The website SeriesSeeker.com was created in 2021 by SeriesSeeker and Hope4TTRPGs. Between 2021 and 2025, metadata for over 500 APs was crowdsourced with detailed, structured descriptions, making this the largest catalogue of APs in the world (as far as I'm aware). While this was made as a discovery portals for fans of the medium, it also represents an important piece of documentation -- a snapshot of an art medium at a specific time.
In April 2026, the domain expired and was scooped by a domain parker -- basically a bot that grabs expired domains in hopes of selling them back to the original owner at a premium. Right now, the site links to various scams or shopping locations, and the original website is unavailable.
On May 14, 2015, I (Anne Monteverdi) saw a post from Ciera "Panda" noting that the site was down. I found a snapshot of it on the Wayback Machine, but all the buttons were broken and the actual data was inaccessible. There was no contact information listed to the creators, except for an Instagram account that hadn't been updated since 2022, and a Twitter account that hasn't been updated since 2023. The only other name on the site is Hope4TTRPGs, whose social media is similarly outdated. I posted on bluesky, asking if anyone knew the people behind the site, but no luck. I messaged all the accounts I could, hoping that maybe only the domain had expired by the hosting service was still up and the data could be retrieved.
In the mean time, I anxiously poked around the Wayback Machine, and noticed the Site Map function I'd never noticed before. EXCITING DISCOVERY! I'd assumed the data was locked in the backend, but the way this site was built, it actually created an HTML webpage for each entry.
I found this downloader on Github, which would allow me to download an entire site from the Wayback Machine -- including all 547 HTML files, representing the data.
I went through the files, spot checking to completion and accuracy, and found that by and large, the data was accurate. But the files were full of HTML garbage, dead javascripts, navigation headers and other mess. And a lot of that mess is copyright -- headers, page design, copy etc are all the intellectual property of the original creator (it hasn't been long enough to call this an "orphaned work"). Worst of all, the data wasn't coded as data -- just text, floating in divs. SO even though it looked structured on the page, in the code it might as well have been a paragraph. I knew there must be a way to re-structure the data, but I'd hit the ceiling on my meager scripting ability.
I reached out on bsky asking if any coders could help me out, and Jayme Howard came to the rescue! He parsed the HTML into JSON, removing all the copyright material and leaving just the crowd-sourced data. You can see the full dataset.
I spent a bunch of the next evening smooshing together some javascript to make this site to people to quickly search the JSON. The results appear as JSON, not clean text: I'm sure that's an easy enough fix but I'm not a developer. Also, the data isn't perfect: some categories have been merged because of how the results were shown on the pages. I'm sure it's possible to refine the data and parse it better, but at least we have it!
As far as I'm concerned, this data was crowd-sourced and is therefore crowd owned. If anyone wants to continue the work or pickup where SeriesSeeker left off, I think that's great. I'm still hoping they get back to me (it's only been a couple days), but even if they don't, we may have lost the site but we haven't lost the building blocks we'd need to rebuild, and we haven't lost the historical record.
Cheers,
Anne
annethegnome@gmail.com
AnneTheGnome on bsky