Regular visitors may have noticed that ASSTR has been down for the last week or so. This appears to be a DNS issue – the site itself is still there if you set up a host file entry to 64.71.155.222.
In case it does go down for good, I’ve taken a mirror of the current content, and set up https://asstr.xyz to host it. I wanted to post here to explain what I’ve done and answer any questions.
**What did I do?**
I set up a hosts file entry so I can access the original content, and scraped everything that’s reachable from the main page. That should be everything under /files (the FTP section) and a lot (but not all – see below) of the Web section.
**What if this is just a temporary outage?**
If the original comes back up, I’ll retire my copy and possibly set up a Cron job to keep an up to date copy available in case we lose it again.
**Why isn’t my favourite collection there?**
There are a number of collections that aren’t reachable simply by following links from the homepage – for example, Kristen’s Collection isn’t linked anywhere. Because my scrape only followed the links from the homepage, it didn’t find these and so they’re not there.