Lost/Deleted Stories
Hey all! I hope I'm not misusing the forum by posting this here, I just created an account after discovering the site recently.
I am a huge Severus/Lily fan and was recently going through my books on ffnet to re-read one of them when I noticed that "Cauldrons and Lillies" by JPena was missing. I tried looking up the story on google and when you click on the link it simply says the story is not found. Does this mean it was deleted by the author? It would be such a shame if it was, I truly enjoyed reading it, it was a great story for the Snape's mind traveling back in time trope. If anyone knows anything regarding this, please do tell.
But that also brought my mind towards another topic, stories which just seemingly disappeared. It could be complete works like Jpena's was or it could be a promising story in progress that just vanished. But what story were you invested in that disappeared and how did you think/ how did you want it to turn out if it was incomplete?
I do have another example, back in 2017ish there was WIP Severus/Lily story called "Twist of Fate" by Valardoheris on AO3 that just disappeared after chapter 18. It was an arranged marriage trope that took place after Snape's Worst Memory and also after Lily and James got together. Needless to say that presented a lot of interesting ideas. But it wasn't just the story, but also the author that disappeared, at least JPena's account is still on site.
Let me know your thoughts and examples, and I am excited to be a part of the community! I've definitely chatted with some of you through reviews/comments on stories before so hello again!
Yeah, it sounds like that author deleted their story. 🫤 Have you tried accessing it on the Wayback Machine?
Quote from Heatherlly on April 13, 2025, 9:45 pmYeah, it sounds like that author deleted their story. 🫤 Have you tried accessing it on the Wayback Machine?
I just tested that out, and Wayback only works for URLs that the site has archived, which I'm guessing has to be done manually by whoever runs the site. I tried the same thing with some YouTube videos I wanted to rewatch but were privated, and I ran into a similar problem.
Nah, site owners have no control over it. The Wayback Machine uses bots to scrape the internet and saves periodic snapshots of different web pages. It works pretty well for public content, but anything that requires content from the current version of the site is much less reliable.
For Youtube, videos aren't static page content like text or HTML. They are embedded, which means that they have to be retrieved directly from YouTube's servers whenever you load the page. Even if the video hasn't been deleted, it goes through real time permission checks. There's no getting around that, unfortunately. 🫤
You guys might not be able to retrieve content that has already been lost, but there are ways to avoid losing other stories/videos in the future. A03 gives you the option to download stories in multiple formats, which you can do with a click of a button. I'd recommend doing that with any and all stories you think you might want to read again.
Videos take a bit more effort, but there are plenty of YouTube downloaders out there. Obviously, it's not worth it to do that for most videos, but for the ones you really care about and would hate to lose? I would absolutely download a backup.
Hey guys!
First off, I am a huge fan of both of you and your works.
Second, I luckily able to get a response from r/DeletedFanfiction, someone has EPUBs of all of JPena's works! I linked it down below, and I just got done binging Cauldrons and Lillies again lol. It was good, not perfect but a good story and goes throughout both wars if you are interested in it.
Oh wow, that's awesome! I'm so glad you were able to get a copy. 💚
