The NSYNC fiction archive has been the home of fiction about the 90s boyband NSYNC since the early 2000’s. It’s really the last fanfic archive standing.
A few a years ago I took it over because the owners at the time put a lot of money into resolving a hack and didn’t want to maintain it. I didn’t want to see it die, so I took it over and have been running it for 3 yrs. It gets a little traffic, is mostly nostalgic, but I am tired.
I pay for hosting and backups. Last year there was a malware issue and I spent $$$ to fix it and now pay for site monitoring. I receive no funds to offset costs.
I don’t know enough about the backend to be useful so I have to hire someone if I need anything done. PhP is an issue any time my host does an upgrade or a change. Overrall, Im tired of babysitting the archive and spending money to keep it going. When I took the site over, I thought efiction was getting an overhaul to make it easier to use— then development died.
I see some activity here (yay) but not a timeline or a path to a new version. I also don’t see any other software we could move to. Feeling stuck- don’t want to let go of all of our history but I’m tired.
I see some activity here (yay) but not a timeline or a path to a new version.
We aim to release eFiction 3.5.7 relatively soon. Had to delay it a bit, as its original release was for December.
There are no new features in 3.5.7, it's just a stability update that adds support for PHP 8. So basically, just modernizing the codebase so it runs on modern servers.
Beyond that, there's no real timeline as of right now. Some rather big personal stuff happened in my life (lost both of my parents in 2022, bought a house, and spent upwards of $30,000 trying to repair the house cause of stuff the old owners didn't disclose and our house inspector didn't notice - like our stairs that literally collapsed just before New Years, with my aunt falling from the second floor into the basement, breaking her ankle)
So yeah, all I can really do is say that yes, we're still in development. No, there's no new ETA for eFiction 3.5.7, other than "soon". I ran into some problems converting the installer so it runs on PHP 8.x. Once that's been fixed, it should *hopefully* be ready to go. Will require some further testing first obviously and then I'll post it live. I already fixed / optimized about 500 lines of code for PHP 8, and removed a ton of deprecated stuff.
I really truly hope you can keep your archive alive. If you need better hosting, we actually sell hosting services as part of DoRoyal. There's a real-time virus scanner too, so it should hopefully mean fewer hacking attempts. Or at least, fewer successful hacking attempts, as we'll remove / clean infected code in real-time.
You can find the link over on our Hosts page.
Oh, forgot to post the article that basically announced 3.5.7.
@NFArchiveAdmin I was about to do the exact same thing.
But I just loaded my installation into an ApacheFrinds installation in developer mode and realized that I only had to make a few changes to keep the archive online at least until the new version is ready. Maybe you can do this to bridge the time. Without this my host costs would have doubled monthly, that would have been way too much for me.
Greetings
Ronny
@grimmbart Thanks for the info. I don't even know what this means. That's how useless I am, LOL>
