is fixed and working. If I click on my own archive profile, I can edit my bio, update my pen name or email address, and add to various fields. However, if pen names were changed at random, the authors would need to be aware that the name has changed. In the case of older accounts where the author hasn’t been active in some time, it could be an issue.

As we’ve been telling people in the Archive Tech Support thread, AFF was subjected to an injection attack earlier this month. The archive was redirecting everyone to another site which invited them to click links of dubious provenance. To help end the attack and allow us to fix the underlying issues, the archive was put in read-only mode. New stories can’t be posted, updates to existing stories can’t be posted, and there might be ongoing hiccups in resetting passwords. In order to prevent a reoccurrence, our coder is going through the archive code with a fine-toothed comb and fixing the issues. It’s a very painstaking process, and we ask that you be patient, since the archive remains in read-only mode until the fixes are completed.

I’m tagging @manta2g to let her know about the dead links.

These random name changes may well be a result of the injection attack on the site earlier this month. I’m tagging our code queen @manta2g and @DemonGoddess regarding this issue. I’ve seen a few random name changes myself, but at the moment, with the archive in read-only mode, there’s not anything I can do myself to address the issue.

Hi, That would be because the archive is still in read-only mode while we make sure we aren’t going to be vulnerable to another injection attack like the one earlier this month. Fixing the issue is a very painstaking process, and takes time. We’ll let everyone know when the archive is fully functional again. Thanks for your patience!

The archive itself won’t support an actual link, but you can copy and paste the url for your readers. The profiles contain fields that accept links, but if we do that in the archive’s stories themselves, we wind up with all sorts of nastiness floating around in there, from highly NSFW imagery to outright malware.

We absolutely do allow our authors to link to their other stories. You can do it as an author’s note, up top or in a footnote at the end of the story/chapter.

Hi! As we’ve been telling other members, there was an issue with an attack on the site. In order to thwart the attack until we can finish securing the site, the archive is in read-only mode, which means no one can open a new account, post a new story, or update an existing story until the archive is back online again.

There’s a vast difference between a derivative work and a transformative work. In the case of this Seuss/Star Trek mash-up, the court held that it was not a parody, but instead did constitute a transformative work. Derivative work requires a license from the original copyright owner because it builds up and expands the original work, whereas a transformative work uses the original work in a new and new and creative manner. It’s rather like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters in that sense. The original work is transformed, and not merely used as a starting point to boldly go where the original copyright holder never intended to go. In the mash-up referenced in the YouTube video, it was the current copyright holder of the Dr Seuss franchise who sued, and not the Star Trek franchise. Obviously, the Star Trek copyright holders are better versed in copyright law and fair use than the Seuss crowd. AO3 calls everything on its site transformative, whether it truly is transformative or derivative in nature. However, you can’t merely label something transformative to make it so. As an example, if someone writes a fan fiction based on the Harry Potter fandom, and creates a new work detailing everything that happened after Book 7, that is derivative. They would be using the canon work to serve as the launching point for their story, as they go on to tell us what happened to Harry and Hermione's children at Hogwarts. If JK Rowling were to object, I rather suspect she would prevail, because this work would, if published, infringe on any future novels JK Rowling might care to write about the next generation of Potters and Weasleys. If someone wrote a fan fiction based on the Harry Potter fandom, and simply created a parallel adventure, or introduced a new character to interact with canon characters in familiar settings and events, that would be considered transformative, in that the new character might reveal feelings and motivations that would illuminate the author’s impressions of the canonical setting or event. It would not materially affect any earnings by JK Rowling from the canonical works or even future works, but it is still highly unlikely that any publisher would take the chance, without clear licensing, of publishing such a work. Legal defenses eat into the already thin profit margins of a publisher, after all. And, in both scenarios, there is a limited portion of the work that could be labeled as original writing. That’s why we call it fan fiction, after all.