PSA: That writing prompt generator site I used for two years just deleted my whole archive

I had over 200 saved prompts on PromptForge.com, stuff I built whole short stories around. Last Tuesday I logged in and got a blank dashboard with a message saying my account was purged due to "inactive usage." No warning, no backup option on their end, just gone. I've been scouring my browser history and old emails trying to piece back maybe 15 of them, but the rest are toast. Anyone else get burned by a prompt site pulling something like this without notice?

3 comments

3 Comments

drew_jones311mo ago

You ever try Wayback Machine for the old pages? A buddy of mine lost a bunch of D&D character backstories on a site that just folded overnight, and he was able to pull a few from Google's cache.

wendy8201mo ago

Oh that stings, I can feel it. What gets me is these sites don't think about us writers who use prompts like a toolbox. You could try checking if you ever shared any of those prompts in a forum or social media post, even a quick mention could have the text cached somewhere. Another thing nobody talks about is that some browser history files actually store page content if you viewed it recently enough, not just URLs. It's buried in a folder called "Cache" inside your browser's profile directory, you can open those files with a text editor and search for phrases you remember from your prompts. It won't be pretty but you might find whole chunks of text sitting there. I'd also reach out to PromptForge directly on Twitter or their contact form, sometimes a public complaint gets you a real person who can dig through backups they claim don't exist.

corap211mo ago

Exactly this! I've lost stuff the same way and its INFURIATING. @drew_jones31, Wayback Machine is a good shout but it only works if the pages were publicly crawlable. These generator sites usually block crawlers so your prompts don't get indexed. The browser cache trick wendy820 mentioned has saved me before though you gotta dig through a ton of gibberish files. One thing that works for me is to search your email for any time you might have accidentally clicked "share" or "email this prompt" even if you didn't actually send it. Sometimes those systems autosave a draft to your account or create a backup link in your sent folder even if you canceled. I'd also check if you ever screen shotted anything for social media or saved a prompt to a note app by accident.