squidgestatus

First of all, I'd like to ask anyone who's gotten access to do tag wrangling here on SquidgeWorld - we're still flailing from the AO3 downtime. We've got over 10,000 tags between Characters, Relationships, and Freeform tags still yet to be wrangled. And if you're interested in being a wrangler, let us know!

Second, we know there are quite a lot of people who not only write fanfiction, but original fiction as well - fiction that is not tied to a fandom. Because of this, we have created a standalone fandom of "Original Works", which you can think about more in the concept of "Movies and Film" and "TV and Streaming Video." This is the "parent" collection, and (as of Sunday when we perform weekly maintenance), will appear along as one of the lists of Fandoms on the upper left menu. Under "Original Works", we have created multiple types of works available for tagging purposes. When creating an original work, you have the following options available, along with a little explanation:

Original Works - Diaries and Journals: This is where you can create something with your own personal thoughts. Almost like a blogpost or such.
Original Works - Epistolary and Letters: Writing the letters between two lovers? This is where those would go.
Original Works - Essays and Meta: Think of this as the, "I'm here to convince you to watch more science fiction shows" or "Here is what action movies get wrong about female characters" and the like.
Original Works - Guidance and Instructions: I don't think this will get quite much use, but you never know. Things under this "fandom" are truly instructions, like "How to save money in THIS economy" or the instructions I wrote on how to implement the OTW code to bring a new archive online.
Original Works - Long Form Prose: Basically, something longer than a short story. A few chapters of a work you've created. Think "novella" which is one or more chapters, and 17,500 to 40,000 words.
Original Works - Lyrics and Music: As it sounds, maybe you've written some music and want the lyrics posted somewhere. Or you've rewritten the lyrics to a popular song. This is where you'd document it.
Original Works - Novel: If you've got an original idea and want to write a novel, use this one. These typically will be multi-chapter and have at least 40,000 words
Original Works - Poetry: Write some original poetry? Use this fandom.
Original Works - Screenplays and Scripts: Screenplays, scripts, and plays have very particular writing styles with dialogue, actions, and stage direction amongst other elements.
Original Works - Short Form Prose: This is a quick short story, or in terms of book size, a novellette. Those range anywhere up to 17,500 words.
Original Works - Others [Unlisted]: This is the catch-all if something else here doesn't fit. This is where most of the existing Original Works were documented under.

Per our policy on original works in the Terms of Service, point 7, these works CAN have Ko-Fi and Patreon links. Just FYI. All other links for Ko-Fi, Patreon, and the like that are intended for fanfiction-based works are not allowed.

If you have questions, please let us know! And as for now, back to tag wrangling.

The SquidgeWorld Archive came back up successfully a few hours ago - but I was too focused and enraged on what's going on in the world instead of sending out an "up" notice like I normally do. So my apologies if anyone was waiting for me.

Basically, it was my own fault. I changed a backup structure without calculating the correct space needed, and ran up against all the available disc space on the server. Everything's been corrected, and barring something extremely odd, like SqWA becoming as popular as AO3 or something, we're pretty much good to go from here on out.  Backups are moved to their own 2Tb partition, and should never darken the doorstep of the server again.

Tell someone you love them today, even if it's just the cat. And know that you are loved and welcomed by the fandom community.

As of right now, 11:53am on Tuesday, December 30th, 2025 SquidgeWorld Archive is back up and running!  If you see any oddities, please don't hesitate to let us know.

For transparency, here's basically what happened:

• The server had a hard disk corruption that had to be corrected


• Corrections were made, but there was an internal database that contained further corruption. The internal database was replaced with a backup so that the "redis" server (software that is required for SqWA to run) would come back up as well


• With all corruption errors addressed, the system processed the data chunks like it normally does when it comes up.

We should be good to go from here on out. This does make a redeployment of SqWA a higher priority.  We're in the beginning stages of this.  More information will come about when we're ready to go.

We've had a huge influx of people to SquidgeWorld in the last week or so, and it seems to come down to an incident at AO3 with underage fics.  This email is to respond to the half a dozen emails/trouble tickets that we've gotten asking us to clarify our stance on the issue.  Even though it's explicitly stated in the SqWA Posting Help section, we're pointing it out here, word-for-word.

Point 1 - Use of the Underage tag: The SquidgeWorld Archive does allow Underage fanworks to be added to the archive.
Point 2 - Use of the Underage tag with respect to fic ratings: Any fic that features the Underage tag and where the rating is Mature or Explicit, that fic must be locked to Archive users only. No exceptions.
Point 3 - Use of RPF tag: The SquidgeWorld Archives does allow Real People Fiction - RPF - to be added to the archive.
Point 4 - Underage/RPF tags on the same fic: If a user adds an Underage fic that is about RPF - Real Person Fiction - that fic must be locked to Archive users only. No exceptions.  NOTE: This rule is new, added in response to this very situation.

While some people may not agree, this is our stance.  We refuse to become gatekeepers of those who use the site; we will never tell you what you can and cannot post to the archive.  However, we want to make sure that people who use the archive and do not want to see those works are not inadvertently exposed to them.  This is why we have our locking policy in place.  If it's in the archive and meets the above points, locking must be completed appropriately.  And if it is not—and a recent quick check showed that people are not always respecting this rule—the locking will be done for you by the admins.

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them.  But if you just want to sit back behind an anonymous keyboard and call us names, that's fine. We just don't need to know about it; don't send us a note to let us know you're calling us an asshole somewhere on the Interwebs. People already do this, and it's tiring.

So we had an equipment failure for The SquidgeWorld Archive that makes the current machine unusable.  We're weighing options, but there will be no update available for the immediate future.  We will be back up, but it's going to depend on a few things.  First of all, we just ordered the necessary equipment as a backup, but we're going to attempt to move the "innards" of the server to a new machine that we have already on hand.

It will probably be Sunday before the server is back up and running again, though we cannot guarantee this.

The good thing is, with our judicious backup policy, we're sure no data is lost.  Indeed, the drives are working just fine.  We just now need to solve a few technical issues before we can come back.

If you're part of SquidgeWorld Archive, you may notice that the site will be down briefly throughout the day - today, October 26th, 2025.  This is because we are going to be adding a few things here and there to add links to Squidge.org's fandom offerings in the Community links/page, as well as additional clarification information for commenting.  The Community links additions will link to some of our pages on Dreamwidth where you can get additional information about Squidge and learn about challenges that are currently happening, and the additional information for posting comments is around discouraging commission spammers from posting.

As always, if you've got questions, don't hesitate to contact us!

I have to say that this is probably my favorite thing about being a part of Squidge.org and all the various entities. Sure, you can see the growth of fandom spaces and how people are using them - but when it comes to the year in review, this is where you can see the real, tangible evidence of what's been going on for the last year. So without further ado, I present SquidgeWorld's Year in Review based on what's been read! Please note this is graphics-heavy so I'll attempt to hide behind a cut.

( Read more... )

So that's how 2023 went. We shall see how this year shakes out to be! Thanks to everyone who was part of SquidgeWorld.org and helped make these statistics come about, and thanks to everyone for being a part of Squidge.org!

Per the post on SquidgeWorld, the SquidgeWorld Archive will be enter extended downtime on Friday, November 24th from 06:00 Pacific (14:00 UTC).  It's currently not known what time we will be back up, but this will be longer than the current usual 30 minutes Sunday morning maintenance.

No other Squidge services will be down.

There have been a few questions today about AI and Squidge.org's approach, so I thought I would drop a blogpost here so people know.  Here's our philosophy:

While AI (Artificial Intelligence) can be a great thing in the realm of medicine, like computers spotting lung or breast cancer before a human can, AI shouldn't have any place in the fanfiction world.  Honestly, probably not in the pro-fiction world, either, but every day companies like Grammarly are rolling out, "Try our new AI tool to assist your writing!" programs.  When it comes to writing, each voice is unique - and that's a wonderful thing.  Bringing AI into the realm of fanfiction is just asking for those unique voices to be squashed in favor of bland, generalized voice that is "safe for the masses."

That's not what we're here for.

Starting soon (days, not months) we'll make a concerted effort to keep screen-scraping bots away from Squidge.org properties, including SquidgeWorld Archive, Squidge.org homepages, and Squidge Images.  That's not to say more sophisticated screen scraping programs won't be able to slip through the cracks.  However, most generic screen scraping programs that AI uses can be identified and blocked.

Additionally, there are two settings that will protect you better on SquidgeWorld Archive.  Those are:

• In your profile preferences, there is an option called "Hide my work from search engines when possible."  This will discourage your work from being found by Search Engines, not necessarily by screen scrapers.

• For the works that you choose to archive within SquidgeWorld Archive, please make sure that this checkbox is ticked.  That way your fanwork will be available only to registered users - and prevent both Search Engines and screen scrapers from being able to access your works.  The setting looks like this:
  
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• Your work will show up in the list of results, just like before screenshot below.  Notice the lock next to the penname?  That means that this work can only be read if you are logged into an Archive account.

Please reply with what questions you have.  And thanks!