Snowflake Challenge #7

[libraralien]

In your own space, tell us about 3 fandom resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy.

• The Cold Boys Fandom Hub - This one almost feels like cheating, since this great resource for The Terror fandom is a collection of resources. Some highlights include the fandom events calendar, which lists various Terror fests/exchanges/bingos past, present, and future, and the links page, which collects other resources relevant to the show, the fandom, and the Franklin Expedition in general.


• Aubrey/Maturin series text search - Exactly what it sounds like. Do you ever need to search the full text of the Aubreyad for every instance of a word or phrase, and get results labeled by book, chapter, and paragraph number? Here you go.


• ds_ficminers - One of my favorite dreamwidth communities, where users dig up and share old Due South fics that have not been archived on AO3, often with heavy use of the Wayback Machine for archiving. It is a great resource for keeping older fic from being forgotten, especially for fans new to the fandom who might not know where to look for fic off of AO3, and entries are tagged for organization. Anyone can contribute, and I find digging up old fics to share a lot of fun! I think this type of community could be a great model for other older fandoms in a similar position.

Comments

[melannen]

Same! I didn't know about the DW comm but it looks really cool.

I wonder if we could put together a multifandom themed recs community where the only rule is that it can't be on AO3.

[libraralien]

I would definitely be interested in such a recs community! I have never modded a comm before, so I would want a co-mod if I made one, but I might do some kind of interest check to see if other people would be into the idea.

I would also have to think about the community purposes of reccing vs preserving. I think in a multifandom space, reccing makes more sense and preservation might be too ambitious, but I would love to see some other single-fandom communities with an archival intention out there too.

[melannen]

Extremely late reply, but: I would be really cautious about archival. There are a lot of different opinions in fandom about archiving other people's fanworks without their permission (even on a site like wayback.) A recs community that includes links to the current/original location and a good summary of what the fic was about is enough to help people who are looking for the fic or trying to get an idea of what the fandom was like, without taking control of it away from the creator.

(I know that on a lot of those old defunct archives the creator can't do much anyway, but there's a difference between 'I'm waiting for that old archive to go down/move to AO3' and some other fan putting it somewhere high-profile that you can't do anything about.)