elisi | Calling all Buffy fans!

ruuger has a post here, which touches on some important issues. Shall do a copy&paste job, but direct comments towards her LJ.

I just noticed a something disconcerting: Buffy has fallen behind Supernatural in the list of most popular fandoms on Archive of Our Own.

We had been already losing to Stargate Atlantis and Harry Potter, but now Supernatural too? Where is this world going to with all these whippersnapper fandoms being more popular! ;)

Seriously, though, I was just thinking a few weeks ago while organising my bookmarks how there really should be an effort to preserve old Buffyverse fic/archives before it's too late because so many fics I had enjoyed were no-longer online. Contact writers and people who ran the old archives and ask them if they would mind archiving their fic at AO3, create collections for the old archives, preserve fic by people who have disappeared online, do something before it's all lost in the ether...

So much was already lost when Geocities and Angelfire disappeared, and fic posted on Livejournal is constantly disappearing when people leave fandom or lock or delete their journals for some other reason. There is always the Wayback Machine, but even that can't be trusted.

Technically it would again be putting all eggs in one basket, but at least AO3 would be a more stable place than archives hosted on commercial servers or run by one solitary fan (plus AO3 has the advantage over many other archives for the possibility to orphan fic or have it be only visible for logged in members).

I think this is a very worthy cause! Surely we can do something?