I hate it when stories are taken down · 10:32am Sep 11th, 2014
Just in general. It makes me sad. I've long since vowed never to remove any stories I write, even if I someday grow to regret them (and in some cases, with MUCH older works that have nothing to do with MLP, I have). I feel like every story is worth something. Even if it's just as an example of "how not to do it," even the most offensive and disgusting works, the most terribly written and poorly crafted stories... all of them have something to say and something to teach us. And every story should at least be experienced by somebody, and should be left available for others to experience and learn from. Though sometimes it's not immediately evident what a story has to teach people, this is a belief I hold firmly.
A little background about me: I have a tendency to leave stories open in tabs for a long long time. Weeks, even. Heck, maybe even months. I lose track of time. These are basically things I've said, "I'll read it later, but it's higher priority on my list than the rest of the things on my read later list." This doesn't mean I'll be getting to it anytime SOON, but it's there, and I'm ready to read it at any time.
I have a lot of stories I still have yet to read.
One story like this was called "One Last Game Book 1: The Maddened Mind." It was a story that had obviously been around for a while (especially given that there was a sequel Book called Book 2: Temple of Chaos). I don't know how long it was sitting in my tabs, but it was a while. I remember looking it up because a while back I was on a real "Legend of Korra" kick and I saw that, in some manner, it was a crossover with that show (perhaps the only crossover with LoK that I'd seen on the site. It's not a series that lends itself particularly well to crossovers). After having it opened for who knows how long, I finally decided to read it, but not remembering anything about the description other than Korra was included, I clicked on the story title to be taken to its main page to see what else was in it (I remember it was a crossover with more than one series. Usually those don't do well, but it looked popular and it had a sequel, so I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, not that popularity is necessarily a good designation of quality).
I got a message saying the story didn't exist.
Apparently it, along with its sequel, both got removed. Or perhaps the author left or got banned or something. I don't know. What I can tell you is that it STUNNED me because I've had to force quit my browser and reload my tabs several times since opening that tab in the first place. I can only assume it was removed somewhat recently. Or perhaps reloading tabs from a reload screen works differently from just pressing refresh. I dunno, I don't computer well.
I feel really gypped and upset at myself now that I didn't get to read it because I waited on it so long. And now I'm more curious than ever to see what was involved with it. It seemed like something truly massive in scale and I'm bummed that I won't get to experience it now, even if I was skeptical of its quality.
Look at me. I'm mourning a STORY ON THE INTERNET that I hadn't even READ. At 5:30 in the morning no less. I truly am pathetic, aren't I.
Any of you guys know what it was about? Maybe can give me a quick plot summary? Or maybe even downloaded it and can shoot it to me? It's a HUGE stretch, but I'd like to know a little bit more about it, even if it could possibly just make me pine to see it more.
Weirdly, if you search "One Last Game" in the FiMFiction search bar, you'll still get chapter results with little snippets of the text, but if you click on it, you just get the story doesn't exist page. >:P
Anyway... this was an inadequate way to come back after being generally absent for over a month. I've seriously lost any semblance of mojo I ever had and I wanted to actually get something out (preferably the last few chapters of PonyFall) before making my return, but I guess I really just wanted to ask after this one random story that got away >_>
That sucks bro.
Wish I could say I knew anything about the story, but I don't unfortunately.
Hope you're successful in finding out something about it, at least.
I guess if you really want to read it, search for the title on google and click "view cached page." Then, do a cache search to see if you can find the whole story.
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Using the Wayback Machine might be another good way to try and find the story you are looking for.
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I'm a complete moron with the ways of computers and am barely functional on the internet, so I'm not sure how to use these things :P
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Steps on how to use the Wayback Machine:
#0) Open up the page to the Wayback Machine.
#1) Type in the address of the website (fimfiction.net) in the "browse history" bar.
#2) Use the timeline at the top of the page to pick the year in which you think you'll find the story in.
#3) Once you have picked your year, choose a day and month to search. You really have to estimate for this one, unless you know the exact date the story was deleted.
#4) Click on the day. Loading might take a while, because the website has to gather information off of a server that has a lot of old data on websites on it.
#5) At the top section of fimfiction, there should be a bar with a "browse" button. The location of the button depends on which version of fimfiction you are looking at. Click on it.
#6) Scroll through the story list to look for your story. You cannot use filters to single out the story's genre or character, but you can use the compact view to look through more stories in one page. You cannot use the search bar at the top of the page to look for your story, because that is generated by Google search, which cannot be saved by the Wayback Machine.
#6.5) To make the process easier, hold down "Ctrl" on your keyboard and press the "F" key at the same time. That should bring up the search function your internet browser has. Type in/paste the title/keywords of your story. If it is on the page, your browser will highlight it. If not, you will need to go to the next page of stories. Remember, loading pages in the Wayback Machine takes a while. Be patient!
#7) Find story. Be happy.
#8) ???
#9) Profit.
I hope those instructions were sufficient to find your way around the Wayback Machine and to the story you are looking for. Like I said, unless you know the date on which the story was deleted, you may have to shift through tons and tons of stories before you find the right one, which will take longer than you think because loading a page on the Wayback Machine takes AGES (10-20 seconds, depending on your internet speed).
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Wow!
Thanks for the comprehensive directions
I'm sure I'll find the story now, though it'll probably take a while. My internet is particularly bad (sometimes even regular pages can take upwards of 20 seconds to load) so I have no idea how long it'll take to find this story...