Most people keep collections as bookmarks or saved links, and most of those collections are broken within two years. The fix takes about ten seconds per entry and is entirely low-tech.

Why links are the worst record

A link points at a position in somebody else's database, on a domain they control, using an identifier they can reuse. All three of those can change without notice.

In this field they change unusually often, because domains churn under registrar, payment, and hosting pressure — the pattern described in our piece on why sites keep moving.

Worse, links fail silently. A reused identifier resolves to something unrelated, so a broken bookmark often looks like a working one until you open it.

Browser sync makes people feel safer than they are. Bookmarks copy between devices reliably, which is a completely different problem from the one that actually kills them. A perfectly synced list of dead links is still a dead list.

The six fields that survive

Title as published, artist or circle, year, format, language or edition, and tags. That's a complete record and it doesn't depend on anything staying online.

Artist is the one to keep if you keep only one. Names travel across sites, translations, and years in a way identifiers never do — the reasoning in our piece on metadata.

The field that keeps a collection small

Add a one-line note: why you kept it. Not a review — a sentence about what it did well or what you wanted to come back to.

Two things happen. First, the collection becomes rereadable, because you can scan the notes instead of opening everything. Second, you stop saving things reflexively, since writing a reason forces a small judgement at the point of saving.

Most people who add this field discover half their existing list has no reason behind it, which is a useful thing to learn.

It changes the shape of a collection over time as well. Lists built with reasons tend to stay in the low hundreds and get revisited; lists built without them grow into the thousands and get opened once a year, briefly, before being closed again.

Where to keep it

Plain text, a notes app, or a spreadsheet — anything that exports and doesn't live inside a single service. The whole problem you're solving is dependence on somebody else's infrastructure, and a record stored inside another platform inherits exactly the same weakness.

Sort by artist rather than by date. It turns a list into something you'll actually browse, and it surfaces the fact that most collections are built around a small number of names.

Back it up the way you would back up anything else, which is to say somewhere other than the device it lives on. A collection record is small enough that this costs nothing and complete enough that losing it means starting over.

If you keep files as well as records, note where they came from and in what generation, since re-encoded copies degrade — the quality problem in our piece on free streaming.

What a collection doesn't change

Keeping a record is not a substitute for where material came from. Sites that strip credit, skip age verification, and host unreviewed uploads are the same regardless of how well you catalogue what you found there.

The floor applies throughout: characters fictional and unmistakably adult, no ambiguity about age, no real-person sexual depiction, no coercion presented as romance. Our standards are in the control room, and connected creation with real account, credit, and moderation controls stays on models.

A record that outlives the sites it came from

Six fields, one note, stored somewhere plain, sorted by artist. That's the whole system, and it takes less time per entry than saving a bookmark and finding it again later.

Because nothing institutional preserves this material — no library, no registry, no publisher back catalogue — readers are the archive by default. A record like this is the smallest possible version of taking that seriously.