Links to The Way

The Way was originally posted to pastebin by Brian Harner on November 11-12, 2019. As far as I know, Brian's pastebin page went unchanged over the next 13 months, with the exception of a post titled, "My Friends," on August 27 2020.

On December 17 2020, sometime between 3:30PM and 7:00PM EST, pastebin automatically set all those pastes (i.e. posts) which were deemed to contain "sensitive content" to private. This meant that most people were rendered unable to view those pastes. Every single one of Brian's pastes, including "My Friends," was subject to this censorship.

This thoroughness of censorship arrived after 1-2 months of pastebin providing a warning page whenever a link with "sensitive content" was clicked. Initially, by early October 2020, this warning page was applied only to new pastes whose "sensitive content" had been auto-detected. The warning page was not retroactively applied to pre-existing pastes such as Brian's until a few weeks later. Apparently, in mid-December, pastebin decided that merely labeling pages which contained sensitive content was not good enough: they wanted to completely remove them from the view of nearly everyone (a private paste can only be viewed by its owner and other pastebin users who the owner has invited to view the page).

As such, I took it upon myself to preserve the book as much as possible. Upon being informed about the hidden pastes on the evening of December 17, I immediately created a pdf of the full book and uploaded it to archive.org. The following day I posted the book to ghostbin, and gave each chapter its own page just like Brian originally did on pastebin. On the morning of December 20 I posted the book here to kimwrate.com, again giving each chapter its own webpage.

After completing this task, I checked Brian's pastebin page. As of 11:30AM EST, it appears that all of Brian's pastes have been restored, except for chapters 2 and 5. I am not yet certain why, because those two chapters contain no more "sensitive content" than the others. One other change has occurred: there is no longer a warning page when one of the links is clicked. Clicking the links directly links the user to the webpage, meaning that no level of censorship is being implemented for these particular pastes.

The version on ghostbin contains a few proofreading-edits from myself. All other versions of the book are in the original, unchanged form written by Brian.

I will update this page as further developments occur.

-Kimberly Wrate, December 20 2020, 12:40PM

Updates

The links to the book on ghostbin.co were removed from this page on September 8 2021. It appears the website's URL is now ghostbin.com.

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