Hello everyone,

We wanted to share a bit of an update from us here at the fanfic.party team. If you read nothing else, know this: we are sincerely and deeply sorry for posting works from AO3 without their authors' consent. It was our responsibility to ask and obtain consent from every author posted, and we failed to do so.

Now, we'd like to share a bit about why we started fanfic.party, how this happened, and what we will be doing going forward.

Fanfic.party started as a project to archive and download as many of the shared Google Drives, Proton Drives, etc. as possible. We had a few goals for our site: first, we wanted to make these works easier to search and read. Second, at the time we believed many of these collections were shared with their authors' consent, and wanted to protect the owners of these Drive folders from harassment resulting from exposed email addresses. And third, we naively hoped to protect the safety of readers by parsing the works ourselves and displaying them on a webpage rather than asking users to download arbitrary epub/PDF files.

We never had any plans to profit off the site. We are not affiliated with and do not support websites such as ao3.life, blk archive, ficdex, or any other "backup" site. In fact, we had planned to shut down the site and redirect all links back to AO3 as soon as it was back online - something OTW estimated would occur within 4 weeks. We misguidedly believed that doing this as a not-for-profit service made it somehow acceptable or less wrong than what others did.

To be frank, we did not realize how many works were uploaded to these Drives without the consent of authors. Looking back, we should have recognized that with such a large number of works, it would've been implausible for authors to share them all willingly. However, in the spur of the moment, we failed to recognize these warning signs.

We should have verified the source and consent for each piece of work before publishing it on our site. We should never have made the site run on an opt-out rather than opt-in model. Moreover, we became aware that many works were missing their start/end notes due to issues with our parser - leading to many works being shared without credit. Regardless of our intentions - or misconceptions that the works were originally shared in Drives with consent, nothing makes what we did acceptable or right.

We apologize for the impact our site has had on both authors and readers alike: stripping away consent - even unintentionally - is never justifiable.

Right now, we've taken our site down and processed every removal request so far. We apologize that we haven't been able to respond via email to every request, but rest assured that all notices that were sent to us have been processed and your work has been removed.

While we are taking our site down (which means all works will be removed), you can still email us if you have any questions or concerns. Our email address is fanficarchive@proton.me.

We also understand that running a website such as this without proper consent is not the right way forward. We've discussed quite a bit with the authors on our team as well as writers who have reached out to us via Discord or Email. We are rethinking this project from the ground up and will share more on this page when it is ready - but we will not make a mistake such as this again, nor will we publish any works without consent.

And finally, we'd just like to thank each and every one of you all, especially to the authors who showed us patience and kindness even when we did not deserve it, and to all our amazing volunteers. It means the world to us.

We understand the hurt and frustrations our actions have caused, and we acknowledge that this anger towards us is justified.

We are sorry, and we hope to earn back your trust.

Thank you for your time,
The fanfic.party Team