olderthannetfic:

olderthannetfic:

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Excellent!

Honestly, we used to have an age of archives where every big ship or random fandom with a particularly enthusiastic champion had its own little efiction archive. The vast majority of these had no major problems other than the biggest one: what do you do when the mod gets tired, goes broke, or gets run over by a bus unexpectedly? Even now, I’d be more concerned about that kind of problem than about the exact wording of the rules unless it’s dreadful and the person doubles down.

It’s great to see more fans building things lately. I hope they have the stamina to keep their projects going for a bit even if not forever.

I realize I should elaborate a little on the Age of Archives™.

I don’t think there’s a standard name for it, but people who were hanging around the relevant part of fandom at the time often do identify it as a Thing.

Here are some ruminations on the history of fandom archiving for context. Feel free to chime in about other sections of fandom because there are a lot of ways to divide up this history depending on where you were hanging out.

== The 90s to the Early 00s ==

Very, very early in online fic, people started collecting the stuff from Usenet groups into FTP archives. A few of the biggest fandoms started their own things, often first as FTP and later as websites. Think Gossamer for The X-Files or 852 Prospect for The Sentinel. Around this time, a grad student made a fic archive as a test project. And then it was a little more popular than expected. Doh! (That’s Xing Li and Fanfiction.net.)

FFN changed the game because it was now easy to post things yourself in a format that was easier to access later relative to ephemeral Usenet or invite-only mailing lists or personal webshrines where you had to e-mail the host your story and wait for them to add the html formatting and get it up on the site.

But FFN always drew some of the anti-slash asshats. It was always full of tweens and bad writing simply by virtue of being large and easy to find. And it quickly changed policies to be anti explicit fic.

The FFN crowd that stuck around or joined later were happy there, and I remember many instances of people complaining about attempts to “split” fandom or “dilute” things with multiple sites. A lot of this whining is now gone, deleted in the FFN purge of… communities? Boards? Whatever they call their discussion section. But you can find it in older reddit posts from before all the fanfic subreddits were flooded with AO3 love.

== Software to Host Your Own?! ==

Now, even in the early 00s, your average internet denizen was expected to be a lot more technical than a person using apps on their phone, but we still weren’t usually that capable of writing a whole archive code ourselves.

Enter eFiction and Automated Archive.

Automated Archive was apparently first developed for 852 Prospect. I’d forgotten that! It was by astolat (of AO3 fame). As you can see on Fanlore, lots of archives started around 1999-2003 used it. What AA actually is is a free, GNU licensed collection of Perl scripts. It could be used for archives with associated mailing lists too (where people would put Please Archive or Please Don’t Archive codes in their fic posts to the list).

I think a lot of people who weren’t there at the time don’t realize that we used to do a thing where a lot of the serialization and commenting were done on a list, like twitter threadfic, posting first to tumblr, etc. and then the fic was compiled and archived for longevity on an archive site. Newer fans sometimes found fandom through the sites but didn’t read the fine print well enough to find the list (or it was obscured since the list was 18+ and wary of new people). In a lot of eras and parts of fandom, the two-site model of socializing on tumblr and posting fic to AO3 was the norm. LJ was a blip where it wasn’t, but LJ looms large in current fandom memory.

eFiction is the one I usually remember by name because it’s less generic… slightly.

From Fanlore:

“eFiction’s early predecessor, Fanfiction Module 1.0, was a PHP module written for Postnuke by Rebecca in 2002.[5] Though originally created for her own fansites, it was later made available for download via her personal script site on May 12, 2002.[6]”

In 2004, the developer had to give up the project for medical and financial reasons. So familiar! This is the fate of just about every fandom project. They don’t usually go out with the bang of massive fandom wank but with the whimper of chronic pain and job insecurity.

eFiction made it suddenly much easier to start your own archive where people could make accounts and post their own fic. These archives had tags and metadata and a decent search built in. Suddenly a ton of fans started their own little sites for their particular interest.

Check out the list on Fanlore of some of these archives.

Obviously, there were still fans doing their own thing. I think some of the eighty bajillion Tolkien archives were original designs. WWOMB was its own thing, I think? (That’s the predecessor to Squidgeworld.)

But there was this era in the mid 00s around the height of LJ fandom where a lot of that same LJ crowd was starting a new eFiction archive every ten minutes.

== Relevance to the Present ==

The point of all this is that when we were building OTW/AO3, these eFiction and AA archives dotted the landscape.

Part of the idea for AO3 was to have a new package that other people could use to start up their gajillion ship-specific and fandom-specific archives again. AO3 was supposed to be the big, undiscerning clearinghouse for every random thing. Fans could then make their clubhouses that served particular needs well instead of everyone’s needs acceptably.

But online fandom has gotten less techy because the barrier to being online is much lower than in the past. (This is overall a good thing. I’m just saying: you can’t expect the capabilities that were the norm a few decades ago.) AO3’s code was also in no shape for others to use for a long, long time.

At long last, we’re starting to see some fans attempt their own projects using AO3’s code. This feels very familiar if I think about 2005 Clex fans or something. It feels very new and perhaps suspect if you weren’t there.

It sounds like this new femslash archive could be pretty cool, actually, but even if there are some new archives with shitty rules, that’s okay!

In the eFiction days, we had many archives. That’s why I tend to think of it as The Age of Archives. Some had nitpicky rules about shit the mod didn’t like. It didn’t matter because we had lots of them.

I think HP and Tolkien fandoms are particularly instructive. Plenty of their archives weren’t single ship but rather taste profile. Such-and-such a list of things the mods considered acceptably canon were allowed. Or this other archive had the BDSM or whatever. And they tended to be social hubs for that small subset of their huge fandoms.

The big issue is that we need to pay for our new clubhouses.

If an archive has an active userbase of a few hundred people and they’re invested enough to join a patreon for $5/month or some equivalent kind of setup, that works fine. If an archive explodes in popularity and has open account creation, that does not.

Small archives are more similar to a discord server than to AO3 or FFN. They need a core population that cares about the social climate there. They need sane mods who will set boundaries. But the exact content and rules don’t matter as long as enough people are comfortable with both to stick around and make this specific space a big part of their fandom life. You can probably be a big player in a small handful of these, no more.

Maybe we’re entering a new age of archives. That would be nice. But we’ll need to offer up a little more of our own money and time in exchange for more specialized and varied hangout spaces. They inherently require more community investment than one central hub or camping on corporate social media does. And they do tend to disappear when the owner has a health condition flare or loses their job, so just keep that in mind and keep your own backups.