Entry tags:
The Coming Death of Fanfic
This is a more serious post than I normally do, so bear with me.
Yahoo just announced that it will be shutting down GeoCities later this year. Yahoo says that existing sites will stay up for now, but that users should look for new providers. It doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the wind's blowing on this story -- sooner rather than later, all those GeoCities web sites are going to go up in a puff of smoke.
Once GeoCities does go away, so too will vanish thousands of fanfics, mostly ones from the late 1990s and early 2000s, published back before the advent of FFnet and other modern fanfic archives. Now, for every classic Ranma 1/2 or Sailor Moon or Bubblegum Crisis fanfic uploaded to FFnet, there are probably five more that never were -- mostly because their authors vanished from the internet or retired from fandom. When I tried to find HERZ for instance, I didn't find it on the author's website -- that was long gone -- but on an obscure fanfic review archive, buried eight pages down. I never would have found HERZ if I hadn't waded some twenty pages deep into Google search results for it. It was literally the last edition of HERZ left on the internet. Well, the case of HERZ is going to be writ large when GeoCities finally shuts down.
If you remember an old story you like, go out and download a copy before it vanishes forever. I have, for a while now, downloading old fanfics and ripping the odd website. Sure, it's "just" fanfic, and most of it was written for fandoms that have long-since died out or faded away, but when it's going it'll be gone forever.
Pass the word along, please, before a lot of old fanfic is lost.
Yahoo just announced that it will be shutting down GeoCities later this year. Yahoo says that existing sites will stay up for now, but that users should look for new providers. It doesn't take a weatherman to see which way the wind's blowing on this story -- sooner rather than later, all those GeoCities web sites are going to go up in a puff of smoke.
Once GeoCities does go away, so too will vanish thousands of fanfics, mostly ones from the late 1990s and early 2000s, published back before the advent of FFnet and other modern fanfic archives. Now, for every classic Ranma 1/2 or Sailor Moon or Bubblegum Crisis fanfic uploaded to FFnet, there are probably five more that never were -- mostly because their authors vanished from the internet or retired from fandom. When I tried to find HERZ for instance, I didn't find it on the author's website -- that was long gone -- but on an obscure fanfic review archive, buried eight pages down. I never would have found HERZ if I hadn't waded some twenty pages deep into Google search results for it. It was literally the last edition of HERZ left on the internet. Well, the case of HERZ is going to be writ large when GeoCities finally shuts down.
If you remember an old story you like, go out and download a copy before it vanishes forever. I have, for a while now, downloading old fanfics and ripping the odd website. Sure, it's "just" fanfic, and most of it was written for fandoms that have long-since died out or faded away, but when it's going it'll be gone forever.
Pass the word along, please, before a lot of old fanfic is lost.