Hi. I see you're working on trying to save the archives at the JoshDonna Fic List. I was the owner of that list from season 3 until about a year after the show ended. I would be heartbroken to see all that fic, including my own, disappear. I lost all my backup copies in a computer crash years ago. Please let me know what I can do to help. Shelley
Hi! Are you the Shelley from Smiles, Tears and Happy Endings, the one who wrote Boomerang and 238 Days? I have archived some of your work already, I’ve been linking to the Archive.org version of your old Fortunecity site, which has held up pretty well over the years.
Basically what I am trying to do is recruit people to sign up on this list to commit to archiving a chunk of stories from the community. I’m using this master Excel Spreadsheet that gives the names and locations of all the stories in the community by 2011. Basically you’ll sign up for a chunk of the list, then create a Google Doc to be your Table of Contents. This is the one I made for the first chunk, one I am working on right now. It’s pretty basic, but functional!
Open the Excel list and go to the first number on your chunk. There will be a title for a story (sometimes a chapter of a story) and the post number where it can be found. You can look to see if that story is already online somewhere. I have found that about 30-40% of the stories in the community, especially the longer ones, are already at AO3, Fanfiction.net, or an archive that can still be found via Archive.org. It is totally up to you how hard you want to look. If the story is already online, write it into your Table of Contents and provide the link.
If the story is not already online, what I’ve been doing is opening a blank Google Doc, pasting all the chapters of the story into it (not worrying too much about formatting), adding an archivist disclaimer, then using the File menu to publish it to the web. That gives you a link you can put in your Table of Contents, and it means that story is still going to be around on the internet.
Because the Yahoo Group is so huge, this is not a job anybody can do alone. I estimate I personally could do two, maybe three sections by the time December 14 rolls around and it’s all over. If you know anybody who is still a member of the group and has a little time, try and recruit them to sign up and help! I know Google Docs is kind of a kludgy solution, but I feel like it’s better to have an inelegant solution that gives us accessible fics than an elegant solution that comes too late.
