FictionAlley

Archive
Name:	FictionAlley
Date(s):	July 2001- 2018
Archivist:
Founder:	Heidi Tandy, Flourish Klink and others
Type:	fiction archive, other things
Fandom:	Harry Potter
URL:	http://www.fictionalley.org/ Collection at Archive of Our Own
A 2002 screenshot of the main page, it has the subtitle: "FictionAlley.org! HARRY POTTER FANFIC IN ALL SHAPES AND SIZES!" -- see here.
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Fiction Alley is an archive for Harry Potter fan fiction that was created by Heidi Tandy, Flourish Klink, and others.

FictionAlley was formed in the summer of 2001 to be a "community in which no person would be unreasonably censored or senselessly banned."

While it was officially launched July 22, 2001, its Yahoo Group FictionAlleyWriters and Artists began on July 6, 2001. See Timeline for some other more specific dates.

The archive originated out of Schnoogle, a site that was created by Heidi Tandy and Cassandra Claire.

The archive is divided into four different so-called houses: Schnoogle for novel-length stories of all genres, TheDarkArts for stories with darker themes like angst, AstronomyTower for romance fanfic and Riddikulus for humourous stories. Each house is associated with a color of one of the houses from the book series: Schnoogle has a green theme, TheDarkArts is blue, the AstronomyTower is red, and Riddikulus is yellow.

It also has an extensive set of forums for discussion of the characters, locations and individual books and movies as they came out, called Fiction Alley Park. The Park is notable among fandom forums for content requirements: members are only allowed to make "one liner" posts in a few specified places, correct capitalization is expected and spelling and grammar must be readable. These requirements allowed the site to claim educational motivations for the forums which aided the site in gaining non-profit status.

It has a Yahoo Group: FictionAlleyWriters and Artists, which was launched July 6, 2001. It is public and can be seen and searched here. This site was originally called "FictionAlleyWriters"; Artists was added roughly a year later.

In July 2018, it was announced that FictionAlley would be moving to the Archive of Our Own as an Open Doors Project.

Some Homepages Through the Years

• 

  the 2003 cover—see here

• 

  the 2004 cover—see here

• 

  the 2005, "Fifth Birthday Cover"—see here

• 

  screenshot of the 2009(?) Homepage

About

From the Current Site: "A Bit About FictionAlley"

A Bit About FictionAlley

What is FictionAlley?

FictionAlley was founded in the summer of 2001 by a dozen Harry Potter fans - mostly fanfic writers and artists. FictionAlley was created to archive all Harry Potter fanfic, regardless of the SHIP, as long as the story met a reasonable standard for grammar and spelling, and did not merit an "adults only" rating. All of the founding mods desired a community in which no person would be unreasonably censored or senselessly banned - a place where people could state their ideas and engage in spirited and thought-provoking debates, discussions, and analysis. FictionAlley also created a beta reader exchange and writing discussion boards, which rapidly grew into FictionAlley Park. The Park hosts over one million discussion posts and over a million reviews from nearly 60,000 registered users on topics ranging from analysis of individual characters and scenes from the Harry Potter books and films to the development of original writing.

[snipped]

In 2003, FictionAlley launched a new chat room for its users, expanded the educational mission of the site, and supported Nimbus - 2003: A Harry Potter Symposium, that was held July 17–20, 2003 in Orlando, Florida. In 2004, FA introduced The Knight Bus, a section for the posting of "real life" events for fandomers, and began a revamp of the fic hosting system. In April 2004, FictionAlley was nominated for a WEBBY Award and in the fall of 2004, FictionAlley was granted 501(c)(3) status by the US IRS as an educational entity. In the spring of 2005, FictionAlley was nominated for a Prix Ars Electronica award; the Prix Ars is considered the Nobel Prize of web awards.

During July, 2005, in connection with the release of Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, FA joined with other sites in organizing line parties at bookstores around the world.

In 2006, FictionAlley launched HarryPotterWiki, the first wiki to blend information about the Harry Potter book series' characters, places, magic and things, with fan theories, stories, art, vids and music. FA has also launched SpellCast a podcast that focuses on fan-events and fan creativity. To let us know about a particularly creative fan or group of fans, email us at [email protected].

FictionAlley has also been a regular sponsor of events at Harry Potter conferences, conventions and symposia around the world. In October, 2005, FA sponsored art and story booths at The Witching Hour, as well as a "trial" of Severus Snape at Accio in the United Kingdom; in November, 2005, FA worked with other sites to organize showings of Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire at IMAX theaters around the world. In 2006, FA sponsored the Common Room and an art/fic booth at Lumos, the first Harry Potter symposium on the West Coast 2007 will find FictionAlley virtually traveling the world, as the host and sponsor of Artists & Authors Night at Phoenix Rising , May 17–21 in New Orleans, then as a sponsor of Sectus in London in July, 2007, and of Prophecy 2007 in Toronto, Canada, August 2–5, 2007.

From the Current Site: "A Guided Tour of the Harry Potter Fandom by Flourish"

The first Harry Potter site was the Realm, founded in the fall of 1999. And there were authors, and it was good. This website was run by one person, Gypsy, but this task is extremely large; therefore, the site's fanfiction archive has become less and less the center of fanfiction activities. This site was the first Harry Potter fanfiction site, and was the typical fan-run HP fanfic site of the time: small, designed in an amateurish way, and with a small community of teenaged authors. Another similar site of this time was alohomora.com (now defunct).

Soon, however, the center of fanficcing glory moved to fanfiction.net (also known as "The Site That Must Not Be Named," by some of the more biased forum posters). Here the Harry Potter fandom grew into the largest literary fandom on the net, and as the ranks of authors grew, so did the opinions and ideas. After arguments between fanfiction.net mods and Harry Potter authors, various fan-run sites sprung up. While fanfiction.net remains a large part of the Harry Potter fanfiction community, many authors also post their fics at these newer sites.

Some of the other sites, such as sugarquill.com and gryffindortower.net, archive only fanfiction of a certain ship (respectively, Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny). Others, like Diagon Alley, choose to archive only adult-aimed fanfiction. Of course, of all of these, we would like you to remember FictionAlley.org the most, as a site which archives every genre, ship, and style of fic (except NC-17). The specific reason for our founding was the desire for a community in which no person would be censored or senselessly banned - a place where one can politely state their ideas and engage in debates without being chastised.

Other notable sites in the fandom that do not archive fanfiction are the Harry Potter for Grownups discussion list, which revolves entirely around the Harry Potter canon, the Harry Potter Galleries and the Harry Potter Lexicon.

A 2011 Description of FictionAlley

In 2011, one of FictionAlley's founders gave an extensive interview at Slashcast. The interviewer is emmagrant.

Some excerpts are below:

Heidi: Well, I was one of the dozen or so people who founded it. Back in, oh god, February or March of 2001, Harry Potter for Grownups decided to stop allowing discussion of fanfic on the main list, and split off into three lists. Before that you could discuss pretty much any Harry Potter-relate topic on the main list. So, at that point, fanfiction was splintered off into another list. There were a lot of Yahoo groups for fanfic at that point. At that point, Yahoo Groups were a place to archive your fic...

Because it was free, and if you wanted webspace that wasn't anywhere that was completely ad-riddled, like GeoCities, then you needed to basically use a Yahoo group. And Fanfiction.net was fine, and a lot of people put their stuff there, but they had some massive amounts of downtime in the spring of 2001. And there were server issues and things like that, and people just couldn't upload their stories when they wanted to, or edit it when they wanted to, so like being on a Yahoo group, you had a little bit more control. But even a Yahoo group, because even of the limitation of the size- of the number of files and the size of the files, and the way it was moderated and things like that, nobody really felt like that was a permanent solution. So there was talk all through the spring about setting up a website that would host fanfiction. So we took control of our own place, and we started uploading stories all through the month of July, launched it with the novels-focus section, Schnoogle, almost exactly ten years ago this week. And about two or three weeks later, the other – once that had basically been tested and it was working, we set up another three sites to host – Riddikulus, for humorous fics, Astronomy Tower for anything that was romantic, because the trope at that point was that every character went up to the Astronomy Tower to snog somebody else... And The Dark Arts for anything that was dramatic or angsty or mysterious – basically it was the catch-all category. And then we went live with FictionAlley Park, also in August of 2001, and it was getting a lot of traffic basically from the very start...

Well, one of the unique things FictionAlley was doing was we would host fics no matter what the ship, or no matter who the character. All it had to do was take place in the Wizarding world, or in an AU of the Wizarding world. And that was something that no site other than fanfiction.net was doing.

Emma: Oh, that's right, because the Sugar Quill was around at that time as well, wasn't it?

Heidi: Yeah, they had gone live February or March, maybe January, possibly earlier, and there were other sites. There was a girl named Eliza Dyonus Snape [?], and she would archive stories that were Snape-centric as long as they were het or gen and PG rated. And there were other people who would put together lists or even host stories on their own webspace, that were ship-specific or character-specific. But like I said, we didn't really have a fantastic Google search engine back then, I mean, Google existed, but it wasn't that great, so it was hard to find things unless everything was in the same place. And you know, that was also the early days of LiveJournal. That really wasn't thought of at that point as a place to archive your stories, although it was certainly a place to talk about them

Emma: Right, and I also remember the importance of it – I was in a different fandom at that time, but I remember the importance of archives then, and just being able to find things. And if you had something that you were looking for, that was even remotely, let's say, controversial, and if you were looking - the fandom I was in, chan was a big thing, um or RPF was just almost unallowed at the time, and so at the time there were mailing lists where people would say, you know, "you can't have this; you can't have that," and it's very different from the culture we have today, which I would say is mostly livejournal based, and really everything goes. And we've almost gone completely in the other direction, where before, you know, there were these archives and lists that were very specific about what was allowed and what was not, and now you're [not even really allowed to] criticize somebody else's ideas about what should be in fic. It's fascinating, what's happened in the last couple of years.

Heidi: It is, and if you go back through some of the posts on fictionalley from, um, I think 2004, we had a couple of the long time FictionAlley users who decided that we shouldn't be hosting any fics that contained bestiality, intergenerational ships, or underaged ships. Basically we got into a debate with some of the users who wanted us to bad all of these things because they felt it was unbecoming for their stories to be hosted on a site that hosted such illicit and atrocious topics. Obviously we took the American Library Association position that, as long as a story had an accurate summery, you know, the same way that books should have their content summarized on a flyleaf or on the back so that people know what a story is about in vague terms, that we weren't going to ban any topics or any discussions as concepts from FictionAlley, you know, we were going to continue our position of hosting everything, you know, as long as the grammar and spelling was reasonably okay. There's probably 250 posts on that thread, just it's a really interesting sort of slice of discussion within fandom circa that time.

Founders/Staff

One of its founders is Heidi Tandy who registered the domain name on July 4, 2001.

Another early staff member was Flourish Klink; she joined FictionAlley at the age of thirteen.

"Who started FA? A whole bunch of people! There were about 20 people, including Maddy, Narri Patters, Colin, AngieJ, me [Heidi8, Cassie, Simon, Alex, Carole Estes, Starling, Priscilla, Jana, Yael, Viola, etc. Amber and then Jason came on about a week later to help with technical things."

See more at Opening Posts: Public Introductions and Who's Who.

An Undated List of Staff

Extremely limited and incomplete list/descriptions are below.

Elves: Who to blame for FictionAlley: (FictionAlley has various "team-members". The profiles below belong to the coders (who get fics ready to go online), uploaders (who actually put the stories up for public consumption) and park mods (who keep everything in FictionAlley Park running smoothly). We also have a slew of E-Mentors, who post their profiles here - their job on FA is to meet & greet the site's newbies and give them an introduction to FA and the fandom."

Mods and Other Staff: Other Staff (offline).

From 2006

From A Bit About FictionAlley:

Who's Who at FictionAlley:

[...]

As of September 1, 2006, the members of the board are Heidi Tandy (President), Paul Kippes, Jason Fraser, Sara Goetz and Robert Standring. Paul Kippes serves as Interim Treasurer and Merin Bears serves as Secretary.

[...]

Some Additional History

Timeline

• February 2001: Cassandra Claire and Heidi Tandy registered the domain name Schnoogle. Another source cites this as March 3, 2001.
• June/early-July 2001: The archive was technically planned in June/early-July 2001 and to be launched in mid-July beginning with Schnoogle and the authors: Cassandra Claire, Lori, Rhysenn, AngieJ, Penny & Carole, heidi, Barb LP, Yael, Gwendolyn Grace, Flourish, Viola, George Weasley’s Girlfriend, and Al. The rest of the fic houses were to be launched at the end of July, hopefully on July 31st, which is Harry Potter's birthday.
• June 22, 2001: Cassandra Claire's Fanfiction.net account was deleted late in the evening on June 22, 2001; fans began commenting on it June 23, 2001.
• July 4, 2001.: Heidi Tandy registered the domain name of "FictionAlley" on July 4, 2001.
• July 6, 2001: Its Yahoo Group (FictionAlleyWriters and Artists) was active beginning July 6, 2001.
• July 11, 2001: Schnoogle.com is launched.
• July 22, 2001: FictionAlley was launched at 11:56 and the first story posted was Draco Sinister 15.
• August 7, 2001: Yahoogroup called "ChapterOwls" was created.
• August 18, 2001: Cassandra Claire removed all of her fiction from FictionAlley.
• In late August 2002, Stacey (Phat Phat Kitty, phatgirlfics) resigned from Fiction Alley. comments from July 31, and October 19, 2003.
• May 5–6, 2002: On May 5, 2002, the "New York Times" published Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume, an article which included an interview with Heidi Tandy and information about "FictionAlley." The next day, the moderators of FictionAlley announced that they were accepting a proposition from Warner Bros. that the website become an affiliate with the giant entertainment company.
• In 2003, FictionAlley launched a new chat room for its users.
• July 17–20: Nimbus - 2003: A Harry Potter Symposium
• August 2003: the archive uploaded its 20,000th fic/chapter.
• April 2004: FictionAlley was nominated for a WEBBY Award.
• Fall 2004: FictionAlley was incorporated as a non-profit in the USA.
• 2004: FictionAlley introduced The Knight Bus, a section for the posting of "real life" events for fandomers, and began a revamp of the fic hosting system
• Spring 2005: FictionAlley was nominated for a Prix Ars Electronica Award.
• 2006: FictionAlley launched HarryPotterWiki, the first wiki to blend information about the Harry Potter book series' characters, places, magic. and things, with fan theories, stories, art, vids and music.
• 2006: FictionAlley launched SpellCast, a podcast that focused on fan-events and fan creativity.
• July 2006: there were 10,000+ authors and over 30,000 fics.
• July 2007: FictionAlley was a sponsor of Sectus in London.
• August 2–5, 2007: FictionAlley was a sponsor of Prophecy in Toronto, Canada.
• July 2010: there was an extensive downtime at FictionAlley.
• July 2015: Heidi Tandy blogs about and links to Positive Fandom.
• July 19, 2018: The Organization for Transformative Works announces that FictionAlley will be archived on AO3 as part of its Open Doors project.

Some Firsts

1. Who started FA?

A whole bunch of people! There were about 20 people, including Maddy, Narri Patters, Colin, AngieJ, me, Cassie, Simon, Alex, Carole Estes, Starling, Priscilla, Jana, Yael, Viola, etc. Amber and then Jason came on about a week later to help with technical things.

2. Who wrote the first fic to be posted here?

Heidi! Me! We uploaded my fic, Surfeit of Curses, first, to test things. But seriously, among the first fics on FA were fics by the authors listed above. When the site launched, we had about 30 authors on Schnoogle and when the other three sites went live a few weeks later, we were probably pushing 100 writers.

3. What was the first fic posted here at FA?

See above. ;)

4. Who thought of all those abbreviations (i.e. 'Glomp')?

Various people, over time. Narri and Maddy seem to have generated a good number, and t00b comes from Veelas Inc, originally.

5. Was FA always like this (i.e. the same 'format')?

Yeah, pretty much. We used to require people to email their fics in, before we had the submission form, though, and we didn't have the Park until about 3 or 4 weeks after Launch.

6. What was the original cover art like?

You can see the first draft sketch at [url]http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/fawa,[/url] but the first colour image is still visible at [url]http://www.cafeshops.com/fashoppe/48065.[/url] Ginny wasn't actually on the original; AA went live about 6 months after the rest of the site.

7. Who designed the original cover art?

Starling & Priscilla

8. Who was the first member of FA?

Techno Guy Paul is the first registered user here on the boards, but the first "member" of FA is probably RJ Anderson - she was the first author who wasn't also a mod. Catlady is also one of the early members, as is Penny. Gwen was originally just an author, but came on board very early on...

Some Historical Screenshots

• July 9, 2001 cover by Starling and Priscilla; WebCite
• its first cover sketch, ^{Archived version}
• July 2002 cover, Magsby ; WebCite
• 2003 cover, ^{Archived version}
• 2004 cover, ^{Archived version}
• 2005 cover, ^{Archived version}
• current cover as of ? to 2015, Magsby, ^{Archived version}

Some Timing Regarding History

Leveraging FanFiction.Net's Downtime

FictionAlley cleverly capitalized on FanFiction.Net's persistent and extensive downtime in 2001 to entice readers to its newly-opened site.

From an exchange on Google Groups in October 2001:

[NAPPA]: Does any one have addresses for good HP fanfiction. I am specially looking for Lily/James love/hate and Harry/Harmione stories. I have gone on the fanfiction.net but they are down for so long sometimes it makes me positively crazy. Please help me............

[Heidi]: At FictionAlley, we've set up a new page with ways to search by author, ship, lead characters and summaries - we will be adding full text searching this week. I know it's shameless promotion (but we are noncommercial, so there's that) - visit the Page O'Links (which I personally call FicAll)...

The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Incidents

FictionAlley was formed in the summer of 2001 to be a "community in which no person would be unreasonably censored or senselessly banned."

Many fans felt the site's creation was a response to Cassandra Claire's deletion from FanFiction.net.

In 2001, Flourish Klink wrote about this connection: "Many felt that Cassie had been treated unfairly; others realized that they did not agree with the terms of service. For others, this was the straw that broke the demiguise's back, causing vague plans for an HP archive modeled after the X-Files' Gossamer site to grow into inspiration to create fansites by and for the Harry Potter fandom. FictionAlley is one of those sites."

Heidi disputes the idea that there were only "vague plans" for the site that became FictionAlley. She stated in 2002 that "FA wasn't born because Cassie was blacklisted from ffn," but the planned site was adapted into a general fic archive "because many authors were disapointed with FFN's management and the incredible amount of downtime they suffered last year."

Other fans debated the extent to which plans for the site changed after Cassie's banning from FFN and whether FictionAlley really could be considered to have been "in the works" before that point.

See Cassandra Claire: A Notable Member. See The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle.

Some Money History

Beginnings: Schnoogle.com and the Desire to Save $35

In the beginning of 2003, Heidi Tandy wrote:

(fandom history note: Schnoogle.com started life back in February, 2001, as a site that Cassie and I made for fanfic-ship buttons - things like Sirius/Cordelia and Ron/Pansy and Metis/Ton Riddle. When we started Schnoogle, and thought it would be a little site for novel length fics by members of HP for Grownups, we thought we'd save 35 bucks and keep using the domain name. Oh, we were *fools*.)

Fundraising and Direct Contributions

When FictionAlley began, it cost us about $20.00 per month to keep the site online; then, it was easy for the mods to pay for everything ourselves. By early 2003, it cost about four hundred dollars a month to keep the site online, so over the holiday season that year, we started a fundraising drive to raise money to buy a new server and renew our domain names for a decade. Wonderful donors helped us cover the cost of our server expenses, and sponsored the domain name renewals.

Then, in the summer of 2004, Dragon.com donated servers to us, which have kept FA online since then. However, in May of 2010, Dragon was purchased by a larger company, and are no longer able to donate servers to FictionAlley; they are currently charging us $200 per month for the three-server configuration that we are currently using. We are looking at other options, so if you work for an ISP that might be able to donate server space to a 501(c)(3) please email us at heidi @ fictionalley.org (without the spaces).

Our staff has managed to cover the server costs through the summer of 2010, especially given the down-time situation in July of 2010, but we are currently conducting a Server Fundraiser. Please click the button below to donate, or click here for more information.

If you're giving under $10, PayPal may be your best bet, because they take a smaller cut than JustGive.org, but for donations over $10, JustGive's cut is smaller and JustGive allows anonymous donations; NetworkForGood also allows you to give to us anonymously, but they require you to donate an additional 5%, which goes directly to them. Check out this calculator to see how much of your donation goes to the facilitator, and how much goes to support FictionAlley.

Some Firsts

Nominated in April 2004, it was the first fanfic site to get a nod in the Webbys.

First Fics and Members

"Who wrote the first fic to be posted here? Heidi! Me! We uploaded my fic, Surfeit of Curses, first, to test things. But seriously, among the first fics on FA were fics by the authors [ Maddy, Narri Patters, Colin, AngieJ, me, Cassie, Simon, Alex, Carole Estes, Starling, Priscilla, Jana, Yael, Viola, etc.] When the site launched, we had about 30 authors on Schnoogle and when the other three sites went live a few weeks later, we were probably pushing 100 writers."

The first list of authors on the site is: "Cassandra Claire, Lori, Rhysenn, AngieJ, Penny & Carole, heidi, Barb LP, Yael, Gwendolyn Grace, Flourish, Viola, George Weasley’s Girlfriend, and Al."

"Who was the first member of FA? Techno Guy Paul is the first registered user here on the boards, but the first "member" of FA is probably RJ Anderson - she was the first author who wasn't also a mod. Catlady is also one of the early members, as is Penny. Gwen was originally just an author, but came on board very early on."

A July–August 2001 Wayback link to: the authors and stories, click in "Fanfictions" on the toolbar.

Moderator Posts: June 2001

Maddy (aka flourish) is the main poster, and the > is me, heidi8

> So what better way to divide the fics than into *four houses*? Not that each archive will be given a house name, but we can be given house colors - in other words, schnoogle.com will be green & grey, because all our fics are "ambitious" and full of plots, just like Slytherin.

H'm... that's a good idea! Our logo should probably be green & grey, too, or at least mostly green & grey. Maybe each archive should have a "poster character" - schnoogle's would be Draco, of course, and Gryffindor's could be HogwartsHottie!Harry, Ravenclaw's Crafty!Cho, and Hufflepuff's... erm... maybe Fred&George, although that's cross-houses ^_^

> And there could be one main page at a domain name like HP-FANFICTION.ORG (yes, org. trust me) which will have a splash screen with the 4 "houses" on it, organized like they are on the school crest - mouseover tells you which types of fics are in that section - and from that, you can click on the section you want to go to.

First off... this page would definitely have links to all the archives & a blog that has announcements. However, maybe we could work up a BETA reader service like they have at Sugarquill? Perhaps a discussion board for open fanfic discussion and not just reviews.

Heidi - don't use blogger for that announcements blog! I can install a weblog that's much easier to use and allows more freedom, plus, it's run off your own servers. No significant space usage, and you don't have to deal with Blogger going down. Anyway, I can install that whenever we get hosting. I can also install a guestbook run off our own space with no ads.

I can make an image with the school badge where mouseover shows what fics are in the archive. I'm sure Rhysenn can, too. Plus... maybe we could divide up the main pages' HTML between people? Rhysenn takes the very main page & one archive, I take another archive, yael takes another, and whoever else does the third? Not only would it divide the workload, it would definetly be a good learning experience for all involved. I know we all have tricks to teach each other :) (Rhysenn, I want to talk to you about the code you use on your page... it's super cool, and it's slightly different from the mouseovers I know...)

Of course, Oh, and have you guys given thought to the cost of all this? if we have five archives - the four and then the, we're going to have to have 5 separate accounts at $10 a month each. I would suggest getting a cheap host, like Yahoo or something, for the main domain - it seems wasteful to pay $10 for main domain stuff each month, since there won't be that much there. Anyway. This means we need to do some fundraising, because we're currently at $15 for each domain we purchase (dotster.com is $15 domains, the cheapest I've found yet) and then $55 a month! Nobody wants to pay all that!

Another bit of history, June 2001:

Wednesday, June 27:

Cassie & I were talking last night about Maddy/Flourish's idea that there should be separate "sites" to handle the different HP fanfictions, especially since, for reasons of organization, we're only going to be hosting novel-length fanfics by those over 17, with a few "mature teens" "grandfathered" in (I know - bad word choice). So what better way to divide the fics than into *four houses*? Not that each archive will be given a house name, but we can be given house colors - in other words, schnoogle.com will be green & grey, because all our fics are "ambitious" and full of plots, just like Slytherin. Now, the rest of these are just thoughts - feel free to suggest your own division: - The "blue" archive can house the general mysteries, dramas and horror fics, because they require "booksmarts". - The "yellow" archive could host humor and parodies - the good- natured fics. - The "red" archive can host the romances, because, well, what romance doesn't involve at least one Gryffindor? Feel free to play with the categories, but I do like the color schemes.

And there could be one main page at a domain name like HP-FANFICTION.ORG (yes, org. trust me) which will have a splash screen with the 4 "houses" on it, organized like they are on the school crest - mouseover tells you which types of fics are in that section -and from that, you can click on the section you want to go to. That way, we have unity of purpose, and some unity of style, but no

burden on one group to archive every type of fic. Any thoughts?

Opening Posts: Public Introductions

From July 6, 2001, the first post to the sites Yahoo Group, FictionAlleyWriters and Artists, was by Heidi8:

Welcome to all of you - you writers of novel-length fics (or fic arcs, which can count too)

We've set this list up as an informational place, where you can learn more about FictionAlley.org - which we hope will be the central Harry Potter fanfiction site. We're still in the process of setting up the backend and the site's policies, so we probably won't have answers to all your questions yet...but things are moving along among the SchnoogleMods.

"Schnooglemods? What's that?"

Well, here's the situation. FictionAlley is going to be the OverSight for the archive - and there are going to be 4 houses - one for novel-length fics (Schnoogle.com), and (most probably) one for romance, one for humor and one for darkfics (mystery, romance, etc.) - the other 3 houses will not be "novel-length fics", though.

We've looked over sites from other fandoms, like the Star Wars site at www.fanfix.com, for organizational inspiration, we're perfecting our HTML and database skills and we're putting together a menu of excellent resources and treats for the readers and writers.

Schnoogle is going to be the first of the FictionAlley sites to go up - we have an ideal soft launch date in the next week or so (: crosses fingers) and the other houses should launch shortly thereafter. If everything goes as we hope, at least a skeletal version of FictionAlley should be ready to go up on Harry's 21st Birthday.

At the moment, we're trying to keep the number of authors low, so we can get everything up & working with a limited number of fics - and we are going to have technical standards (minimum length of chapters, minimum length of completed fics, requested spell-checking and Lexicon-checking (in other words, spell the words the way they are in the book wherever possible)) since at least in the immediate future, all the fic-uploading we do will be by hand.

We're still working on the exact policies, and will post them here shortly.

FictionAlley should be at least 83% fun - yes, everyone will likely get the occasional UnFun flame, but on any given day, visiting FictionAlley should not be something that stresses you out :)

Happy to see you here!

Heidi

One of the first posts to the forum was Cassandra Claire:

One: I'm Cassandra Claire, I've got a trilogy of "Draco stories" in the works, starting with Draco Dormiens, continuing on through Draco Sinister, and finishing up with Draco Veritas, in which I kill all my characters to prevent myself from writing yet another sequel and blowing the whole 'trilogy' concept.

Two: Um, "Cassandra Claire" is fine. Pen name comes from Jane Austen's "The Beautiful Cassandra." http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/austen/juvenilia/cassandra.html

People tend to call me Cassie or Cass, although I don't particularly like Cass. *glares pointedly at Simon.*

Nice to see you all here!

Cassie

Other first posters who made introductions, along with Cassandra Claire and Heidi8:

• Simon Bradford
• yael
• Alicia/Sue
• R.J. Anderson
• Al
• Lori Summers
• AngieJ/Ebony
• Narri
• Rhysenn
• A.L. Milton
• Carole Estes
• Katrina Germann

Discussions About Submission Policies and the NC-17 Rule

In 2002, a fan wrote in a LiveJournal comment:

[fuck]: Sorry about the subject line, but just wanted to make sure my post was not Fiction Alley-approved as soon as possible.

How do I put this? I love the folks who run FA. Haven't even the mildest quibble with any one of them. But I have a lot of problems with the site. Ranging from it being impossible to find slash fics to not being able to link to stories from the summary pages to, yes, the NC-17 restriction. I'm sure there is a reason for this, but I'm curious as what it is exactly.

I guess the question is what is its intended audience? [...] Since hp is after all a childrens' series, I understand it's important to make the site safe for kids, but I think it's also necessary to set up another site -- or some sort of system within FA -- that caters to hp's many adult writers and readers, and the more mature themes that many of them gravitate towards. Especially since, in my humble opinion, much of the best stuff (not all, but a lot) being written in hp fanfic is a hard R or over.

ivyblossom, the journal owner, replied:

The reason for the NC-17 restriction is a deal they have with their server, nothing more. We've been considering setting up a Veela server to house NC-17 fics as a kind of leering, horny cousin of FAs. I would personally insist on a different form of navigation, however...I wondered how hard it would be to rip off a version of ff.net, where we can assign usernames to authors whose fics are approved and they can upload them themselves.

In 2004, Heidi8, FictionAlley's founder, commented on 'Elite' archives?, a post discussing fiction archives and their policies:

Actually, we also check for "originality" [as well decent grammar and spelling] and need a fic to have 75% original content before we host it and that's mostly to prevent things like what happened last week, when someone submitted the script from Beauty & the Beast with only character name changes. Now, I'm not saying that putting HP characters into other universes is inherently bad - I did it myself with Pride & Prejudice, and I've included a lot of lines from Emma in my fic Guileless, for the CCC challenge, but if we allowed people to upload things without having that "original to the submitter" marker, we'd end up hosting a lot of those "search & replace" scripts. As it is, we allow people to use the plot and a lot of dialogue, as long as they change enough to hit that 3/4 mark.

We have been criticized over the years for being too harsh, for not being harsh enough, for allowing Mary Sues, for not banning silly romances and "uncanonical" things like "Remy" and "Siri" and snogs between Harry and Draco and the like, so we're used to not being able to please everyone, but we were the *first* archive in the fandom to have any minimum standards for grammar & spelling, while not placing restrictions on plot. When we started FA, the only archives in the fandom were ffn (which was down for most of the summer of 2001 (which is one of the reasons why FA was founded in the first place)) and Sugarquill, which placed restrictions of plot and characterization on the authors they hosted - I think that given their current structure, they probably qualify as an invitation-only site, which is very different from the structure on FA, and possibly closer to the way DA is now (and I notice I'm no longer hosted there; should probably pop over and ask the mods why).

Also, when we started, we were closer to Skyehawke in that when an author's fic was submitted and had reasonably good grammar & spelling, we'd upload the rest of that fic regardless of the SPaG. But that grew into an untenable situation, as people had one chapter beta read, and then gave up, which is why you'll see a lot of the fics from 2001 and early 2002 with dialogue punctuation, use of "Hermoine" and other misspellings, etc. We don't do that any more, and haven't in almost two years, but we got a lot of grief when we changed to require reasonable SPaG in all chapters.

When it comes to canon coherence, if you slap an AU label on something, we'll let you get away with anything, But the original inspiration for the requirement came from me seeing a fic where James, Sirius, Remus, Severus, Lucius and Tom Riddle were all the same year.

Basically, we needed a way to try and cause authors to be familiar with the text of the books, either by reading or listening to them, themselves, or using the Lexicon or another resource as a guide. It's not hard, and it helps to weed out the I WROTE THIS FIC IN 4 MINUTES IN MATH CLASSSS WHILE HIGH ON MOUNTAIN DEW WHEEEEEEEEEE submissions.

The original plan had been to have the NC17 stories archived separately from the rest of FA. FA was technically planned in June/early-July 2001, launched in mid-July with Schnoogle, and the rest of the fic houses at the end of July. We had *always* planned to take ArtisticAlley live in the Spring, and also launch an NC17 archive then. And yes, FFN was hosting NC17 fics, so there didn't seem to be a real rush to create the NC17 section.

The reason for keeping them separate was that a number of our mods, including Flourish, Colin, Rex, Starling, Priscilie, Mack, Phil, etc., were under 18, and we thought it would be too difficult to keep them from being exposed to the NC17 stories, and still host them on the site, in part because Flourish and Colin were so active in the (then entirely manual) uploading process that summer and fall. When Stacey (Phatgirlfics, now Phatphatkitty) came on in the early fall, it was with the expectation that she and Gwendolyn Grace would work to create the NC17 version of FA - "Arrowtick Alley" was the original name plan.

But in the Spring, various Veelas talked with Stacey about the archive, and there were some machinations there which I didn't know about until after the fact, and Stacey asked us to bring Kissaki (machiavelian) on to FA so she could learn the ropes, with an expectation of starting an NC17 archive in 2002 that would be a sister site to FA. Stacey had a falling-out with FA in August of 2002 and quit working with FA then, but Kissaki was still part of FA, and that September, when FFN went down in their lie-filled "commemoration of 9/11" gesture, which was really done so they could tuck away the NC17 stories, Kissaki, along with a number of FA staffers (including some people who are still on staff for both sites) started work on RS.org.

So basically, RS.org was created as an FA sistersite, and we still do think of it that way. It was founded on similar principles, by many of the same people, and with a similar structure. And given the way domain names and passwords work on the internet, and the way the sites are hosted, it's sort of working well this way. At least, I hope to think so...

"Houses"

• Schnoogle - hosts all novel length fanfiction
• The Dark Arts -
• Astronomy Tower
• Riddikulus
• Artistic Alley
• Fiction Alley Park - the message board community
• HP Ink Pot - hosts essays written on the fandom
• Harry Potter Wiki

e-Mentors

From a March 2003 post:

Dear Park Denizens:

Last spring, FictionAlley implemented an innovative program to help newbies grow accustomed to life in and around the Park. Almost a year and thirteen thousand newly registered members later, the FictionAlley eMentors program has grown to include thirty happy bouncy-schnoogly eMentors, showering lots of loff and care on all who register on our site.

Some of our eMentors' RL situations have changed... and although we'll hate to see them go, we must look towards the future (towards Nimbus - 2003 and the release of OotP!) It is time to replenish our supply of eMentors!

If you're an oldbie (in other words, if you've been a registered user for over three months from the time the application is due) and would like to be an eMentor, take a look at the application at the bottom of this post. Then, cut & paste the answers into an email, put your User Name and the word "EMENTOR" in the subject, and send the email to [email protected]

Note: If you've accrued more than one point for ToU violations in the past four months, you'll have to wait for the next round of eMentor selections.

You don't have to answer every question correctly - but at least 75% have to be correct. Remember - all the answers are on FA (including the Point Me! page, FAQ and Newbie's Guide), and if you're really an oldbie, you should know them, or at least know where to go for the answers. If you don't know the answers, you're probably still a newbie and we loff you and you should wait a few more months before

you apply to be an eMentor.

Controversies

It has come to the attention of the officers and directors of FictionAlley that allegations as to improper citation of sources have been made against fics posted by Heidi, Cassandra Claire and Ebony.

Such allegations have to be taken seriously, and, accordingly, the authors and the mods have been given time to consider the allegations, and for the authors to edit the fics concerned. As Cassandra Claire had already decided to delete her fics for unrelated reasons they will not be restored; the other authors are or are in the process of editing, and revised versions either have been or will be posted in due course.

FictionAlley's TOS provide for a formal complaints procedure to be made to the ombudsbeing at [email protected] for any concerns which Parkies have about site administration. Please make use of this channel in the event of any concerns which you may have about the site and its adminstration.

Cassandra Claire: A Notable Member

Cassandra Claire was an early member, and The Draco Trilogy was posted there after it was removed from Fanfiction.Net. The fifteenth chapter of Draco Sinister was the very first fic posted to FictionAlley.

Cassandra Claire's fic page link to the last chapter of Draco Veritas was posted in August 4, 2006 and now leads to a FictionAlley page which says:

Error 404: Not found! As the first step of troubleshooting we suggest trying to browse the directory of the file you wanted to see, as our directory indexes are meant to be helpful. Story Management for authors is here and the story search is there. In August 2006 a volunteer techie made a mistake while working on the production database. We think maybe 500 fics were lost. If you think this error has something to do with that, you can can write to [email protected]. The general contact address is [email protected]. If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.

Cassandra Claire's fic page on FictionAlley has been excluded by the Wayback Machine.

In 2018, Flourish Klink said:

[Flourish Klink]: To this Twitter post in which someone was like, “fuck Cassie Clare,” Cassandra Clare, the YA novelist, “because she doxxed a preteen girl and called her mom and ratted her out about all the stuff she was doing on the internet.”"... And what was interesting about that was that I looked at that and I knew from the way that this rumor has developed over the course of many years that the preteen girl in question is actually me. Me, 20 years ago [when I was 12 years old]. [laughs] Because I’ve followed the different ways that this rumor has gotten passed around Tumblr, and has been, you know, gone everywhere. And like most rumors, it starts from a seed of truth in that I was a preteen person and Cassie Clare definitely had at least one conversation with my mother. [laughs]... And here’s the thing. The way that I met Cassie was a I wrote a really negative review of Draco Dormiens, her famous Harry Potter fanfic. [Elizabeth Minkel]: Cool, good job. FK: So when we initially met I had critiqued her publicly on the internet. ELM: And you were like 12? That’s really good. FK: For among other things I think bad use of semicolons? I had a lot of really nitpicky grammary things. It was all very silly. ELM: You were a terrible 12 year old. That’s awful. FK: She was like 23 or something. Anyway. So we had met this way, and so some people I guess maybe think that that meant that we still hated each other later, but we didn’t? I was sort of publicly not into her fic, and then we were working together to found this fanfic archive, because it’s possible to work with people whose fic you don’t like, it turns out, to found a fanfic archive. And because of doing all this there was a bunch of legal stuff and so the adults involved wanted to talk to my mom to make sure it was OK that I was taking part in this project. Right? So yes, I gave them my dox so that they could call my mom and confirm that it was OK! [laughing].

See The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Debacle.

See The Cassandra Claire Plagiarism Incidents.

FictionAlley and Warner Bros. and CafePress

This topic touches upon fandom and profit, copyright and other legalities, fandom and visibility, and more.

FictionAlley had been fundraising beginning a few months after it was created, as the monthly costs soon became more than could be handled out of pocket by its owners. See Some Money History.

On May 5, 2002, the "New York Times" published Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume, an article which included an interview with Heidi Tandy and information about "FictionAlley."

The next day, the moderators of FictionAlley announced that they were accepting a proposition from Warner Bros. that the website become an affiliate with the giant entertainment company.

Dear Friends of Fiction Alley,

We are delighted to announce that Fiction Alley has been invited to join the Warner Brothers WBShop.com Affiliate Program. We are now able to provide our site visitors and users with direct links to a wide assortment of Harry Potter merchandise from the official online Warner Brothers Studio Store. While the affiliate program is open for anyone to join, we were thrilled to be invited by Warner Brothers to join the program.

This program will pay Fiction Alley 10% of sales generated from WBShop.com links on our site. Therefore, if you follow links to the WBStore from Fiction Alley (including Schnoogle, The Dark Arts, Astronomy Tower, Riddikulus, FictionAlley Park and Artistic Alley) and purchase any of the Harry Potter products for sale, WBShop.com will award 10% of your payment to us, which we will use to cover the operating costs of Fiction Alley.

We are especially pleased and proud to announce this association with WBShops.com as we represent one of the biggest Harry Potter fanfiction archives on the internet. We are overwhelmed with excitement to be recognised by Warner Brothers and WBShops.com as a legitimate fansite for Harry Potter, and as a site hosting HP fanfiction in particular.

We would like to thank every founder, moderator and administrator who has put countless hours and dollars into creating, developing, and maintaining the Fiction Alley group of websites since its launch in Summer, 2001. We also want to thank each and every one of our authors, artists, and forum visitors - without you, Fiction Alley would have no reason to exist. Thank you all so much for helping us to build and grow into what we are today - one of the best sites in the world for Harry Potter fanfiction, fun, and friendship.

With best regards, The Moderators and Admins of Fiction Alley

Shortly after, the FictionAlley mods agreed to let Warner Bros. put links to their for-profit sites for fan to buy merchandise, with "FictionAlley" getting some of the commissions.

This sparked much conversation around the issues of fandom and profit, Warner Bros.' often adversarial history with fandom, the possibility of a large, for-profit company dictating content (example: no slash, levels of explicitness), getting too cozy with TPTB in terms of visibility, and others.

We've been fundraising to support FictionAlley since late 2001; in 2002, WB invited us to be an associate at their store, told us that being an associate of other shops was fine, and know about our FA-branded merchandise at Cafe Press. It's okay. Really!"

See more at FictionAlley and Warner Bros..

Some 2002 Responses by Fans and Mods at FictionAlley

your not seriously going to do this are you???? I mean.... look at hat theyve done to other sites. I can't believe this....

what do you mean "they" and what do you mean by other sites?

We've actually done a lot of research into this matter and we think this is a good decision but if you have concerns please ask!

What have they done to other sites? Personally, now that WB has learned of our existence from the NYT articles, I'm very glad that they chose to try to make money off us rather than to try to shut

us down.

I understand what you are saying, and i understand the financial ramifications of this, But what I mean is the WB has a chip on its shoulder against pro-slash sites. Im not saying they would try and shut down the site or anything, im just asking if it could be in the best interest of ALL types of stories hosted.

I must say, you do have a point. Furthermore, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that, legally, fanfiction writers do not have intellectual copyrights on their work. Isn't there a risk of the WB using the better stories for their own profit without the writer's permission? I also fear that the WB may start problems over slash fics. This is a potentially serious problem. Do we really want a corporation to have such a large leverage over whether or not a certain kind of fic can be posted? Is this in the best interests of the fandom? Perhaps I'm paranoid but this reminds me of the incident that occured directly before FictionAlley's creation, when FF.net booted Cassandra Claire without prior warning. How unfortunate it would be if the same set of circumstances led to both the birth and demise of FictionAlley. Perhaps these worries are unfounded, in which case I readily apologize, but perhaps they are not, and I think that the Fanfiction community has the right to hear these concerns, and any others that may arise, addressed.

How would AOL TimeWarner have control over which fics can be posted? They are affiliates of FictionAlley, not the owners/moderators/admins of FictionAlley. They have no say in what goes onto the site beyond asking that it be kid friendly. The only thing they can do is as not to be affiliated with the site.

The slash community has nothing to fear. As a predominately slash writer I fear nothing of this affiliation and am happy that such has occurred so that FictionAlley can get the monies it needs to keep going. None of the slash that resides on FictionAlley is of a terrible and, or pornographic nature and they would have nothing to say about it. Warner Brothers by the way, does NOT have a chip on it's shoulder against pro-slash sites. It's the image of slash it is against. For other fandoms under Warner Brother's control I have heard of no fights against them in the slash community, it is just the image of "Harry Potter Porn" they wish to end.

Warner Brothers (AOL TimeWarner) has taken an amazing step by coming forward and embracing the fanfiction world instead of condemning it. I have been through many fandom Vs Warner Brothers fights and am actually shocked that they embraced us rather then fought us. This is a step in the right direction regarding the treatment of fans and I would applaud them if I didn't feel that I would look like a fool.

To get back to my point though (yes I realized I lost it somewhere), an affiliation just means that we (the site) is joined to Warner Brother in a professional, monetary relationship. FictionAlley directs customers to their stores and in return, FictionAlley receives a bit of the profit. Warner Brothers has no input on what is done to the site and if they do not like what is on it, the extent of their control is to ask to no longer be affiliated with FictionAlley. The addition/removal of fics still only resides with the owners/moderators/admins of FictionAlley.

On another note, AOL TimeWarner does own the intellectual and trademark rights to Harry Potter (er, I think, I know they own the trademark rights) and none of our work IS copyrighted beyond other writers stealing our work, but I do not think that their is a flunky cruising every affiliated site just to steal our ideals and toss them into something. This has always been a problem no mater where our work was hosted. But really, I don't see Warner Brothers stealing our fics for their own purposes...what would they do with them?

Nobody has copyrights on anything they did not create (or purchase the rights to). This is common sense. As I understand it (am not a lawyer, folks) a created character (like my Kensington de Plume) who is completely unaffiliated with/related to any HP character (unlike Cassie's Rhysenn Malfoy) is, however, copyrighted to the creator.

WB screen "Buffy". There is slash in TV Buffy. It's safe to say that WB are slash-friendly.

WB have no leverage at all over FA. It's simply a "buy something from WB and FA get 10%" arrangement. Nothing more. If it becomes so, FA will discontinue the arrangement.

Insofar as WB *know* that we host fanfic and want to associate with us nonetheless? Of course it's in the fandom's interest!

In what way? WB do not own FA. They have no connection to us apart from the fact that we send shoppers their way and we get a cut. I am totally at a loss to see the similarity.

FA was not created in response to FFN's removal of Cassie's fics. The timing was coincidental, but "Cassiegate" was not our reason for existence.

I feel that they are unfounded, but it's good that you're thinking about the issues concerned. I'd recommend that you read some of the arguments at Slytherlynx's LiveJournal, which can be found at http://www.livejournal.com/~slytherlynx

None of the issues that you raise are any more or less valid now that FA has a purely commercial relationship with WB. WB knew about the fandom before the NYT article (remember the Chris Noxon article "Harry Potter Porn"?). They know about us now. Nothing has changed, apart from the fact that they are now appearing to support us. I cannot see that this will change.

As a slasher myself, I have no problem with my writing being accessible to anyone. That's what the Internet *is* -- accessible to anyone.

WB have, to my knowledge, taken *no* action against any slash site -- the only sites they went after during their "PotterWar crackdown" were ones with "harrypotter" in the domain name. HPforGrownups was not affected, nor was hpslash or any other fic archive.

The stories that FA hosts are *not* NC-17. I can't see that WB would have any problems with non-NC-17 fics, or they would not have affiliated with us. Before agreeing to the affiliation, we asked them to confirm that they knew

what we were and what we hosted -- and they did so.

exactly. First off... to the extent of my knowlage we as fanfic writers HAVE NO RIGHTS.

But as you say, i dont think giving them so much leverage is a good idea. Perhaps im looking at this all wrong.

Acually.... i think this is a completly different situation then what happened to Cassie Claire, but based on the same underlying issue. Copyrights.

Also... what will WB do with our stories? Heidi... do they no have permission to use our stories for they own benifit? Yes, thay probably could all along... but is it moreso now?

Yes, it would be a honor for a story to be reconized by the WB as supiror i suppose.... but would they tell you if they did?

-- Honeyduke, sorry for causing so much trouble.

Five days later, the mods gave some details, and also announced they would also have links to Amazon.com on the site. This announcement met with almost complete silence.

Hi! As many of you know, so far, FA has been completely funded by the mods and admins, with a small amount of donations by our users.

But last week, as we've been discussing here, we got the say-so from Warner Brothers to set up affiliation programs with them, as well as with Amazon (US and UK (we're looking into other countries too)).

What does this mean for you? It means that if you want to purchase products from Amazon or from the WB site (not just HP stuff, anything they sell counts) we *BEG* you to get to their site by clicking on our "Affiliation Urls" which are listed here: [link redacted]

If you live in the US, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE order the video from us by following those links. If you want to send copies of the books to friends and family, please follow those links. If you order anything from Amazon (especially really expensive stuff (even though there's a limit on the $$ we get from things like computers)) please follow those links.

If you've already ordered the video from Amazon, *cancel your order* and reorder it using our links.

Why are we begging like this? Because we get between 5% and 15% of what Amazon collects from any product you buy by clicking on one of those links, and we get a flat 10% from any purchase you make on the WB's site (and they're introducing new products for teens and adults, so stay tuned!)

In other words, by buying things you'd get anyway (like the LOTR movie, or the HP dvd, or HP action figures) you're supporting FictionAlley. And the more support we get, the happier and less stressed we are; we're certainly prepared to keep paying for FA things out of our own pockets, it's just that we'd rather not have to :D

I've added the link in the Bookmarks section here, and it'll be a bit more obvious from FA's main page, and on the reviewboards too by the end of the week. But you can start using it now! Please, do!

-- Heidi for FAMods

Some 2004 Responses by Heidi Tandy

[cheshyre]: Cafepress items with mottoes based on fanfic. There was a line of VSD t-shirts that had to be withdrawn for likenesses of the actors. Just searching CafePress, I can see pretty journals with fanart images of Harry Potter characters, frinstance. I heard rumors when CafePress enabled searching their entire database that WB was going to give Harry Potter fans until the end of July to get all HP trademarked materials off the site before bringing it to their lawyers' attention.

[Heidi8]: There's a really long backstory to this. Oh, first, let me introduce myself - I'm Heidi, one of the admins on FictionAlley and also a copyright/trademark/internet lawyer.

Back when FA started, we had a CafePress store in hopes of pulling in some money to cover our license and hosting fees. When we started, they were something like 150$/year. By our six month anniversary, we approximated that they'd be about a thousand dollars a year. This past year, we've paid about four thousand dollars in hosting & bandwith, and about four hundred more in licensing fees for our message/reviewboard software and other expenses.

Initially, the only things we had in the store were things like our Big Bad Mary Sue section and some co-ed naked fanficcing gear. We had a donation page on Amazon, and that was it - most of the money for the site's fees came from the mods & admins, and I think we made a total of fifty bucks on the CP store between that July and that May.

Then, in May, the New York Times did a story about us (on the front page) and even though the article mentioned some of the slash that we host (titanic_days' Snitch, in which Harry and Draco are twenthsomething gangsters and gay lovers in London) the WB Store people contacted us and asked if we wanted to be an affiliate of their new online store.

We said yes but wanted to make sure that they were okay with the stuff we hosted and the fact that we had this little cafe press store. They were and they were, so we did. Then, with their assent, we also signed up for other "associate" things like Amazon and Posters Now, and we started adding more to the contents of the CafePress store. The conditions were that everything be G-rated, and that nothing have both a character name *and* an image that may or may not be a character from the HP books. In part, this is because there is no copyright in most of the character images, and because we were using it as a design rather than as a trademark - and we weren't using the names, which are trademarked.

In other words, we're on one side of a line, and we are never crossing it. And despite all that, there's nothing WB could complain about regarding our ship gear because the ones for the specific ships have the clever ship names like Guns & Handcuffs (Draco/Harry), WolfStar (Remus/Sirius) and We Believe in Trees (Ron/Hermione) on them - and they don't have the characters' names at all, so they're like a Very Deep In-Joke.

"see my icon for what the image looked like"

The whole thing about the CafePress store change was because I made a call to one of the people I talk with at WB, in hopes of helping fans not get screwed over by this sudden and utterly un-previewed change by CP - CP, it seems, didn't even think through the potential implications of their changeover on fen with shops, and WB was very understanding that this was something nobody knew was coming.

Then, of course, a few days later, JKR posts on her website that she's a fangirl of nasubiona's artwork, and links to a site that hosts NC17 fic and art. La.

Also, re: Cassie - the CafePress problem was generated because people who don't like her complained to them, and she *was* using the GAP trademark (see my icon for what the image looked like) and trademarked terms like HOBBIT ("pervy hobbit fancier"). Of course, in the world of irony, we now have someone else using the Still Not King line on some Viggo merchandise. Sigh, it works all ways.

Some 2008 Responses by Heidi Tandy

In 2008, Heidi Tandy explained:

Fanfic sites like FictionAlley.org have been using google ads for years. Back in 2002, when WB's online store asked us to be an affiliate of their store, we asked them whether doing the same sort of affiliation with Amazon and other stores, and/or having small text ads on the site, would be thought of as commercial use, and they told us that they didn't consider it as such. Now, this is WB's legal department, specifically talking about fics, art, vids and essays rated R-or-less, and they have applied the same principle to other Harry Potter websites. And Mugglenet, who've worked with WB and also Scholastic, have pop-up ads as well as text ones on the fanfic portion of their site, for example, and they've talked about the six-figure-income they get from the site. FictionAlley's isn't anywhere near that - the site has never brought in more than a thousand dollars a year from the ads and affiliations, and we haven't had any GoogleAds since last summer since we had a Google Grant, and you can't do both.

Of course, this is just WB, and perhaps it's just HP, so other media companies and properties might read it differently.

Some 2013 Responses by Heidi Tandy

Heidi Tandy also commented on these affiliations in 2013:

The day after the article ran, when posts were popping up on Usenet, in Yahoo groups, and on FictionAlley about the havoc Warner Brothers and J.K. Rowling were surely going to wreak on the Potter fandom and all other fandoms besides, I got an email from the new manager of the recently relaunched WBShop.com site, asking if FictionAlley wanted to be an affiliate of their store.

They didn't want to shut us down. We could stay online, we could go on having and sharing fanfic and fanart, discussions, debates and all sorts of creativity, regardless of the ships/romances they included - and we didn't have to worry that they'd Expelliarmus our stories or pictures. That kind of contact from The Powers That Be - supportive, interested and curious - would start to occur more and more frequently as time went on, until an invitation to the Warner Brothers studio was, if not a common occurrence, at least a logical step. But that's the moment when everything changed.

Fan Reactions to the Move to AO3

When it was announced in July 2018 that FictionAlley would be "moving in with An Archive Of Our Own", many fans reacted with joy and nostalgia to the news. Some collected fan reactions from the AO3 announcement post:

SkyTintedWater

FictionAlley! <3

That was my very first introduction to fanfiction when I was younger. Thanks for preserving it for us :)

Gracerevealed

Wow FictionAlley!! This was the MOST popping HP archive back in the day.

pygmy_puff

I didn't even know it was still around! That's great, I had a really tough time navigating on FictionAlley and gave up on it years ago. Happy to see the works being brought over to AO3. :)

lanenk

Oh wow, I remember that site, nostalgia overload. I can't believe it's been 17 years. I am so glad A03 is archiving it here, there were some excellent fics there.

Redsparkletea

Thank god! I loved that site but the navigation was very "old internet" and counterproductive to finding fic. not to mention it got very hard to even load. I'm glad these works are being saved.

Jondar

My goodness! 17 years!

It's wonderful to see FictionAlley being archived here on AO3. A huge thank-you! to Open Doors, the OTW and AO3 for helping preserve this massive archive of Harry Potter fanwork!

As one of the founding members of FictionAlley, and one of the first behind-the-scenes people behind the site (uploading fics, moderating etc.) it's gratifying to see this archive preserved.

Thanks again!

Further reading

Meta

• a link to 50 fan essays posted between 2006-12 to HPinkpot, a section at FictionAlley

News Media

These articles mention "FictionAlley":

• Harry Potter and the Quest For the Unfinished Volume by David D. Kirkpatrick, "New York Times" (May 5, 2002)
• The New Powers That Be: Harry Potter, the triumph of fandom, and the future of creativity. by Laura Miller, "Slate" (September 11, 2015)
• Harry Potter Alliance Uniting 5,000 Fan Creators to Fight For Fair Use and Copyright (August 28, 2015)

References

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