Archive of Our Own
| Archive Of Our Own (AO3) | |
| |
| |
| URL | https://archiveofourown.org/ |
| Status | Endangered |
| Archiving status | Not saved yet |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
| Language(s) | English, Multilingual |
"Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users." (Wikipedia article)
Although the website is run by reliable people of open-source mindset, the text authors themselves cannot be trusted with long-term availability of their works. These authors are no strangers to deleting their work online weeks/months/years down the line. Therefore a reliable up-to-date archival project is always necessary. Thus the project should be marked endangered, although the website itself is not.
Archival
Just like other websites with user-generated content, this would be a continuous project to keep up-to-date.
Two years ago I volunteered to help find a deleted fan-fiction piece. It seemed, there are no archives or mirrors at the time. Any available archive.org fan-fiction dumps hadn't captured the work in question - VADemon, 2025
Oftentimes works contain 18+ story lines and the likes ("Sexual content" is a top tag), so the website hides them behind cookie banners. Archive.org's WBM crawler cannot archive those due to consent cookies missing. But there's a trick: if you add ?view_adult=true to the end of URLs, the bot should receive the cookie back. If there are multiple chapters, some tools (e.g. the Wayback Machine) will not show the entire work in a single page, but, if you add ?view_full_work=true, it will show you the entire work. If you need to save a page that is adult, but has multiple chapters, you should use ?view_full_work=true&view_adult=true.
Work ids are sequential, and singular works on archive of our own can be downloaded without external tools it will always download the entire work.