How I Hacked Into My Old-Old FanFiction.Net Account

I have been trying to hack my way back to “embryonic writing” account on Fanfiction.Net for the last week or so. Furiously. I suddenly decided it was time to purge the crap from my numerous synonyms. 

Some of the crap I will never take down as it reminds me of where I came from, in a strange way. Even though they are the very definition of “#badfic” I consider some of them – well, one or two of them – cornerstones in my “career” as a “Fandom Bunny”. Plus, I try to give myself dues that I was only… 11 or 12 at the time (yes, too young to have a FF.Net account but I promise everyone was doing it back then) and I had no decent spellchecker. Seriously, I wrote my FIRST fic in flipping Notepad. 

Yet even taking that into consideration there are… limits. Some of the pieces that still lingered on my old page, even after a “Great Purge of 2013″ (the last time I was able to hack into my old account), that I couldn’t bear to be on public view for a second longer and was determined to scrub away. I will hack and slash and bash my keyboard, spamming DELETE with a passion to ensure that no one finds them. Except with Wayback Machine, of course, but what is seen on WBM stays on WBM.

Anyway, on with the story. 

As it turns out, it was ultimately the Wayback Machine that helped me work out a way back into my old FF.Net account….

The issue was that I couldn’t for the life of me remember what my email address at the time was. I tried several versions with several passwords but nothing. A part of me resigned myself to the fact that I would never, ever get into this account to tidy it up and make it a little archive. Maybe move some of my… meh… pieces on the main account to there. It seemed futile.

Then I remembered the Wayback Machine.

I looked up my old account to see whether it had ever been captured and, woo, what do you know? It had. There even one dating back to 2003ish time, the year I had just turned 12-years-old and (*cough* lied about my age *cough*) to open a FF.Net account. Now, back then… I knew that people could just email you and I wondered if I’d be able to work out what the long-since-defunct email was from that.

Didn’t work… but then, after a little more eye-rolling, I realised there was a link to something else on my profile page. An old Hometown website!

Yeah, I had one of those. Anyone here who is an early 2000s kid will remember these things. If you didn’t have a Geocities page filled to the brim with your childish, misspelled nonsense then you probably had a Hometown page. I did. It was horrible. Horrible.

However, I did have a link where people could email me and, lo and behold, I finally was able to see the email address as it once was. I knew that was the one I used on FF.Net… and I was pretty sure I knew the password at this point.

Plonk. I’m in.

I have now officially begun renovations of the place to turn it into an archive and finally proof-read all the fics that aren’t *quite* badfic. I’ve already done one, and even completed a rewrite of it as a new fic. Perhaps in time I will share it…

Though, I will also be careful because if I can use the Wayback Machine, then so can other people. On my pages. In a way, I’ve made peace with it. That ugly load of embarrassing nonsense was written by a hormonal pre-teen who had no access to spellcheck, and she used to be me.

So, I can live with it. Just remember. What is seen on the Wayback Machine, stays on the Wayback Machine. Odds are on those awful badfics, fanpages and candid QAs you fellow Generation Y’ers (AKA Millennials) made are still out there. 

Preserved. 

On Wayback Machine.

Welp.