Like many fans, we are concerned about the news that GeoCities is going to close at the end of the year, especially as many older sites and fanfiction archives are housed there. As the chair of Open Doors, which is dedicated to protecting at-risk fannish projects, I can assure you that we will work out some sort of gameplan; in the interim, if you have an archive or webpage there, or if you can put us in contact with any archivists located there, please contact Open Doors through the Open Doors contact page.
- Morgan Dawn commented: when you click on the geocities announcement link transformativeworks.org/news/geocities-closing you get a 404 error. I just sent out many e-mails to archivists about the Geocities closing and the OTW announcement - you may want to get the URL fixed.
- jinjur commented: thank you! we're working on the problem - in the meantime, feel free to direct people to the front page of the website (https://transformativeworks.org/) or to use this alternate link: https://transformativeworks.org/node/657 - and as this is an intermittent issue, simply refreshing the page may return the correct content. eta: we've made some tweaks that should address this - the link should work now. :) our apologies for the difficulty, and thanks again for spreading the word!
- Morgan Dawn commented: thanks. the fix may take time to work - I am still getting the error message. If contacted, I'll ask people to contact you folks direct if they're still having problems - I don't have the ability to go back and fix every post I made.
- Dafna commented: I've read the last two newsletters and looked at the roadmap, but don't see any mention of a timeframe. How close are we to the archive being open? Or at least to an open beta? I ask because I'm sure I'm not the only fan with a bunch of stories on Geocities that don't really need to be *archived* per se, but it'd nice to be able to put them somewhere safe like the AOOO before Geocities shuts down.
- Wystii commented: I'm in a similar situation. I was always planning to move to the archive here once it was open for business - whenever was fine, but now there's a timing issue. Although, I guess it won't really matter if my older fics are temporarily offline until this Archive is ready for general use. Hmmm... will need to back-up but on the bright side, no need to update before moving. ^___^
- fcoppa commented: As I commented to the above person, feel free to send me a contact email and a website url through our web contact form and I'll be back in touch when the board approves a plan. We might be able to help you early! --Francesca, speaking as Chair of Open Doors
- fcoppa commented: We're going to see if we can help people TOSed from Geocities, either through early AO3 accounts or through open doors. If you want, please send me a contact email and a website url through our web contact form and I'll be back in touch when the board approves a plan. --Francesca, speaking with her Chair of Open Doors hat on
- khellekson commented: Thanks so much for the heads up re. Open Doors. I am involved in a fandom that went active in 2001-2002 and has many, many archives on Geocities. I'm e-mailing the list owners of the fic archives I have records of, asking them if they need help moving stuff over, but I really fear that much older fic will be lost because the archive owners disappeared long ago. And that was fine as long as the fic archive URLs persisted. My personal fanfic archive is on Geocities because I wanted the links to persist. Hah! How ironic. I'll be moving the rest of my fic over to the Archive of Our Own. (Before I logged in, when I clicked on links associated with this post, I got a "Page Not Found" error, but it was in an unfamiliar language--maybe Dutch? Once I logged in, I could access the pages properly.)
- jinjur commented: we're working on that language-switching bug that you encountered - every report helps.
- fcoppa commented: Yes, please, KH, any help you can give us in getting in contact with archivists will be so helpful! Tell them to contact Open Doors through our web contact form especially if they have old archives! (The link problem is an ongoing bug webmasters have been working on, but the node URL--the one that I use when I crosspost to DW, LJ, IJ, etc--is usually stable.)