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Do you have fanworks with embedded audio or video on AO3? We have information about how the impending death of Adobe's Flash plugin might affect you: http://bit.ly/ao3-flash-eol
4:41 AM · Dec 29, 2020·Twitter Web App

Link to the tweet above

Okay, so! First things first the embedded flash players stop working 12/31/2020 (but they did not work for a lot of browsers already, so it is not such a hard deadline as that).

HOWEVER, part of this article lays out AO3's plans on some partial fixes for the broken code.

In the article, they said "We will in the near future run a process on the AO3 to find works posted using the Dewplayer plugin and automatically convert the relevant HTML to use the <audio> tag."

What might the "near future" mean? Who knows.

For those who used the Dewplayer (AO3's own embedded streaming code) instead of the podfic.com code, this doesn't necessarily mean that your links will start working again as there are two other issues (that I know of).

First the html5 audio tag needs more set up for your hosting than the flash player did. You have to allow the new player permission to reach into your hosting site and bring the audio out (approximately). If it works for you now though, it should work with the updated code.

Second the html audio tag does need the link to the mp3 file to be an "https" url not an "http" url. Basically all urls have the s now automatically but I don't know if when AO3 updates the "relevant code" if it will also include updating the url itself to add that s.

Of course in addition to that, there are still a lot of people that used podfic.com flash player instead of the dewplayer which AO3 won't be updating. And for that I have a thing! It is not a full thing, but it should be helpful.

Last month in preparation for the death of the flash player, I embarked on a project to write a script that will search through all my AO3 works, check for the code that uses the flash player, pull out the actual mp3 link, and put the link in the new html5 code for me to update.

It doesn't actually make the changes for me (which would extremely cool but I think also currently impossible? but if not, hmu bc i want to know). But it does identify exactly which podfics need updating, and formats the code for each streaming player in the work.

so you could then just copy and paste. It still takes a long time to be honest, but it might be especially helpful for people who sometimes used dewplayer and sometimes used podfic.com, because you wouldn't have to click through to check.

The end result is just a txt file with the title of the podfic, the link to the work, and the old and new version of the code, so pretty easy to work with, but the actual script is slightly less so.

It is a python script based off a modified version of alexwlchan's unofficial AO3 api, which is how I pull down the information from AO3 in order to search through it. I wrote out documentation on the code, but it is written for someone who is already familiar with python.

So if you are curious you can view everything on my GitHub

If this is meaningless to you but you still would like to see which works need updating, I have written it so that you can search on a different url than just your own works.

(So what I mean by that is I could potentially generate the report for you if you like, it may just be slow so that I don't stress AO3's server out.)

Honestly I am mostly excited about this code for the ~potential~ so here are some ideas for potential future work:

- Finding all the html audio tag streaming if something is not right with the way it is automatically updated by AO3

- Checking for links that only have "http://" instead of "https://" because it is currently unknown if AO3 will be updating that part of the code, and the audio tag only works with https

- Migrating your hosting to another site. You can search for the old site name and find what posts still need to be changed.

This is cross-posted to my twitter. Or rather, it is cross-posted from there to here since I am locked on twitter.

Uh, let me know what you think!