About a year ago, Fan History paid for some one to create FanFictionNetBot. The bot created about 490,000 articles when we finished running it. While it was primarily active in March 2008, we occasionally ran it to create articles about FanFiction.Net who had joined after we had created the bot. We last ran it on December 26, 2008 and the last article it created was the one about Ending Howard, a name that now seems fitting.
We’re never going to run the bot again on FanFiction.Net. No new articles will be created. The articles were never intended to be updated. The bot is officially dead. Why? At the time that we created the bot, we were in compliance with FanFiction.Net’s robots.txt policy and their Terms of Service. We only created it and ran it in the first place because we weren’t violating those. FanFiction.Net has since changed their policy to explicitly prohibit this type of activity. Fan History tries to be a good fandom neighbor and violating a site’s Terms of Service would fall into that category.
