When fan sites vanish

I found a dead link on a Tolkien fan site and notified the owner. It appears the original site has been taken down, for reasons I cannot fathom.

The old site, http://home.freeuk.net/webbuk2/tolkien-biography.htm, was titled An Illustrated Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Demonstrating no special skill at designing fancy Web sites, the author nonetheless produced a remarkable tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien. You can see one of the last versions of the site here, but only if FreeUK.net doesn't block the archive through robots.txt.

In a relatively short time, many other fan sites will be taken down forever. Yahoo! recently announced that it was discontinuing the Geocities free hosting service. Thousands of science fiction and fantasy Web sites, long abandoned by their creators, will soon cease to exist.

If we're lucky, Yahoo! won't block archive.org from indexing Geocities content, but don't hold your breath.

Seizing the moment, Webring has offered hosting service to GeoCities users. Webring itself started life as an independent service, then was bought by Yahoo!, and was relaunched as an independent service.

If you have favorite Web sites hosted on GeoCities, you would be well advised to save them to your personal drives. You may never see them again. If you know someone who once had a GeoCities account, maybe they'll want to save their work (if they can) and move it to another service.

Many academics once had GeoCities accounts, too. A lot of research -- perhaps only published on GeoCities -- is about to vanish forever.

The loss of intangible value in fan sites and other content will be inestimable and it is unstopable.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.