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Archiving writing.com interactive stories
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From: guest (anon) , 55 months, post #161

have you got "not the older brother/sister anymore"?

From: guest (Tights) , 55 months, post #162

I was able to find 117 chapters of "Not the older brother/sister anymore":
https://archive.org/download/stories_files/stories.zip/stories/1318734.html

Just a heads up, you have to bronze through the index page (if you try to navigate using the options inside the chapters itself it won't work).

You can check all the archived stories here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1No4zjBzV81O9G3lNx6Z6ib3idqIdJEH_KCAcVkO0VnE

From: guest (Cornerodaweb) , 55 months, post #163

Thanks to Tights and everyone else who made this possible. It's fun going down memory lane and seeing even some of my old stories up (rage95, Luke the Homeless Bass Player, naw328, and Ekul J being the handles I remember). Although at times when I get all nostalgic and really miss those old days of writing.com almost on cue there's a page blocked by "too many users" or an advert for writing.com memberships. They really messed up a good thing there. But anyway thanks so much for everything you all do. :)

From: guest (Tights) , 55 months, post #164

I agree. That whole thing about "oh, the resources", that the admin tries to make people believe seems like absolutely horseshit to me. It's not like there are millions of people creating interactive stories and, for god's sake, it's just text, it's NOT 8K 360º footage. It's almost as if he just doesn't like the thematic of most of interactive stories and because of that has this attitude.

From: guest (anon) , 55 months, post #165

honestly I'm surprised this isn't a greater internet issue and haven't seen more normie revival projects or partitions

From: guest (Brayn) , 55 months, post #166

Tights,

I've said it before, I work in Enterprise-data centres with storage all the time. The amount of data required to store interactives and the processing is a statistical rounding error on big businesses, not even remotely expensive for a home user.

Unless they have a very badly optimized database, there is no reason it would be that expensive to run. BEAddventure and Fiction Branches run with far more content, far cheaper and longer than w.c has, and neither of those sites has had to restore to a pay-to-play system.

From: DivineBandit , 55 months, post #167

I think Interactives probably pull in most of the site's traffic. I've never once heard of someone outside of our communities reference writing.com or host their works there. When you click on the membership page of the site, before any all of the regular membership benefits, there's a big list of perks exclusive to interactives.
https://www.writing.com/main/shop/cat/Memberships

I can't get too mad about a niche site trying to leverage its one claim to fame, but the tactics used are pretty transparent. The 'server overload' is nonsense, but some of the extra features they've added on are better, at least.

To be transparent myself, I've been anonymously gifted memberships on the site for several years now. I don't really know why they do, but I feel like I should continue updating my stories and writing there so that it's not wasted. That's probably related to why I'm still more positive than most folks.

From: guest (Tights) , 55 months, post #168

Anon (post #165)
There are actually many people who are into trying to save internet's history. Internet Archive is probably one of the biggest most audacious projects/institutions ever, there's also "Archive Team", if memory serves me they were the folks who saved Geocities before went down the memory lane, before Yahoo killed it for no good reason at all, like no good reason at all, at all.

The problem is that oftentimes people are saving things but... what they are saving it's just "unsearchable". To mention this case, for instance, many of the Writing.com story chapters that I found had already been archived on wayback machine by someone throughout the years (I was able to find about 200k chapters that I didn't archive, that it was already there), but it was just a living hell to search throughout that thing and tried to catalog, and remove duplicate results and just organize that data. To make it into something that people could, more or less, find what they were looking for (it's not ideal cause you still can't search by words inside the chapters itself, it's a shame, but... it's better than nothing). Othewise you end up with this colossal amount of unsearchable data.

The end result is that there a lot of things being archive and saved on those platforms (the most known of them being Archive.Is and Wayback Machine), but the tools to search throughout all that pile of archive data it's just not there – and since Google and pretty much all main search engines don't index such archived data, you're pretty much screwed. They are there but if you wanna search you'll need to get a shovel and dig really deep.

Another main hurdle is that oftentimes you have to know some commands and technique to speed up the process and sort of all data, in the meantime I ended up download WSL, and installing ubuntu on windows, and learning some commands to speed and process and to help me to sort all that data.

To finish it off, I just have to recommend this amazing Jason Scott's speech, Jason Scott's who is what I called a legit digital archivist, talking about this issue of digital preservation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ZTmuX3cog

Some other useful links:
• https://archiveteam.org
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LzyRcLJdlg
• http://alexandria-project.eu/archivesearch/resources/documents/ArchiveSearch-TPDL16.pdf

From: guest (Tights) , 55 months, post #169

>BEAddventure and Fiction Branches run with far more content, far cheaper and longer than w.c has, and neither of those sites has had to restore to a pay-to-play system
Well put, Brayn. you have all these sites that you mentioned, another one it comes to mind would be Fictionmania, they all are able to stay online without pulling that shit. I don't quite understand why writing.com's owner is doing that, other than he has something against this content (don't know I'm just theorizing). Because they don't delete non-interactive story content.

From: guest , 55 months, post #170

Is it possible to download all archived stories somehow? I don't trust web archive that much tbh.

From: guest (Tights) , 55 months, post #171

It is, but by my calculations it would take about 50GBs, supposing you don't optimize the data, if you optimize it (removing html tags and so on...) you probably can lower this value to something like 10GB, maybe even lower, depending on what methods you are using. By my calculations there is about 2 million links archived on wayback machine. With that said, even if we're talking about 50GBs or even 100GBs, it's not that much nowadays.

It's something I think about doing, some day, but since these stories have been archived on web archive for at least a decade, it's not something I'm in a hurry to do, I don't think they will delete everything right out of the blue tomorrow, but I definitely plan to do that in a near future. You are totally right, many of these stories on writing.com have some edgy topics... it's not totally out of reasoning to imagine they could delete it.

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #172

TL;DR: I download all the writing.com stories, it's about 10GB (I guess, I'm still sorting and organizing it, I'll upload in the next days)

So, for those who have been keeping an eye on this issue... The whole question about how reliable wayback machine is left me wondering. They do actually remove things (even when there is nothing illegal or anything like it, probably because it would be just a pain in the ass to check each case individually, or just because of bad PR, I just lost some content that I had archived there just because it happens to be a 8chan thread, and they, after the El Paso shooting just deleted all 8chan images that they had stored there), anyway....

The main takeaway here is: If it's not a torrent, or other some P2P sharing thing, it could be taken down in a blink of an eye by someone just pressing a key. I put waaay to much effort and time to just see everything being taken down just because they received a DMCA notice or just because someone's story on writing.com had some off-color subject and Internet Archive admins decided to remove everything.

I'm still keep using them, because I think it's improbable to happen, but it's important to have a backup of what have been archived so far.

The whole thing uncompressed has like 220GB, it's about 14.000 stories, but everything compressed takes about 5GB only, so my advice is to just uncompress the story you want to read, rather than uncompressing everything. Anyway, I'll make a torrent and post the file in the next days, most of the job is done.

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #173

Ok, I finally finish it! I made a torrent with will writing.com interactive stories! It's about 16GBs (not small, but not terribly huge though), anyway, I would be glad if you guys could download and seed it, and just make a copy of it:

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/34954712/Writing_-_Interactive_Stories_Backup_(2019)

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #174

Another thing I'm working on it is to try to make it all the archived stories searchable (like typing a keyword and see on how many chapters that keyword appears), I'm still don't quite know how could I do that. Maybe I could create a spreadsheet list, with the plain text, but it would be a huge list (probably with about 2GB), so it's not that viable. Anyway, maybe someone here has some idea about how could make database searchable.

The perfect solution would be if there was some service that allowed me to bulk submit 2 million wayback machine URLs and the search engine made it searchable, but apparently you can't do that on practically any search engine (google, yandex, you name it, they all don't allow this - probably to avoid spam and all that crap). Maybe someone has some idea or advice about what could I do.

From: guest (Bob) , 54 months, post #175

Torrent link returns 404

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #176

Oh, wait, this is weird, try using this magnet link instead:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:ca5266d078a79f122602482c5db4ea0d555f74ec&dn=Writing.com%20-%20Interactive%20Stories%20Backup

I think The Pirate Bay removed because it may look like a virus (a single 15GB file maybe sound suspicious

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #177

I uploaded the torrent file on Google Drive as well, in case you guys have some issue using the magnet link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g0UOcbnphMYT2mz-6KMSjxRiOBgKPlcp/view?usp=sharing

Since TPB deleted the torrent, I will post here what I had posted on the torrent description:

First of all, this is a worst-case-scenario backup, just to be safe. So there were a lot tweaks that I didn't implemented cause, honestly, it would just be a giant pain in the ass to do that, to make it 100% perfect and easy to search and browse, but the bulk and the essence of it, it was saved.

Archiving things is more important then indexing and making it searchable, because you can do these two things later. As long as the data still exists you can organize it later. If you just want to read the story google to the google spreadsheet and it will be waaaaay simpler/easier:

With that said, here are some explanations about how the archive works:

• There are about 14631 stories (although the number of files is more like 20.000 cause just for sanity's sake I archived old version of some stories)

• The backup consists of a 15GB rar file. Inside this file there is about 20.000 zip files that actually contain the stories themselves.

• I seriously don't recommend you to unzip all the stories because the whole uncompressed file takes about 200 GBs, so just take a look on the story you want to see and extract only that one.

• Find a story: On writing.com each stories receives an unique ID number, I used this ID number to save each story and to organize it. To see what ID number corresponds to each story just check the Organizer.xls file that I'm uploading along with the file. Also, there's a folder called Index, that contain the synopsis of each story. Anyway, it's pretty much that.

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #178

>go to the google spreadsheet*
Fixed

From: JackSket , 54 months, post #179

No seeds dude, can someone post a direct link?

From: guest (Tights) , 54 months, post #180

What you mean "no seeds", there are seeds:
https://i.imgur.com/4goaYrV.png

Although I'm still uploading it, my upload speed is slow. Be patient.

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