When will FFN be back? Place your bets!

[Negrek]

If you weren't aware, FFN has been completely offline since July 12th. The official Twitter account recently released a statement about the outage, claiming that it's a result of a complaint about child abuse-related materials hosted on the site from their domain registrar.

So when do you think FFN will be back? Is this the end, at last, for a site that's been limping along for well over a decade? Take a guess, and if you're right, win some all-important bragging rights! Feel free to discuss the situation in general in this thread, too.

 

[Negrek]

it's back lmao

I knew it would get back online like five minutes after I finished typing up this thread. I manifested this. Goddammit. :P

 

[System Error]

Epic.

Anyway, have a chapter to upload there when I'm not distracted.

 

[icomeanon6]

I am humbled and overjoyed to accept the award for Last Place in this contest. I want to thank Negrek for jynxing FFNet back into having working DNS.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

It's so weird to me that anyone would consider FICTION to be "child abuse material". Was it about an actual real child that exists in the real world or something? Or was it about fictional characters that have never and will never exist?

 

[Negrek]

All we know is what's in the statement linked above. I don't think FFN followed up at all after the site came back? (I can't view Twitter properly because I don't have an account.) All they said is that someone reported content on the site that GoDaddy said violated its child abuse policy, and that FFN removed all but one of the linked items. Since FFN's ToS bans pretty much any sexually explicit material, and they've interpreted that extremely liberally in the past, it could be almost anything.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

I would just hate to think that antis did this because I don't want to imagine that they would have this much power. But they also said that one of the fics had nothing of the sort in it too, so I'm guessing it was probably reported as something like "I don't like this so it's abusive".

 

[Negrek]

Some additional, final(?) updates on the situation with FFN. Apparently shortly after the site was restored they received another child abuse complaint from GoDaddy, which they considered unfounded, although they removed the story in question because it was deemed too explicit for the site's terms of service. Their takeaway was that GoDaddy was employing some kind of AI or otherwise automated content detection system to report content related to child abuse, and that it wasn't working well. idk how likely that is relative to someone with a grudge reporting stories they don't like to the registrar rather than FFN itself (it seems like any automated system scanning FFN for inappropriate content would flag more than 20 or so stories, if it didn't simply melt?), but one way or another it prompted FFN to switch DNS providers.

I would never have expected FFN to show any sort of support for people writing inter-species romance given past content purges, but I suppose it's not the wildest thing that's happened this month. The site moving away from GoDaddy is a good thing regardless, so all in all, a weird little episode with a happy ending?

 

[BraviaryScout]

Good. Fuck GoDaddy

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

I seem to remember that GoDaddy had ads that were highly suggestive and often included scantily clad women, so of COURSE they have double standards geez. No introspection whatsoever.

 

[icomeanon6]

The weirdest thing is that their early ads didn't even specify what their line of business was. Everyone in my house assumed it was an adult website.