->Arrow

Do people have issues with OTW?

This is a weird and complicated story, but essentially the people who seem to have the biggest problems with OTW have a personal issue against the folks behind the scenes (to the point where they have done fairly unscrupulous things like outing the project coordinators to RL family and employers) or because the OTW project goals coincide with other individual archive/fan history projects. There seems to be a mentality of "but I'm already doing that!" among OTW's detractors and the sense that OTW is poaching on someone else's territory. Which is...well, crap, basically, and scans to me as a bit petty considering fandom in general needs all of the independence, structural and logistic support it can get. But I don't want to get into trouble discussing the specifics of a situation of which I only have the vaguest of understandings. The goals of OTW are worthy ones, and the conduct of the group behind it has been exemplary - very calm, cool and professional. Which cannot be said of its detractors.

Anyway, as to the archiving question, I think it's a great idea - I say, the more off-LJ archives, the better! OTW is a great project and I fully support it, but it can't hurt to make fic available in a wide variety of places, particularly fandom-specific ones.

Your idea of creating a script to automatically pull LJ entries (which authors can continue to edit and update) and channel them into a searchable database sounds great! I don't have any programming ability but I'd like to offer my help and support.