otw_news | Reminder: GeoCities Rescue Project: Fanfic Writers, Please Be In Touch!

Reminder: GeoCities Rescue Project: Fanfic Writers, Please Be In Touch!

This is a reminder that the OTW will give Archive beta accounts to people's whose fic will be thrown off GeoCities when it closes at the end of next month! But you have to come and ask! (Please ask!) If you haven't found other hosting options for your own fic, or if you are an archivist or maintainer of a multi-author site, please email Open Doors with your site name and we'll try to hook you up one way or the other.

Meanwhile, some awesome fans are documenting the existence of fannish sites on GeoCities using Fanlore. If you ever wanted to try your hand at using Fanlore, this is a great time to learn: there's loads of sites that need documenting. And if you know any of the people hosted on or running these sites, please please encourage them to request Archive accounts: we don't want to lose the stories!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW Blog.

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I've been working on the Big List (http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tk0itjvE_zCKuSWsJ9c1UHQ) for the last week. There's a depressingly small amount of people (two!) who have returned my emails or posted at Fanlore's Dreamwidth community.

I'm curious: have many people gotten into contact with Open Doors about saving their sites? I'd like to think at least some of the people off the Big List have.

The Dragon Press has actually been hosted elsewhere for a number of years now. It's safe. :)

I'm glad your site is safe. A lot of old Geocities sites are a mess of broken links and dead emails. It's hard to figure out what's been moved, and what's in danger of being lost for good.

I went through the list, and I suspect that 458 is associated with the matching yahoogroup xmenmoviefanfic. the group might be another way to get in touch/spread the word about the project, if you haven't tried that already.

Some sites are affiliated with mailing lists or LJ communities. I'm not comfortable joining any communities just to pimp the Geocities Rescue Project, though. I think that's generally considered rude, no matter how excited I am about the project.

Thanks for the tip, though!

That mailing list is for the other X-Men archive, XMMFF, but

seperis and

tylergrrls are the people who used to be at a few of those email addresses listed in the spreadsheet.

(I wanna say back in the day there were two lists, each with an archive, with similar names, and then they were rolled into one pretty early on, since it made no sense to duplicate.)

239 - I'm pretty sure moved here: http://koffeeklub.net/kj/MAP.html

So so so belatedly, but I did have it in an open tab! *facepalm*

The short version is--we have about 30 people processed through Geocities Rescue, though some of those are archives, so the 1 mod is saving a whole site's worth of stories. And no, there's not a ton of overlap with the big list, but we can't archive fic at OTW without *some* responsible person's permission.

Fanlore, OTOH, can do more; in addition to capping sites and documenting resource pages, you can, I am told, even grab the occasional story if it meets a notability requirement: so if its the subject of an essay, for instance, or if it was widely discussed and is referenced in a discussion that's on Fanlore. If that helps. Other than that, OTW can't do much unless we're asked: we can also host html files also through Open Doors if a responsible person (author/mod/archivist/site maintainer) asks us to!

I had not heard of this at all.

I maintain a 'ship site that's got links/mini reviews of nearly all the Auron/Lulu fanwork out there (a tiny fandom, yesh). I was going to move it to my own server, but until now I've kept smut away from my own website.

Since this is the first I've heard of all this, I solicit advice:

Would it be better to move the Auron/Lulu Shrine (http://www.geocities.com/auronlu/) to OpenDoors or some other more fan-connected place?

I know nuffink about Fanlore, Big List. Guess I'd better investigate, huh?

Edited 2009-09-26 18:08 (UTC)

We are totally a fannish place (!), and in any case, its not either/or. If you like, you can have a beta Archive of Our Own account for your stories (this is for the text) and we can screencap the site and describe it for Fanlore. You have total control over the account there and you can certainly host your stories other places as well. We're hoping the Archive of Our Own will be, like, fandom's deposit library: a place that some folks use as their primary hosting, but that everyone uses as a safe backup where links are stable and preserved etc.

Let me know what you want to do or if I can help.

FC for OTW

I took a look at Fanlore, but I didn't see anything about adding to the documentation. I have a friend who kept an amazing LOTR recs list for over four years, as well as running monthly challenges, Marigold's Recommendations. I haven't been able to get in touch with her for quite some time, and mutual friends have said it is due to a lack of computer access and time on Marigold's part. This was a very important fan site during its heyday, and launched a number of well-known LOTR writers. I would hate to see it lost. Do you need her permission to document the site? Time is running out, and as I said, she is hard to get in touch with right now.

Hi! I'm in no way affiliated with OTW, but I have been working on the Geocities Rescue Project for a little while now. I don't think you need permission to document sites on Fanlore (you can take a few screenshots, and describe the site's contents. Anything beyond that, I believe, would require permission from the site's owner).

You can see how other people are handling sites (often without the owner) over here: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/GeoCities_Rescue_Project.

ETA: I put up a stub for Marigold's Recommendations (http://fanlore.org/wiki/Marigold%27s_Recommendations). Please feel free to flesh out the entry.

Edited 2009-10-01 22:16 (UTC)

Thank you so much! I appreciate it, and will be glad to add information to it once I figure out how!

If you need any help figuring things out, I'd be glad to help. I'm no expert at the wiki, but I have been working on it for a few months now.

Geocities is closing soon. Fan History (http://www.fanhistory.com/) would love to work with you to increase preservation efforts (http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Fanhistory.com:Geocities_preservation_project). If you would be interested, please get in touch with me at laura@fanhistory.com or our admin team at support@fanhistory.com. We would love to see more information preserved and if we work together, we can accomplish more for the good of fandom.

I have been helping to document this for hours and hours... and I really think no matter the feelings in between both sites and the people involved, this should be a group effort. My first website was on Geocities nearly 10 years ago and it was a great place to be hosted for free hosts.

Hope to see OTW team up. The more heads the merrier and definitely would give me relief on my end. I am still angry with Yahoo!s mysterious move to do this and it is a shame to lose such a good service.

We have information for about 5,000 stories (http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Category:Stories_hosted_on_Geocities), about 250 fan fiction archives (http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Category:Fan_fiction_archives_hosted_on_Geocities) and information from over 100 fansites (http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Category:Fansites_on_Geocities). I know that Fan History and the Organization for Transformative Works don't have that much admin overlap in interests so it would be nice if we could mirror (and keep our respective licenses) articles on both so that a broader range of fandoms can be covered. We've mostly been focusing on Harry Potter, anime, X-Files fandom, soap opera fandom, music fandom, terminology pages. I'm not entirely certain where the focus is... but the broader it is, the more support? The better.

At this point, even if we could share say screencaps of sites and try to get a big collection of those, where the look of the sites is saved and we can go back later and mine that information? It would be fantastic so that we have it. I know that there are one or two projects out there trying to save everything but that might not be easily accessible and you're going to loose original date stamps to know when things were last updated, how old sites were, etc.

And yeah, sucks big time what Geocities is doing. On the other hand, if they weren't closing, there would not be the push to document fandom from the early 1990s. Getting that done is fantastic. (The service itself was awesome ofr the time... but at the moment? Kind of crappy. Lots of people already pulled out from Geocities or Geocities closed them. Lots of the important Babylon 5 fansites on it were gone.)

We're still planning on doing some promotion for our preservation efforts and if OTW would be interested in teaming up, we would be happy to promote them as part of our efforts to increase fandom awareness and participation in this project.

I wish personal issues could be set aside to get this sort of thing going. In the end, there is essentially one common goal, and the differences between FH and Fanlore are on other issues, not the preservation of history.

here, here. It would make some of our jobs easier. :)

There are less than 10 days left before Geocities gets shut down. Please contact Fan History ASAP to coordinate your efforts. Its a great public relations move for you, and if the content on Geocities is not archived, content important to fandom history will be lost forever.

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Reminder: GeoCities Rescue Project: Fanfic Writers, Please Be In Touch!

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"Marigold's Recommendations"

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Cooperation request

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