They just posted this an hour ago, 12.03.18. just in case anybody is interested.
With the new update to Tumblr’s community guidelines announcing that they will no longer permit adult content on their site, we’d like to take a moment to reassure all y'all that we have your backs. With a very few exceptions (such as spam and the like), if it’s legal under US law, it’s okay to post here. We’re 100% user-supported, with no advertisers and no venture capitalists to please, and that means we’re here for you, not for shady conglomerates that buy up your data and use it in nefarious ways.
Tumblr’s definition of “adult content” seems to be inherently visual, and I also wanted to remind people that we do have basic image hosting. (It’s definitely not as slick and easy to use as Tumblr’s, I won’t lie, but it does exist.) If you want to include images in your posts, you can upload them and the site will give you HTML that you can paste into your entry. Or, if you have post-by-email set up, just attach the image to the end of your email and it’ll be posted. All users have a 500MB image hosting quota right now. I know that’s small for people looking for a place to host NSFW image blogs, but we are reviewing usage statistics to see if we can increase it, or at least make it possible for people to pay for more quota like you can for more icons.
Holy shit!
Wow, that’s some great service right there! Why the fuck did no one go there to begin with in the first place?
I’m thinking the limited pic sharing space and the more closed atmosphere of it. Personally, I prefer the format way more than that on Tumblr. I never really liked how this site was set up after being an LJ user. I prefer the journal based way of sharing but I know a lot of people would miss reblogging abilities.
Pillowfort has that…like, you get the journal but you can reblog from.main into other comms…or make a post to go into that comm only that’s off main. I got used to the reblogs here. I dunno that I can go back to copypasta x-posting 😂
Believe me, we tried to make fetch happen. We really did. But by the time DW was up and running and pretty good as a site, LJ fandom was splintering. Everyone said “wait and see” for long enough that the drive to make DW active just wasn’t there.
Many people desperately clung to LJ. They felt attacked by all of the attempts to make them go to DW or the other options. They felt abandoned by the people who jumped ship before they really had to. They wanted to stick it out and either try to deal with the new policies or make petitions and see if they could get LJ back on track.
Other people favored a different journal clone. Greatest Journal and Insane Journal were both popular with groups of fans at various times. The set of people who wanted to leave LJ but specifically wanted a LJ-like experience was divided, making each of these other hubs less active. Some people had already tried to leave LJ before the mass migrations, but they ended up in empty communities while the real action was still, for a while, back on LJ.
By the end of LJ, it had some features that weren’t available at the clones. Many people also had lifetime accounts they’d paid a bunch of money for. It wasn’t just the money either: having an account type that’s only rarely for sale marks someone as a long-time user. That social cachet goes away if you switch sites. The new sites didn’t have the entrenched communities or homey feel of LJ for people who’d been comfortable there for a decade.
By the time we all finished milling around, yelling at each other for picking the wrong journal-ish option, Tumblr had developed big fandom communities. New fandoms were active here, so here we came. Some people who like text and don’t like too many images staid behind. When I went and looked at my old DW, there they were, still posting regularly. Some people left fandom entirely. Some people went elsewhere and are now invisible to me.
Fans will use any site, no matter how shitty and lacking in features, if that’s where the rest of the fandom is hanging out.
I still belong to a couple of active yahoo groups.
But the biggest factor is that, back then, DW had no track record. We didn’t know that GJ would be gone or IJ inactive or that DW would still be living up to its promises a decade later. It sounded good but was unproven, just like Pillowfort now. LJ was hard to leave, just like Tumblr is now.
The sites themselves are different, but the social and emotional forces at work were exactly like what’s happening on Tumblr now:
“Well, I haven’t been deleted and my friends are here, so I’m staying.”
“That other site is weird and has weird features!”
“Let’s start a petition! They’ll have to listen if we get enough people!”
In the midst of all the purging panic, I was alerted to a very important issue. It was a very real possibility that @spockslash, the blog of our late fandom grandma would be lost to us forever. So I archived the blog, every post. As it was today (12/3/18).
Thank you to @not-freya for submitting submitted every link to the WBM. Did you submit the sideblogs as well?
As an FYI, the WayBack Machine will only back up a portion of blogs. Caveats below.
1. The WBM crawls randomly so you cannot be certain it will reach any one blog, let alone sideblogs.
2. You can “save” a blog by submitting the URL to the WBM* ….BUT….
3. If you have set your blog to endless scroll, it can only back up the first entries (it will appear to back up as you scroll down but that is only because the blog is still “live”. As soon as the blog disappears, only the first few entries are store)
4. You can get around this by remove the endless scroll in the settings…BUT….
b. or submit each individual blog page to the WBM like @not-freyja did.
6. WARNING!!!! The WBM will also not backup images embedded. Or video. Or audio.
7. Some flagged content is now blocked on Tumblr display pages so if the WBM cannot see it it will not be able to back-it up.
tl;dr: I’ve contacted her family and they will be looking into ways to backup Fandom Grandma’s blogs. But don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of other blogs……if you love a blog, try contacting the fan directly and offer help.
Even though this blog is obviously NOT nsfw, I think the upcoming Tumblr Purge is probably the end for this form of the Tower blog, for two reasons.
The first is that the purge also killed links so that they no longer show up in tags. I put all of my major posts on the blogspot (a-land-of-shadow-and-substance.blogspot.com) and mainly used this page to promote those posts and provide an easier “table of contents” to navigate them. Since links no longer show up, my posts are no longer seen in searches and thus get very few views or feedback. Linking to the post on Tumblr no longer provides any more views than if I had posted on blogspot alone.
The second is the mass fandom migration the purge is likely to create. Fandom generally goes where it has the greatest freedom of expression, without fear of accidental wrongful deletion if something gets flagged wrong. Even if links worked here, I’d be only reaching a fraction of the readers I could have before.
I have no idea what other social media platforms I could move to. Tumblr was somewhat unique in that its reblog feature could spread my posts farther and get more readers, and that it also had a social aspect that allowed feedback,discussion, and suggestions in a way that generated even more content. I’m honestly not sure what other platforms currently around could function in remotely the same way. Facebook seems non-fandom-oriented, while Twitter seems too short-format. Ao3 is apparently for fan-fictional content only and I’m not sure if my documentary-style approach would be within their lines. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know!
To be clear, I’m NOT going to delete this blog. If it disappears, that’s staff’s fault. Even if I don’t use this anymore, I’ll at least keep it around as an archive of sorts, even if I move to another platform. I’ll stick around a bit to answer messages too.
Otherwise, as always, I’ll be at a-land-of-shadow-and-substance.blogspot.com
In which he reads slash and gets upset about zippers.
The first timeI ever spoke to Gene was in late September 1966, just weeks after Star Trek came on the air.
Remember your Star Trek history: he was not a Big Name or a Famous Person in the fall of 1966. At that point he was happy to talk with anyone who could string some intelligent sentences together and showed an interest in Star Trek. He really was accessible to pretty much anyone who asked for an interview, even for a science fiction club newsletter – which is what I was writing the first time I talked to him.
That first impression of a guy who was eager – eager – to chat at length on the phone about his show stayed with me, probably long after it should have. Star Trek caught on, then of course in the 70s the fandom grew and grew, but in my head Gene remained this friendly, easy-going guy you wouldn’t hesitate to approach and chat with.
Through the 70s he remained accessible to fans and interested in fan input. It’s said he was controlling in the work place, but was never that way
with the fans (in my experience). He would ask, “What do YOU think?”
then sit in that way he did, leaning forward and listening intently and
grinning at your eagerness and strong opinions over his creation.
As for sending Gene a slash story… At some point he said to me – as he said to many, many, many people in the early days – “Send me your work when it comes out.” What can I say? I was a dork. I took him at his word and mailed my work to his office, regularly, whenever I produced something. I highly doubt he read it. Perhaps he scanned samples of what came in to him from god knows how many fans? Because obviously he saw that one story of mine. Which is one of the things I find funny about the “zipper” incident: I got acknowledgement/feedback all of one time from the creator of Star Trek, and that is what he noticed and remembered about my story. Zippers.
I’ve seen some posts mentioning LiveJournal as an example of what happens when a site starts getting really aggressive about policing content, but this particular situation is making me think of Quizilla.
Quizilla was the weird little site that introduced me to fanfiction. It was supposed to be for personality quizzes, but in practice it had a mix of fanfic (sometimes in a semi-CYOA form), original fiction (sometimes in that same semi-CYOA form), and quizzes. Some of it was smut. Writers would generally warn you that a “lemon” chapter was coming up, and there was an “are you sure you want to see this mature content?” screen you had to click through before you could read anything too iffy. It worked fine, at least as far as my tiny self could tell.
Then they got bought out by Nickelodeon, who went “oh no, this is a teen site now, and it must be Made Appropriate for Children!”
So off went a good deal of the lemons (without any warning, as far as I can remember). Some people still tried to sneak smut past the moderators, but what they got away with was far tamer than most of the things you’d see on Ao3.
This did not stop Nickelodeon from trying to keep “fixing” the site, with disastrous results.
The tag system was pretty much permanently screwed up at some point– I can remember scrolling through pages and pages of content marked “angel” or “demon” on the old Quizilla, but after a certain point of the changeover, I only ever got one short page of results for each tag, even when I knew there was more to be found within that tag. A lot of older stories, most of which weren’t lemony at all, simply ended up butchered after Nickelodeon decided that stories could no longer be in quiz format– basically, they imposed new word count limits on the quizzes, and they just deleted any parts of the story that overran the word count. They got rid of the forums because they didn’t want to bother moderating them, and I also seem to recall them banning custom themes for profiles, quizzes, and stories at some stage.
It was a slow process, but a lot of works were lost, both good and bad, both smutty and PG-rated. And eventually, once they’d screwed up the site and driven off a lot of people, they shut down the site.
tl;dr: Dammit, I already lost one guilty-pleasure site full of fandom content because of misplaced attempts to get rid of porn, and I don’t want to see this site start making the same mistakes.
The internet interprets censorship as a bug and routes around it. I think this dictum can be easily transferred to fandom: Fandom interprets order as a failure of imagination and subverts it.
I’m well aware I experienced only one or two sides of a multifaceted personality. Looking back with all I now know, I see him as neither hero nor villain, but as a very flawed person with an amazing vision, which I’m glad he passed on to the world. I’m glad I had a chance to know him.
I’ll be handing out slash fic under the “special secret table” at cons. Subscribe to my fanzine.
Guys, I have a Yahoo mailing list that’s limited to thirty people, but we have to be careful, so make sure you always put disclaimers on each email about none of this is yours and TPTB shouldn’t sue you.
YES, you have yo put that on EVERY email, do you want to get shut down?!?
I feel like it’s deeply unfair that I’m forced to relive this period without the youth and vigor that propelled me through it the first time.
I’ll be handing out slash fic under the “special secret table” at cons. Subscribe to my fanzine.
Guys, I have a Yahoo mailing list that’s limited to thirty people, but we have to be careful, so make sure you always put disclaimers on each email about none of this is yours and TPTB shouldn’t sue you.
YES, you have to put that on EVERY email, do you want to get shut down?!?
Make sure to email your age statement to one of the listmods!
I’ll be handing out slash fic under the “special secret table” at cons. Subscribe to my fanzine.
Guys, I have a Yahoo mailing list that’s limited to thirty people, but we have to be careful, so make sure you always put disclaimers on each email about none of this is yours and TPTB shouldn’t sue you.
YES, you have yo put that on EVERY email, do you want to get shut down?!?
Don’t forget to delete the quoted text in email threads, so you don’t make people download unnecessary kilobytes.
Why is Spock in knee highs? Why are they on fire? What is happening?
I imagine the fire is symbolism for Mirror Spock’s blood fever, because this looks to me to be pon farr, judging by all the jizz on the ground under them. You’ll also notice that the background is full of penis imagery—Spock’s double ridged penis, to be precise. And the boots are probably because Spock was in such a frenzy to mate that he didn’t have time to get them off.
Well thank you I didn’t even notice the ground jizz and penises everywhere
Line drawing by Gerry Downes, in the first K/S slash zine, Alternative : Epilog to Orion, 1976.
Gerry was a Renaissance woman, pioneer, and dear dear friend. She broke through a lot of barriers in publishing the first zine about the emotional and physical love between Kirk & Spock. We lost her too soon to cancer, 17 years ago this month. But her legacy lives on…
They were TINY. 100x100 pixels. That’s, like, digital scrimshaw. And people were obsessed with making good ones - and there were CONTESTS, super cutthroat ones, and trends would sweep the icon-making world every week or so and as soon as you mastered a technique it would be passé, and there were whole communities dedicated to tutorials and icon-making resources, and it was all its own WEIRD LITTLE WORLD.
Is there anything like that now? What do graphics-obsessed people make in the Tumblr era?
If there is one thing I miss about LJ it’s the shadow-conversations people used to have in comment threads solely with their icons. Icons had a vocabulary, and a grammar, and you had to learn it.
Gif sets: not quite used the same way.
Right! It was a whole different dynamic because you could choose which icon to post with. So it would be like “I’m wearing my Severus Snape with a Weird Al song quote mask to say this.”
FLASHBACK MAAAAAN.
For a year or two I had a paid LJ account and I remember being actively excited about the EXTRA ICON SLOTS. I would be able to express myself with a wider array of Thor and Batman reaction images!
a friend and i once had a conversation that went to, iirc, something like 6 pages of comments, just the two of us, only with out icons
100x100 pixels wasn’t scrimshaw on the monitors we were using. It was a totally reasonable percentage of screen space in the resolutions we had at the time.
Icons were your mood indicator, emoticon and gif rolled into one. I actually miss having multiple icons to choose from.
Ye Good Olde Days.
I imagine a lot of icons are currently lost to the void even before Photbucket introduced their pay wall recently.
There’s a story that gets told about this early 70s ‘zine.
The
Old Ones say that when Mark Lenard (the original Sarek) saw this
displayed in the dealer’s room at a convention, he picked it up, gazed
at the cover for a long silent moment, then closed his eyes and theatrically sighed,
“Oh my son, my son.”
You just know that that zine was filled with juicy nsfw goodness.
@woodelf68 Sadly, no. It promised so much, and delivered so little.
you cannot see nsfw reblogs anymore on your tumblr blog. they only appear on your dash
this one is tagged “not nsfw” so of course it is blocked
I’ll be handing out slash fic under the “special secret table” at cons. Subscribe to my fanzine.
Guys, I have a Yahoo mailing list that’s limited to thirty people, but we have to be careful, so make sure you always put disclaimers on each email about none of this is yours and TPTB shouldn’t sue you.
YES, you have yo put that on EVERY email, do you want to get shut down?!?
without the objectionable post I wrote about the lady herself.
Truly her work needs no introduction. She was one of my two favorite artists in the 70s (the other was Alice Jones).
Thank goodness we have this zine era art on Fanlore as it will be removed on Dec 17. Fan artists - you can upload a small quantity of your fan art to Fanlore on your bio page. Best if you can add some commentary you received. Ex: for the 4th drawing, spockslash wrote:
“
This piece by Pat Stall is my favorite of all her work, ever. That
glimpse of Spock’s hands on Jim’s butt just gets me: so intimate, so
tender, yet also slightly urgent, slightly possessive
“
Spock just loves getting his hands on it and kneading it all morning like he’s a big vulcan cat o/
Since we’ve been talkin butts here lately in the booty dungeon on my blog - here’s a slight redraw/companion to this pic, which is very old but i still think very fondly of it :)
I’ve said before that elements of @deheerkonijn ‘s art remind me of some of the best art from the print zine era.
This
piece by Pat Stall is my favorite of all her work, ever. That glimpse
of Spock’s hands on Jim’s butt just gets me: so intimate, so tender, yet
also slightly urgent, slightly possessive.
When I first encountered @deheerkonijn ‘s art – which gives much appreciation to Spock’s love of Jim’s posterior – this was the artwork I thought of.
I don’t know exactly when McSpirk emerged, but I know it was early in slash history. Stories were circulating hand-to-hand in the 70s, before any slash was ever printed and openly distributed.
I don’t personally ship them as a trio, but I have zero problem with it being a beloved ship for many other fans.
I’m going to say more below, but this gets into nsfw material, so I’m putting it below the cut.
That’s fic about real people. First, it didn’t have a consistent name. Then, there were a few fandoms that were called by their fandom name. I think some people called it “actor fic” or something for a while. Then, finally, the term “Real Person Slash” was coined. Later, when it was more popular, it became clear that this slash-centric term would not work, and “Real Person Fic” became more common as a term.
Why was it banned? Well… because it squicks people, mostly. Partly, because people thought it was more legally dubious than fic about fictional characters. That’s probably not true in most jurisdictions, but people thought it was true.
I’m just thinking about how a few months ago there was that whole “why does AO3 have to host ALL THAT GROSS STUFF” and I’m sitting here, watching Tumblr melt down— I didn’t expect to have such a clear example of “because this is where corporate platforms always leave us” so soon after that fight.
Anyway, these wiki entries can give you an idea of what documentation of a tumblr post and its responses might look like. We’ll never document every single little thing, and we wouldn’t want to, but we can make a record of major conversations and schools of thought so that fans who come after us know how people were feeling on tumblr back in the day.
Fanlore uses the same wiki markup as Wikipedia et al.
Fanlore has a “Plural Point of View” policy: treat it like oral history where you want to document all sides of a controversy rather than Wikipedia’s attempt at ‘One Universal Truth’. (But feel free to correct factual errors.)
Fanlore is about any fandom history, so minute details of canon don’t belong on there, but minute details of meta, fanworks exchanges, any zine ever, any significant online fic, tropes in fanworks, etc. do.
Since tumblr is getting harder and harder to search, even aside from deletions, now is a great time to document important tumblr posts on Fanlore or add information from tumblr posts to existing articles.
Right now, Fanlore is an amazing resource on pre-internet “Media Fandom”, old print zines, the LJ era, and a lot of slash fandom history.
But it’s only as good and varied as its editors.
In my experience, it could use a lot of help in the realm of anime/manga fandom, including BL fandom, fandom not in English and/or outside of the English-speaking world, fandom on places like Quizilla or Wattpad, femslash fandom, etc. If your area of fandom is not represented, it’s only because the current editors don’t know enough!
You are welcome! We need you!
If you know how wikis work, you’re all set to edit Fanlore. If you’ve never used a wiki, we can help you figure it out.
No, for real, that’s one of the things people have been proposing. There’s new peer-to-peer stuff that might make fanvid and fan art gallery websites a solid choice. I’m less sure about the blogging options, but it looks like there are some.
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 - FFN forums deleted
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 - Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 - Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
FF.net banning porn isn’t a “fandom purge” though, just a porn purge. Fandom isn’t just porn.
Yahoo/other sites being incompetent/dying isn’t a “fandom purge”, it’s just bad business.
Youtube using content ID so you can no longer use stolen music is a GOOD thing, because YOU DON’T HAVE LEGAL RIGHTS TO THAT MUSIC!!!!!
Megaupload was MEGA FUCKING ILLGAL
God
It’s like none of you know… law.
No, fandom isn’t just porn, but when “porn” gets targeted, it’s always the m/m stuff that gets attacked first, followed by other queer stuff and anything made for women’s taste. To me, that’s a problem.
Queer content tends to be rated higher than straight content, even voluntarily and by the content creators, so deletions based on metadata will hit it disproportionately and include content that isn’t actually explicit. Queer content also attracts more harrassing grudge reports. AO3′s site rules and site culture discourage all of this, but it’s the reality for most internet spaces and was certainly the reality back when many of these FFN deletions happened.
There’s no specific definition of a “fandom purge”. The events people are mentioning here had a major negative effect on fandom and/or destroyed many fanworks. In many cases, they were caused by incompetence or by the host having other priorities, not by some specific targeted attack.
That doesn’t lessen their impact on us.
Megaupload going down and Youtube adding content ID were intended to stop straight up piracy. They also had a side effect of destroying lots of perfectly legal fanwork, specifically vids, which have historically been lost at an even greater rate than fic and collected and archived only rarely.
The way that music is used in vids will generally fall under fair use, though it’s not a defense that often gets tested. Vids have their own sort of vocabulary where the song and the images come together to create a meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t simply replace the song and have the same work with the same meaning. Vids aren’t piracy, and it is only the creeping, grasping erosion of fair use understanding by corporate propaganda that makes anyone think so.
It’s simply not accurate to call that kind of remix use categorically “illegal” in the US.
Even youtube has reinstated plenty of fanvids after a fair use-based challenge. I’ve done this myself. Many of the challenges about music on there are completely spurious. (There are scam artists who claim rights they don’t actually own.) The ones that do come from the real rights holder are not taking fair use into account.
The actual law is far more permissive than the de facto situation where we’re dependent on hosts that care about advertisers.
The original post was not intended to pass moral judgment on yahoo or ffn or anywhere else, just to suggest that the current tumblr shenanigans are part of a long history. My conclusions are:
1. Fans who got in via tumblr should take heart: fandom won’t be over even when we inevitably leave tumblr at some point (which won’t be just yet anyway).
2. We got tired of all of the deletions and built AO3 to protect fic. It’s time we started doing the same for art and vids and blogging because all of those are still vulnerable.
3. Websites have every right to not care about us… But we have every right to leave them and make our own spaces that value us.
For all the gay and trans people who wrote messages to my family about what my mom meant to you, my husband and I want to respond. First, thank you. It was great to hear. I’m proud of my mom for many things but the most for what an ally and advocate she was to the gay community. Especially for kids. Obviously I’m gay and I feel very lucky that my mom was my mom. She was the best. Not merely accepting but celebrating who I am. Adopting my husband and loving him like her own son. When I was in high school and college all the gay and questioning kids hung out at my house because of her. One trans boy lived at our house for over a year when his parents threw him out. She showered us with love and pride. I’ve read through some of her blog and can see that she was doing online what she did in real life. I’m glad and proud that she did that even when she was old. An old lady on tumblr because she always was the coolest though she didn’t know it. Now she’s gone, please, gay and trans kids who wrote to my family about her, honor her by loving yourselves and never, ever doing yourself harm. It’s what she would want. It’s really important. Thanks. -Zachary
Our mom, Dee, Fandom Grandma, wrote this for you and asked that we share it after her passing.
Oh my darlings. My fandom friends, my fandom family.
This is a difficult message to write.
It has become clear that treatment can no longer help me battle the cancer that has invaded my body, and it’s time to prepare myself to say goodbye to those I love.
That includes all of you.
I have struggled mightily with how I should do this. Should I tell you now, so you will not be blindsided by my passing? Would telling you burden you unnecessarily ahead of time? I don’t want you to worry about me. I want my last few months or weeks to be an opportunity to give as much love and kindness as I can, to cheer on your wonderful fan art and writing, to share as many memories of the early days of fandom as I am able, and to enjoy the fun I have in being with you.
So after much thought, I’ve decided to ask my children to let you know of my passing when it happens. If I hurt anyone with the suddenness of that announcement, I hope you can forgive me and know that I meant well by this decision.
I hope you know that you have enriched my life immensely in what turn out to be my final months. What fun it has been to be a fan among fans again! I feel so lucky to have discovered modern fandom and this community when I did. You have taught me so much. You’ve impressed me, moved me, made me laugh, and brought a whole lot of happiness to my days.
I hope you know how honored I feel to have been embraced by you as your Fandom Grandma and your friend. It’s humbling to be given this opportunity to care so openly, so freely. I am touched by this, daily, more than I can say.
I know that some of my adopted family here are not in happy family situations in their off-screen lives. It troubles me that I will not have further opportunity to tell you how special you are, how unique, how precious. That you are worthy of love and happiness. Please know that wherever I am, my caring about you and believing in you will still go on.
Dear beautiful hearts — and that means every one of you — please be kind to yourselves. And to each other. Please, please keep fandom a place where we are welcoming to newcomers. Where we value each other, even if we don’t agree on specific ideas.
And please go on enjoying fandom, as long as it is meaningful and positive for you. I hope many of you will be fandom grandparents to the generations that will follow! Please keep writing and creating art. Keep our traditions alive. I’m passing the torch of this historic fandom on to you now.
You are amazing. I love you. I know you will make me proud.
So I was pulled away today from working on the Tumblr Strikethrough pages on Fanlore for another project. But if there is anyone who wonders about the value of finding fandom spaces and a place for our own community, I give you Exhibit A: Fandom Grandma Dee.
As fan artist
@equalopportunityenby said best: “She Did”
Missing on list of purges is a place known as "Freedom of Speech Fanfiction (FOS-FF)", a place founded to supposedly be more free and tolerant than FFnet after they banned script format fanfic. I was a member from its inception to when the admins grew power hungry and employed a sitewide purge in 2007, to eliminate whatever fanfiction they personally felt was low quality or not to their personal standards. Their backup tool didn't work well, and the admins claimed "we gave you time" (1/2)
After the results of the purge, their fanfiction database was wiped down a lot, and the admins ruled that if you wanted to submit a story, it had to be personally approved by every single one of them. This lead many stories to be rejected arbitrarily just because one admin wouldn’t like them. It’s become “Ghosts of the Vanguard” but I don’t know if they still have the whole draconian ways. (2/2)
Interesting! I’d heard of that archive, but I didn’t know anything about it. There used to be a lot more archives and coms where the mods had a minimum “quality” standard to let things in. It always leads to the archive/com getting less popular and writers leaving.
Friends? Brothers? Lovers? T'hy'la. This week’s Ship Sunday pairing is Kirk/Spock!
Known as the first slash fandom, Kirk/Spock is a fandom classic. Whether you’re a fan of the original series or the reboot, you should boldly go over to Fanlore and add some information about your favorite pairing to our articles.
Not sure how to become an editor on Fanlore? Check out our wide variety of resources including tutorials or our new visitor portal. If you have any questions, you can also reach out to us directly by using the Ask feature on our Tumblr or email us. Happy editing!
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 - FFN forums deleted
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 - Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 - Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) - deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
Just a PSA: if you’re the sole owner of a community over on Livejournal and you’re thinking of deleting it because you can’t find anyone else to manage it when you leave, please don’t. I’m keeping my LJ and am happy to adopt communities. I don’t mess with them aside from removing any spam that gets posted. My username there is also alessandriana; all you have to do is add me as an admin and delete yourself.
