greerwatson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greerwatson) wrote2023-04-18 01:23 am
greerwatson) wrote2023-04-18 01:23 am
Entry tags:
Vanishing websites
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.
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.
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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
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That was when it was pointed out that much of what would be lost would not be personal sites but ones associated with the fandom more generally, specifically the War sites and faction sites. That was when Steph stepped up to offer space in her website; and I took months collecting sites and sending them to her. The War sites, though they had been created by (usually) the warleader of the day, were basically RPG logs with some ancillary material; and as many as 400 people might have taken part in each game. The Wars were a big part of FK fandom culture: no one on list demurred at our saving them.
As for the faction sites, we contacted faction leaders (or someone in the faction who'd step up to that role) and made any changes they wanted. I recall the NatPack wanted to have some pages of photos removed as well as a birthday list; and, of course, we did that.
We tried to contact as many owners of personal sites as possible; and no one ever refused us permission to include their site in the archive. We did sometimes edit someone's name or remove personal stuff. On the other hand, there were people who basically just said, "Oh, that old thing! You can do what you like with it!" And others expressed their gratitude, since (like the others on list) they'd not been able to save their sites using Yahoo's instructions.
All archived sites were reported to the list, along with their new URLs. This is not just some private endeavour of Steph's and mine. Every step of the way we discussed what we were doing with the members of the FORKNI-L list. The general reaction was relief that someone was stepping up to save the fandom's history.