Vanishing websites

[greerwatson]

About a month ago, my website mysteriously disappeared. Along with all the rest of the Forever Knight Website Archive, including three main FK fic archives, most War archives and faction sites, sundry personal sites saved from GeoCities and Fortune City, and so on and so forth.

My first reaction was to e-mail Stephanie Kellerman, who had been hosting the Website Archive on her site, www.foreverknight.org. The e-mail bounced. I posted to the FORKNI-L mailing list (on which Steph had been active last fall). No response—well, except for concern and sympathy from other FK fans. I then googled and found an obituary.

Whether the Stephanie Kellerman who died is our Steph Kellerman from FK fandom is something I have no way of knowing. That's one of the difficulties with fannish friendships. You may not actually know the person's RL name; and, even if you do, you probably don't have a street address for them. However, the obituary included the usual little bio, which said the deceased knew computers and had four grandchildren—and, although my correspondence with Steph had been mainly about the Website Archive, things did occasionally get mentioned round the edges (so to speak); and it fits.

Anyway, I do plan to put my website up somewhere in the near future on some webhosting service yet to be decided. At the moment, I'm doing some revisions here and there; so it will probably be a few weeks.

When I do, I want to get a large enough site to be able to rehost the other things that have gone. As I did a lot of the collecting and editing of the old GeoCities sites, I have back-ups. I even, in a fit of concern, went page by page through the big fanfic archive copying absolutely everything (I hope!); so that's not lost either.

It'll take time to put everything back up; and, when I do, there'll be a new domain name since Steph's "www.foreverknight.org" has apparently been paid for until 2026, and I'm certainly not going to wait until then! It will all mean an appalling lot of editing in various wikis; but c'est la vie, I suppose, if one finds oneself called to be an archivist.

Comments

[kizzykat]

oh, dear, that's not good news.

Have you considered WordPress?

[queen_ypolita]

Oh, that's not fun and sounds like a lot of work even if you have copies of things for safekeeping

[brightknightie]

Hi!

I feel that I need to point out that many people have been hoping and praying for years for many of those old files to finally go away, especially the list archives.

All those decades ago, when we had no idea what the internet would become, and many of us were just teenagers, many of us said and did foolish things on the internet, and did them with our real names, and regret it bitterly now. Not all of us work in tolerant professions, or live in tolerant places. I have seen people lose job opportunities, and be at risk for being able to live in certain places, because of having their real names searched and connected to old fanfic or email list hijinks. It is not fair; it is real.

Just because someone used his or her real name online decades ago, before we knew better, doesn't mean that he or she wants it to be revived and searchable now, in connection with the kinds of things people said and did in fandom then.

Please, please, please, do not resurrect anything with real names on it. Most especially, please respect that anyone who is using an alias today is doing so for good reasons and does not want that blown apart with direct connections to their real name.

It's one thing to download files for one's own enjoyment. It's another to upload them for the entire world. When we were on the mailing lists all those years ago, we didn't know there would be archives. We didn't know that employers and landlords would judge us.

Thank you.

[yhlee]

Hello - please don't do this. I'm not in this fandom, but I've been in other fandoms under my wallet name, back when we were all younger and more innocent. I am very, very lucky in that most of my fannish activities can be under my wallet name because I am in a profession that tolerates this. (Freelance writer/novelist.) Even then, I took down my fan vids years ago; for career reasons (I've since done work-for-hire writing for Marvel and Disney/Star Wars, among other things) it would be a bad idea for me to have those still publicly circulating.

There are people whose jobs will not tolerate evidence of fannish activities, even the most vanilla kind; probably the majority. There are people who are dealing with stalkers. As brightknightie points out, it's one thing to keep a downloaded copy of some fic (etc.) for personal enjoyment and another to repost them to the public. Unless you have the explicit consent of the specific person whose fanwork(s) you're reposting, I would not do this. The risk of outing/doxxing someone in a way that they can't control is too high.

[morgandawn]

I realize this is a lot of work but thank you for doing this.

One shortcut you might want to use - for those pages that have been backed up already via the Wayback Machine, just create a browsable index and point to the archived versions. Fans did this for a Stargate SG1 archive that went offline. They then used AO3 bookmarking feature to index and tag the stories. You don't have to do anything that labor intensive - just a page with an index would be good.

[switchbladeeyes]

Thanks for doing this. I totally get people's concerns about real names, but being able to pull/anonymize things seems a reasonable solution. I had things pulled from the old fan fiction site in the mid 2000s for reasons already expressed by others (I think I googled myself and realized the issue). That, as far as I know, was respected. (I'm only sorry I didn't keep a copy for myself... maybe not that sorry as I was pretty young so it was probably cringey.)

I stumbled through the wiki onto some still-working links to war archives, which I didn't even know existed, and my name does appear in those though googling doesn't get hits, at least not first page. (Not sure how these things get indexed.) At any rate, it was personally really joyful for me to stumble across that stuff because I had forgotten all about it. So I appreciate trying to preserve the fandom's history and also be responsive to any individualized concerns on specific content.