AO3 News

What Makes the Desert Beautiful is Moving to the AO3

Post Header

Published:
2023-03-11 16:26:42 UTC
Translations:
Tags:

What Makes The Desert Beautiful banner

What Makes the Desert Beautiful (nickandgreg.net), a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

Background explanation

The Nick and Greg archive What Makes The Desert Beautiful (WMTDB) is an archive for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fanfiction focused on the Nick and Greg slash pairing, active from 2004 to 2017, founded by CarolineCrane and moderated by BeeLikeJ.

What Makes the Desert Beautiful was built with an old fashioned eFiction script. Keeping the website running is no longer maintainable because of the outdated system and security issues. To ensure safekeeping of all fanfics, the WMTDB moderator has decided to move them to AO3.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with BeeLikeJ to import What Makes the Desert Beautiful into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. Eventually links to the old site will redirect to the collection on AO3, which can be searched and filtered in order to locate individual imported works.

We will begin importing works from What Makes the Desert Beautiful to the AO3 after March 2023.

What does this mean for creators who have work(s) on What Makes the Desert Beautiful?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will invite it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors. We will then permanently close down the site.

Please contact Open Doors with your What Makes the Desert Beautiful (nickandgreg.net) pseud(s) and email address(es), if:

  1. You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
  2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
  3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
  4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3.
  5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
  6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your What Makes the Desert Beautiful account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the What Makes the Desert Beautiful mod to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of What Makes the Desert Beautiful on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We're excited to be able to help preserve What Makes the Desert Beautiful!

- The Open Doors team and BeeLikeJ