fandomhistoryproject

FANDOM HISTORY RESCUE PROJECT IN THE NEWS

Weekly Summary 02/03/2020, by The Mad Programer at Data Horde. "The 'Save Yahoo Groups' team (aka Yahoo Groups Fandom Rescue Project, aka Yahoo Gedden) hasn't fully tallied up their data yet, but have counted the number of groups they've downloaded so far to be about 84,655 and the number of groups they are still retrieving from to be about 38,000 for a total of 123K groups!" [Dusk's note: We still don't have final figures, but the total estimate has gone up since then.]

FANDOM ARCHIVED

The Geocities Gallery. "A restored visual gallery of the archived Geocities sites, sorted by neighborhood." There's no internal search engine yet, so you'll have to use an external search engine to find the fandom sites, which are scattered throughout this archive. (In Google, you do a search on "site:geocities.restorativland.org" plus some fannish keyword.) See also The Geocities Archive Is Bringing the Early Internet to Life, by Gita Jackson at Vice.

GENERAL

A brief history of Yahoo Groups, by Michael Martinez, writing several years ago. "Do you remember FindMail? Probably not. It was an email list archiving service started in January 1997. FindMail transformed itself into an email list hosting provider called MakeList. By December 1998 MakeList transformed itself into eGroups. eGroups merged with a rival mailing list provider, OneList, in 1999, retaining the name eGroups. Yahoo! bought eGroups in August 2000 and rebranded the service as Yahoo! Groups."

Verizon Is Undermining Efforts To Archive Yahoo Groups . . . For No Coherent Reason, by Karl Bode at Techdirt (back in December). "Under Section 230 Verizon faces no liability for the content shared on the platform, and there's no valid reason for them to be fighting back against archival efforts. Yet here we are."

"I hate to say this but as a fandom elder I speak from very long experience: Save the Fic You Love." A thread of advice at Twitter by K.C. York.

A New History of Fandom Purges, by our member franzeska.

Fandom Flashbacks, a monthly series of rec posts by me of older fandom content that I located while working on our project. Much of this content is no longer online except for being cached at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

Don't Panic, by ao3commentoftheday. "In recent days, there have been a number of posts on tumblr about third party apps that host AO3 fic on them. . . . Here's what I know and what you can do about it." See also the commentary by our moderator morgandawn and more commentary by shinelikethunder (don't skip the tags).