#but yeah my old posts are embarrassing but I won't delete them because they're a part of my past

[olderthannetfic]

I'm sorry for random and unrelated question to usual topics (though it has to do with AO3). But basically, is it wrong to save and/share someone's fics on AO3? And I'm talking about downloading pdf files among with others that the site provides - it's still gonna contain all the tags, author notes, author name, warnings, etc...

I saved someone's fics because I loved reading them (and sadly this author has habit of flipping out and deleting everything, only reuploading maybe year later if at all). So I got all of them as pdf files - then someone else talked to me how sad is that the fics are gone. I offered to send the files via email to the person for preservation purposes, but the author was alerted of this and called me toxic etc, telling me that I don't have the rights to share or save (even though every work on AO3 is given the option for download.

Afterwards they did a post on AO3 about how nobody is allowed to save or share their fics.

Maybe I'm the asshole here, but I've seen so many fics disappear off the face of the internet in my lifetime, plus isn't AO3 archive in itself? I just didn't want everything to be gone again.

So yeah, was I justified in my actions of saving / sharing, or should I just do as author says and delete everything? (Side note: They said that they're gonna reupload everything eventually, but they've deleted fics before and reuploaded some, but I hate that this situation is kinda ''now you can read, now you cannot, because I say so''. And the situation isn't even something like ''author is embarrassed of their stories, and want them deleted - Old Shame, if you will'' - it's literally just ''you can't read it because I say so''.

So yeah, which one of us is right? Author, or just someone who loved their stories?

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Private person-to-person sharing of deleted fics has been the norm forever.

You want to keep it a bit quiet. Don't throw it in the author's face. Don't post those PDFs somewhere public.

But no, you're not doing anything unusual here if you were just offering to send some PDFs privately to another fan.

I understand that the author is upset by their lack of control over their work. That's a common emotion. But they're naive if they think their fans won't save their work.