Urgent! Fortunecity.com free sites deleted

[otw-staff.livejournal.com]

Fanlore is appealing for help in an urgent effort to assist fans affected by the disappearance of free sites on FortuneCity, an early Internet website provider that hosted many personal fanfic websites and small archives due to its free accounts. In conjunction with the more clearly communicated Geocities fadeout a few years ago, this action on Fortunecity's part has meant the loss of another chunk of fannish history.

Fanlore is hosting the website addresses of the now deleted sites. Knowing the addresses to old sites gives fans searching for them a chance to recover and access the content once held there by going through the Wayback Machine.

A Google spreadsheet has been started so that volunteers can "claim a fandom, read the instructions...and pitch in."

Although an email was sent to account holders, many of the addresses tied to those accounts are no longer valid or are no longer frequently used by the maintainers. In addition many fans did not see an announcement banner because it was placed with the site ads, which many users have blocked while visiting the site.

The effort to document the URLs of the missing pages is urgent because they are currently stored by Google, but Google deletes its cached records in a short time if a webpage disappears or changes. This is why many typing fingers are needed, to record those addresses before they disappear from search results.

If you can help, please do the following:

1) Sign up on the Google spreadsheet for particular fandoms. Follow the instructions to record the addresses.
2) Contact Fanlore if you need help with the project, or want to submit addresses but do not have a Fanlore account (use Fanlore's contact page here: http://transformativeworks.org/contact/fanlore%20gardeners and put "FortuneCity help!" in the subject line)

If you are an author or artist whose work was deleted by FortuneCity, we would welcome it on the Archive of Our Own. If you need an invitation to upload your work there, contact AO3 Support via our support form and put "FortuneCity content" in the summary line.

Please do what you can to help rescue these lost works!

Mirrored from an original post on the OTW blog. Find related news by viewing our tag cloud.

Comments

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

I remember similar happenings on various sites; this has been going on as long as I have been on the Internet. Anybody remember GeoCities? I think that a lot of the old X Files & HL slash was on Fortune City so if it's gone, I'm sorry.

[lucyrp.livejournal.com]

Yes, sadly many fannish sites have fallen by the wayside over the years - similar happenings were the motivation for setting up the Archive of Our Own, in fact. We're pleased to be able to save at least some of them - we also did some rescuing of fannish Geocities sites (http://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/collections/geocities-rescue).

[lostandalone22.livejournal.com]

Three of the fandoms that I would be more than willing to help with (Mutant X, seaQuest, and Poltergeist: The Legeacy) aren't listed here. Is it still possible to help with those, because if they're as big of a part of other folks' lives as they are to mine, then they should also be saved.

[otw-staff.livejournal.com]

Hi lostandalone -- click on the link in the post there to contact Fanlore. Anyone who wants to can add fandoms to the list and work on them.

[lostandalone22.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

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