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

[francescacoppa.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

Re: Cooperation request

[taiyoukai-nile.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Cooperation request

[partly-bouncy.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Cooperation request

[roaringbrute.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Cooperation request

[taiyoukai-nile.livejournal.com]

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