BronxWench

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.

Fan fiction works are not original works, even if the original work in question is a title in the public domain, on which copyright has expired. The staff of AO3 either drinks heavily or studied law under a very small rock in the middle of the Utopia Planitia if they truly believe that a work of fan fiction is an original work. I’d suggest trying to get it published (and not self-published) to cure oneself of that particular delusion. However, IF a fan fiction is properly disclaimed (attributes copyright of fandom to the actual copyright holder, states that no profit is being made), the portions of the fan fiction that were written by the author of the fan fiction may not be reproduced or used without permission, and yes, if your fan fiction has been posted elsewhere without your permission, you can certainly avail yourself of a DMCA takedown request. If your fan fiction has been posted elsewhere without your permission AND without attribution, under the name of a person who did not in fact write anything at all, that is plagiarism, which is the theft of your intellectual property. That is illegal and has cost people their employment when they’ve been discovered to be a plagiarist. I will delete a story posted by someone who is not the actual author of the story pursuant to the DMCA without question. I will delete a plagiarized story, along with the account of the plagiarist and all its content, whether stolen or not, and that plagiarist will be banned from the site permanently. Enthusiasm for a story is one thing; theft is entirely another thing.

The search function might not be fully available yet. I was able to search by author name in one archive, but not if I used a wildcard. I tried a tag search and it appears anything less that 4 characters isn’t working. If I search for HJ, I get nothing, but a search for a 4 character tag like Anal gets results. Of course, the archive pages aren’t fully restored yet, so this may be cleared up as each archive is fixed and brought back online.

I’m going to quote from our admin/coder: We’re working on patching the site. Keep an eye on this thread for updates: https://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/topic/72627-archives-in-read-only-mode/

If there are at least five stories for this pairing, we can create a sub-category for it. Otherwise, we would not make the sub-category. If there are five stories already, please post the links here for me. When the subdomain is fixed and live again, I will make the sub-category and move the linked stories to the new category. Thanks!

Until we fix the issues that allowed the injection attack which redirected all of the archive subdomains to a malicious page, the archive is in read-only mode. That means you can’t post a story, update a story, review a story, create an account, or reset a password. Our coder is working all the free hours she has to get this fixed for us. It’s a huge job, so let’s all be patient. Trust me, we all want the site back to normal.

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.

As long as it doesn’t wind up the way the HBO version of Game of Thrones did, with an ending that not even the author liked.

I find short fiction to e actually harder to write. When the challenge prompts were more active here, I’d always wind up writing a 1,000 word flash fic, and then going back over it a few times to make something clearer, which meant trimming words elsewhere, and the next thing you know, I’d be sobbing in my coffee and longing for a cigarette. BUT flash fiction made me hone my writing. You have to grab someone’s attention, hook them, and satisfy them in 1,000 words. There’s no room for verbal clutter, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

Unfortunately, we aren’t able to remove stories from other sites. If we are made aware of AFF stories being posted elsewhere, we do try and notify our author of the plagiarism and encourage them to report the theft to the other website. We also check our membership for the offending author, just to make sure that we’re not permitting a plagiarist to maintain an account here. I will say that some of our authors use different pen names on other sites, and while it’s rare, we’ve had reports of plagiarism because the pen names differ between sites. We always check that as a possibility before we ever make a determination of plagiarism, just to be thorough.

It’s pretty bad, but I’m not going to call troll yet, unless the author posts a bunch more stories exactly like that one, especially in more than one fandom. Then I’d call it trollery for sure. The review, however, is gone.

I’m tagging our code experts @DemonGoddess and @manta2g on this one. Those search parameters should work, but we’ve had a few odd glitches after our recent migration to the new server.