Posted on by Dunc

Whatever happened to FanfiX?

For years, FanfiX.com was the fanfic archive for Star Wars fandom. The archive started in the late 90’s and was officially dubbed FanfiX.com with the domain purchase in 1997. And then, in 2003, it vanished, and people have been intermittently asking about it ever since. Wombat, one of the site archivists, gives her account.

While FanfiX could never completely archive all Star Wars fic online, particularly after the fandom explosion with TPM in 1999 and the growing popularity of self-upload archives like FanFiction.net during that same period, the loss was a striking blow to the SW fanfic community. Yes, you can still access it via the WayBack Machine, but the possibility was there for a central touchstone for the SW fanfic community.

Are all-encompassing archives like FanFiX or The Gossamer Project practical anymore? Are they even possible? Do we need them? Sometimes I wonder…

3 Replies to “Whatever happened to FanfiX?”

  1. I’ve been working on trying to resurrect fanfix. com for a couple of years. I’m going through all the archived pages from the Internet WayBack Machine..

  2. You’ve got to be careful with that kind of thing: The Wayback Machine is one thing, since it’s archiving a site where people actually sent in and thus gave permission for their stories to be run. But for a whole new site – even if you use the same name – you don’t have their express permission. (Or that of Deb/Guri to use the name FanfiX. Unless you do, but I doubt it.) Some of those authors may prefer their stories be lost from the active internet, or they may have rewritten them after the site vanished and not want the originals out there, or they put their real name on something when they were 15 and now they don’t want that in Google… Etc, etc.

    Yes, it’s the internet and this stuff is out there, but it’s common courtesy. Some of those folks can be probably be tracked down, and many of them might not mind, but you really do need to get permission from the authors if you ever plan to make that a public archive.

  3. Fanfix went down when I broke my neck in a car accident and lost the domain name. I recently got it back….. miss all of you.. wombat if your still out there drop me a line :)
    Deborah

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