2024-12-25

The ASSTR-Mirror site is a work in progress. I highly missed ASSTR when it went down, and I greatly appreciated whoever did ASSTR.xyz for a couple years, but it looks like it is down for good also. Recently, I found myself in a position where I had a little bit of extra money to purchase a domain and a couple bits of hardware to upgrade an old PC for hosting the site, and some time off work recuperating from minor surgery and needing something to do to occupy my time and distract my thoughts. I'm not going in to this because I want to be the one to take on this responsibility, but because I haven't seen anyone else pick up the mantle and I don't want hundreds of thousands of stories covering decades to disappear from the internet.

I have pulled copies of pieces of ASSTR from multiple locations and have been stitching them together as much as possible without access to the original source or servers. It's a slow process since there are tens of thousands of broken links. Some links are repairable, and that is what I've been working on over the past several weeks. Unfortunately, some links are not repairable because I haven't been able to find copies of what they are pointing to. I'm getting thousands of links fixed each day, but with over a half-million total pages to go through to look and fix broken links, it's going to take quite a while. The broken links are greatly affecting Google search results, so fixing links is my biggest priority at the moment. It looks like Google is crawling the site about once every three days, and so far it's went from 7.5K to 16.7K to 20.7K to 31.8K pages indexed over the past two weeks. Even with 31.8K indexed in their searches, that's still only about 5% of the total pages on the site.

I am not a web designer, but I do have some background in programming from decades ago. As part of all of this, I've had to teach myself how to set up a web server, some basics of HTML, PHP, Java, and so on. Not enough to be fancy, but enough to understand how the original site's pages worked in order make it functional. I also had to figure out some type of workaround for searching (since I don't have the skills to build a search engine myself and can't afford to purchase one at this point). That's why progress on getting everything working is taking so long.

I am currently working on fixing bad links, finding missing pages to repopulate, and rewriting some code on pages that's outdated. After all the links and functionality issues are taken care of (at least as much as possible), I would like to be able to open the FTP back up for authors to start submitting again. That'll be a whole other learning experience, since I've never set up an FTP for multiple users to be able to access discrete locations before. Long-term, I want to get an SSL certificate for the site, but that's going to be a couple hundred dollars because the original site was put together using multiple subdomains so a wildcard SSL is the most economically feasible way to go in order to cover all the subdomains. Depending on the amount of traffic that the site gets (currently only a couple hundred visits per day), I may also have to look at moving it to a hosting provider instead of an old PC sitting in the corner of my home office.

So, all of that said, please excuse any errors you may encounter while things are being worked on, and I thank you for your patience and for visiting the site.