Don't know if this is an appropriate topic, but her goes.
Does anyone know why ASSTR and all of it's associated sites have suddenly disappeared? Become inaccessible?
Would appreciate anyone's insight into the situation.
thank you
Don't know if this is an appropriate topic, but her goes.
Does anyone know why ASSTR and all of it's associated sites have suddenly disappeared? Become inaccessible?
Would appreciate anyone's insight into the situation.
thank you
TR and all of it's associated sites have suddenly disappeared? Become inaccessible?
Would appreciate anyone's insight into the situation.
thank you
My understanding is that it has been years since anyone has done any maintenance on the ASSTR servers. I'm actually surprised that it's taken this long to go off line.
The .xyz mirror is from 2012, I believe, so anything posted to ASSTR in the past 10 years will not be accessible.
That would be "a good thing", most of what has been posted there in the mean time is archives which are reposted every few days. A lot was lost over the years and people have been searching for it ever since.
I've just checked and that is not a 2012 mirror, there are updates there from the last 10 years.
Replacing .org with .xyz is an excellent suggestion. Does anyone know of a way to do a search and replace of part of a URL in Firefox bookmarks?
You could use "DB Browser (SQLite)" the db to edit is places.sqlite the table is moz_places. This will edit the bookmarks and the history.
If you only want to alter the bookmarks only, in the bookmark manager, do a backup, it's a text json file you can do a search and replace with a text editor then restore the backup.
This seems to happen every year or so. It will go down for a few days to a week, then return again.
Hopefully, as part of the migration, they will rebuild the indexes. I have had to go through the FTP portal and manually scroll through all the entries to look for the author/story I was interested in.
Check the newsgroup alt.sex.stories.d
also reachable trough
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.sex.stories.d
So far nobody knows anything.
There are effort underway to setup an alternative at authoralias.asslr.org But with no way to contact the authors, I do not expect that to go very far.
There are effort underway to setup an alternative at authoralias.asslr.org But with no way to contact the authors, I do not expect that to go very far.
I suspect that some authors might still have the email account they used to set up their accounts. Granted, for many authors, the way to contact them would involve an ouija board.
But can an author delete stories there? Not that I really care, I pretty much stopped visiting when Artie pulled his stories back in early 2012.
What killed it off was spam, the Nifty Archive was being uploaded on a 3 day cycle - the same stories appearing in "Recent Updates" every three days. There was also a "Leslita Archive" behaving similarly but it was easier to ignore because there were less files involved.
But can an author delete stories there?
ASSTR is basically just a web backup of stories that get posted to the Usenet group alt.sex.stories. The problem with usenet is that most servers only host files for a short period of time, but some servers will host them pretty much indefinitely. Unfortunately, the latter type of server usually requires a subscription to access.
What this means for users and authors is that (a) a story can disappear very quickly for most potential readers, but (b) it never really goes away entirely.
With this in mind the question of whether authors can delete stories off of ASSTR is mostly irrelevant. There might be a copyright argument that the author has not granted permission for the story to be reposted on ASSTR in the first place, but the site isn't really a story site the way SOL is. ASSTR is sort of like the Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine. Just for a very specific subpart of the internet.
A good thing is that access to the many and various authors sites hosted on ASSTR may be back, so fans of a particular author - say Ivan the Terror as an example I recall from a somewhat recent thread - can obtain copies of favorite stories.
The Wayback Machine gave access to snapshots of the hosted sites, but not actually access to the stories hosted on asstr.org when the asstr.org was not available.
The Wayback Machine gave access to snapshots of the hosted sites, but not actually access to the stories hosted on asstr.org when the asstr.org was not available.
I used the Wayback Machine to read stories on AssTr relatively recently, this was when the actual site was unavailable.
ASSTR is basically just a web backup of stories that get posted to the Usenet group alt.sex.stories.
It was definitely more than that, any number of authors put their stories up directly. Are you suggesting that the Nifty - or Leslita - Archives all arrived on the site via alt.sex.stories?
There is no question that Artie removed all of his stories in one fell swoop around 11 years ago, as have many other authors over the years.
Just looking at the "Recent Uploads" page: hundreds of French-language re-uploads, a few from mypenname3000 and that is pretty much it. The French stuff seems to have protagonists aged 6 or 7 upwards (I don't speak French).
Northman makes it clear that the ability to delete stories can be very important.
No, Collections are basically private sites being hosted on asstr.
My point was simply that the main asstr site wasn't exactly curated, so the idea of authors deleting stories off that site was probably a non-starter.
I just looked to see the registration on the site. It's with AWS whose terms prohibit using for child porn. I don't think AWS is hosting the site, but I think it extends to their registration services as well. If that is the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see the site disappear again.
Depends on how strict they interpret things, though. In the US, "child porn", for legal purposes, refers to situations where an actual, real child is involved. This is why stories and cartoons are legal.
It's possible that AWS simply has that in their terms to give them an excuse to cancel accounts and keep the money when something objectionable shows up, but they don't go out of their way to root out sites that are technically legal.
Depends on how strict they interpret things, though. In the US, "child porn", for legal purposes, refers to situations where an actual, real child is involved. This is why stories and cartoons are legal.
It's possible that AWS simply has that in their terms to give them an excuse to cancel accounts and keep the money when something objectionable shows up, but they don't go out of their way to root out sites that are technically legal.
If AWS is in keeping with the rest of Amazon's services, they have a hard line on 18 or over on anything digital. You can mostly see this play out with Japanese content. If a character is/"looks" under 18 and engaged in certain things, they won't stream it, or otherwise offer it on platforms like KU or simple direct (digital) purchase. But they'll very happily sell you the Blu-ray or print edition of that same material.
The easiest demonstration of that would be just about anything published by Seven Seas Entertainment under their "Ghost Ship" imprint, be it the manga, or the anime version of the same title.
Even more daring on the part of Seven Seas, given their company operates out of Ontario, Canada.
If AWS is in keeping with the rest of Amazon's services, they have a hard line on 18 or over on anything digital.
But then you have the issue of grandfathering.
There are still some stories in here that involve those under 14. But those are all grandfathered, as that was not the mandate at that time.
And because it is primarily an archive and largely unmoderated, that is very different from a site that actively goes out and collects stories.
I admit, ASSTR was great, about two decades ago. But by then usenet was already dying, and we had better alternatives like here to turn to instead.