When a platform shuts down, where is your story?

You write or translate web novels, and every chapter lives on one big platform. One day that platform announces it is shutting down, and the first question is not "where do I go next" but: where is my original copy?

This is not hypothetical. On 24 October an author posted on r/WebNovels under the title “Tapas is to shut down. Where to go next?”. According to the author's opening post, they were working on their story and planned to post it on Tapas once editing was done, then realised that day that the service is ending, and asked the community where to go.

One caveat before you read on: this post relies only on what the thread says. We are not quoting an official Tapas announcement, and we say nothing about timing or about how the platform will handle users' data. If you use Tapas, read the platform's own notice. The rest of this post is about a general risk, not about any one site.

Each role is locked in somewhere different

Every platform holds something for you. What sits where depends on the site, but by role the question is similar:

• Writers: the published chapters, drafts, worldbuilding notes and the edits over time. If your only canonical copy is the posted page, the platform is holding your canonical copy.
• Translators: the raw you pasted, the translation per chapter, and the easiest thing to forget, the name and term list: what characters call each other, how a technique was rendered. Lose it and, even with the translation intact, whoever continues has a hard time matching it.
• Readers: your reading list, where you stopped, your saved series. Nobody calls that "data" until they have to remember how far they got.

What these have in common: being locked in to one place does not begin on shutdown day. It begins months earlier, when everything convenient was saved in one spot and you had no second copy.

What to do: keep your own copy outside the platform

No complicated tooling. A habit.

1. Keep the originals outside the platform. One text file per chapter in your own folder, not just the posted version. For translators: keep the raw you are allowed to use.
2. Keep your translations. The edited version, plus drafts if you may want to revisit a decision.
3. Keep your own glossary. Character names, terms, forms of address per character pair. A plain spreadsheet file is enough.
4. Export on a schedule. Don't wait for an announcement. Pick a rhythm (end of each week, or after each arc) and export what changed.
5. Open the export. A copy you have never opened is not a copy you know you can read. Open one chapter outside the platform and check the text is all there.
6. Readers: note somewhere of your own the title, author, the chapter you are on and where you read it. Five minutes now and then is enough.

A tidy folder layout for one series:

series-name/
  raw/            # source chapters you may use
  translation/    # edited chapters, one file each
  glossary.csv    # names, terms, forms of address
  exports/        # dated exports: 2026-10-26/

What 2novel is, and what it is not

2novel is a workspace for translating and editing chapter by chapter. For this topic, what is relevant and true today:

• It has a Book Bible that keeps names, terms and forms of address for a whole series (depending on plan).
• The AI translation is a draft: you read it, compare it with the source and fix it.
• You can export to DOCX, PDF or TXT, single chapters or a whole book. There is no EPUB.

And what 2novel does not do:

• It is not a publishing platform. You can enable a bilingual reading link so others can read without an account, but that is a link you send yourself, not a place where readers find your story.
• It does not find or recommend stories. It only works with text you give it, and you need the right to use that text.
• It does not replace a publishing platform. If you need somewhere to post chapters and have readers, you still have to choose one.

So don't read this as "move to 2novel". It sits at a different layer: where you work on the text and keep your own files. An export is a file on your machine, which does not depend on whether any platform is still open.

One next step

Tonight, create the folder above for one series you are working on, copy in the latest chapter and your glossary, and open the file. If you use 2novel, export a chapter to DOCX, PDF or TXT and open it outside the workspace. Guide: translate your first chapter.

As for "where should I post next", the r/WebNovels thread is where the community is discussing it. That choice is yours, based on the readers you want to reach.