3052907

That is what I was afraid of. I guess I'll need to start archiving the Archive.

3050756

At the moment stories are only deleted when an author requests it.

Feel free to send me a private message if you want me to take a look!

I recently had a need to look in the archive for a deleted story. In the most recent version the author doesn't exist at all. In an earlier copy they, and the story, do. I'm curious what caused this. Glitches as the archive has evolved, some policy decision to prune deleted accounts, or?

3036482

It's purely limited to slapping someone

That's correct. I have a bit of a moderation responsibility here.

I'm sorry for doing it in a bad manner. It was intended to be a poke, not a slap.

3036275
The way things are, I have no idea where their understanding of the internet diverges from mine. The first response would be to go on a thorough explanation of the half-century history of the internet and the various communications technologies and file sharing methods employed throughout the decades. This explanation would need to include hacking history including how some people played a certain audio tone with a tape recorder into a payphone to get free long-distance calls and histories on file sharing, and copyright law through the centuries and recent history. There are also many different file-sharing protocols in play.

While this would no doubt be a fascinating read, it would take hours or days to write. It would also probably overlap about 80% with what they knew. I think that doing that, which is the obvious thing to do that makes the most sense if I did not seek further clarification, would be unreasonable. That's why seeking further clarification over how they could have that gap in their knowledge was important. It saves massive amounts of time and research on my end, and saves reading time on their end. It also shortens my comments to something that would fit into this comment field as opposed to requiring a small book to publish.

Just talking about network traffic, peer swarms, and error checking could be more confusing than helpful. It all depends on what their prior knowledge is.

Torrents are not niche. They are the primary way of sending files across to people. Direct downloads, especially for large files, serving a large userbase, or for a userbase that might have spotty internet connections, are a fairly difficult and costly thing to do. Torrents do not require significant amounts of dedicated storage space on a hard drive to use, unlike some of the modern peer-to-peer filesharing protocols. If you, as an internet user, are in the habit of downloading files from 10mb up to several gigabytes (or a few dozen or hundred gigabytes if you're trying to mirror a database for data preservation), then you'll be well acquainted with torrents. If your internet use is limited to browsing social media and streaming platforms, then it's possible that the idea of downloading stuff for stable storage might not have occurred to you. You've got to watch a few libraries burn down before you start to think of things like fire safes.

Torrents are not primarily about pirating things. I'm working on a small project to work on my phone, and the alternate operating system images are distributed via torrents. Torrents are also the main way I download the copies of games I've bought from the various Humble Bundles over the years, since it cuts down on distribution costs. Torrents are also the preferred option for distributing large packages of fan-made content and non-commercial works, when large hosting sites aren't available. They're also still the most reliable way Linux distributions are distributed for experimentation. The various Internet Archive sites also offer torrent downloads for the various public domain media they have. Again, this is to offset server costs.

I said the equivalent of "please don't be offended. I'm asking a question, not being a jackass" several times in that comment. I believe I was being very accommodating. If you consider what I did to be an offense because I wasn't taking feelings into account properly, then you are every bit as guilty of your own crime. You have locked yourself into a logical trap here, since your post does not have the element of trying to get information to better help someone as a fundamental reason. It's purely limited to slapping someone for trying to honestly connect with a different person when that person has gone out of their way to cover every surface in their question with emotional bubble-wrap. If their feelings matter, and I have transgressed, then my feelings matter in just as much of a potentially oversensitive way, and you have transgressed in the same way. If the priority is establishing facts and history to facilitate clear understanding, then your comment is unnecessary.

I hope I've been thorough enough to get across where I'm coming from.

3035887

Even if you didn't mean to, that still sounded pretty condescending to me. Just explaining what BitTorrent actually is would have been more helpful.

imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png

Torrents are a very niche thing in this day and age. The fewer reasons there are to pirate things, the less common they become. BitTorrent is still awesome and incredibly effective, but it's been a long time since it was mainstream.

3035887
Because I've never used them. That I know of, anyway.

3034361
I don't mean this in a judgmental way, but I am genuinely curious: How does one somehow remain ignorant of how torrent files work in the modern day? I could almost understand not knowing this back when it was 15-ish years ago, you might have been a kid, and it was a brand new protocol, but "transferring large amounts of data in a stable download that can be paused and resumed" seems like a part of internet usage that everyone would have learned about. Before this, I was using dial-up and frequently had broken downloads when I tried to grab things like game installers for Ragnarok Online.

This idea is a genuine mystery to me, on par with meeting an adult who doesn't know how to tie their shoes. I'm not angry, upset, or meaning to be judgmental, I am just baffled at how something like this can happen in a person's life.

I noticed that you called it a torrent. Do I need any particular software to download it properly?
Wait. Never mind. I'm an idiot. I somehow missed the link directly below that. Sorry.

3028822

In the giant ZIP-file mentioned in the blog post above!

How does this work? Where are the stories?

3022930
Oh don't even know he had a patron

3022929
I don't know, it's paywalled.

3022897
The pony version or the new version?

3022895
Yes there were loads more but thank you you are probably one on the last people with a copy

3022894
Mystery solved!
Vongoalyken has removed his fimfiction account and paywalled his story on patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/StarEaterVon/
The story is up to chapter 128 as of 25/03/2021

...he's done a very poor job of advertising it though. The story has been scrubbed from most sites I looked at.
The story was moved to Patreon on 30/09/2020 and it costs $7 to access even the first chapter. This seems like a very strange decision since how would any new readers find him and realise they wanted to read the read the story?

3022894
Nevermind, this site has Star Eater up to chapter 88.
[Link Redacted]

3022894
I just happened to have the file on my e-reader - up to date as of 16/09/2018.
Not sure if there were any chapters since then.