Avery has been writing fan fiction for about six years, now mainly focused on the gay hockey romance Heated Rivalry. Until last month, it all lived in one place—Archive of Our Own. Then, on October 29 the fan fiction behemoth went dark due to a “security incident.” Within days, Avery was alarmed to find her works on mirror sites she hadn’t posted them to.
“To me it’s a security risk,” Avery, who did not want her real name used due to fears of backlash on social media, tells WIRED via DM. “One bad actor could put malware in that drive.”
She emailed the sites—Squidgeworld and AO3.Life—and the stories were removed, though she’ll never know if she has found every copy online. (AO3.Life has since been taken down, and Walter Hopgood, president of Squidge.org, which hosts Squidgeworld, told WIRED it removes works that are posted without an author’s permission.)
Avery’s problem is one shared with many fanfic authors since the team behind AO3 announced the site will remain offline for up to four weeks.
Hosting more than 18.8 million fan works across hundreds of thousands of fandoms, AO3 is among the most visited websites in the world. When it went down, some fans started freaking out over the “AO3 apocalypse.” Within days, readers who had saved stories on their own device placed them onto shared libraries on Google Drives. But finding alternatives has caused friction in the community, as some authors are unhappy with the way their works are being distributed without their permission, breaking fanfic norms and exacerbating fears about AI scraping.
One of the many drives to pop up was the Archive Salvation Google Drive project, a collective of fan fiction downloaded from AO3. It faced criticism after launching, though a spokesperson tells WIRED it offered ways for authors to ask for their work to be removed. But it’s since been hacked and is no longer accessible, according to a November 3 statement on a moderator’s TikTok, though the group behind it is still sharing fanfics in a closed Discord server.
“We continue to acknowledge the controversies of such drives but also want to acknowledge the joy this has brought readers and the authors who submitted their fics to us,” the statement said, adding, “our drive was controversial and very public, so the hacker is most likely someone who stands against drives like this in general.”
Avery doesn’t mind her work circulating in private drives or being asked for copies of their work for fans to read—her concern is with her work being uploaded to giant drive libraries.