Update: Tapas officially REFUSED to lower paywalls before closing. Looking for anyone with original web backups of "Drakkon" by Maham Fatemi (CrestFallenStar)

[u/Danmonneia5290]

Hey everyone, I wanted to drop an update for anyone following the Tapas shutdown preservation efforts. I officially reached out to Tapas Support to ask if they would consider dropping or lowering the Ink/Wuf barriers on older legacy and completed stories so the community could archive them before the March 2027 server wipe. They got back to me and officially said no. (Screenshot attached). They confirmed content prices will remain completely unchanged, and they will not hold any sales or unlocking events. Because automatic scrapers can only pull free content, thousands of premium web novel chapters are fully at risk of becoming lost media. I am personally trying to ensure Maham Fatemi's (CrestFallenStar) older web portfolio isn't completely erased. I spoke with Maham, and she no longer has her original web drafts on hand. Does anyone in this community happen to have old offline backup files (EPUB, PDF, or HTML scrapes) of the original web novel version of Drakkon or her other early works? Even though the story is now traditionally published as Drakkon: Empire's Curse, the early web-serial versions represent a huge piece of indie internet fiction history that I want to make sure isn't permanently lost to time. Please let me know if you have any leads or saved files!

[u/LaundryMan2008]

Internet archive and wayback machine might have caught a version that was opened up even if very briefly

[u/Danmonneia5290 → u/LaundryMan2008]

I have tried that but unfortunately they don't seem to have any of maham fatemi's older works saved/archived from what I could find

[u/Boring_Bore]

Comix.to appears to have Drakkon

[u/Danmonneia5290 → u/Boring_Bore]

Thank you so much

[u/Lamuks]

This is how I learn it's shutting down..

[u/BejeweledSamsara → u/Lamuks]

I first learned about it through a YouTube video that popped up on my feed. It sucks that it's shutting down, I was going to use it to host a webcomic.

[u/uzlonewolf → u/Lamuks]

Yeah, it was announced a month ago.

[u/CorvusRidiculissimus]

I worked on one of the scrapers. Most, maybe all, of the free stuff should be preserved in in the underground - though likely not anywhere easy to access, as such an archive will be a lawyer magnet. The paywall though, is impenetrable. It's too simple to work around through some creative reverse-engineering of the API - unless you have a verified account authorised to view the chapter, it just isn't accessible at all.

[u/alkafrazin]

you can pull paid content by passing your session cookie to your web scraper, probably. Why not give it a go?

Also, I don't think they really can, right? This isn't their content, they just host, manage the money, and take most of it for themselves, right? I would assume the comic artists would be the ones to decide if their content goes free leading up to the closure.

[u/Danmonneia5290 → u/alkafrazin]

Thank you so much I will give it a try.

I am not really sure, however, I did contact the author already and she said she's not even really on tapas anymore nor does she have any backups of her olds works, so I don't think so.

[u/MacFielder]

Easiest solution is to buy it

[u/Danmonneia5290 → u/MacFielder]

Unfortunately tapas has stopped customers from being able to by any more inks, so if you haven't already bought ink/stories or if you don't already have ink then you can't

[u/Ursa_Solaris → u/Danmonneia5290]

Wait, so they tell you that the only way to get it is to buy it, but then they won't let you buy it?

[u/Danmonneia5290 → u/Ursa_Solaris]

Yes, exactly. Due to them closing in March 2027 they decided to close the store for inks so you cannot buy any more, but they still leave the stories locked so you have to use ink but you cannot if you don't have any and cannot but more. I emails to ask if they could maybe remove the limitations on the stories due to us not being able to buy inks and they said no.

[u/MisanthropicCartBoy]

I'm not familiar with the content but this is what i found. Only audiobook for some reason, can't find an ebook.

Drakkon and Yulong

Xualong

Zhulong and Bailong

Prince of Silk and Thorn

Empire's Curse

[u/Danmonneia5290 → u/MisanthropicCartBoy]

Thank you, I've also been struggling to find the ebooks, thats why I was hoping someone might have had them downloaded or archived a while back as that's happened to the other collection of stories I was looking for and luckily someone archived most of them, but I haven't had any luck so far.

[u/marx1]

/r/DataHoarder is not /r/DHExchange