GeoCities Rescue Project

Related terms:	GeoCities
See also:	List of GeoCities Fansites
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The GeoCities Rescue Project is a project of the OTW's Open Doors committee. The goal of the project is to preserve fan fiction and other fannish websites hosted at GeoCities, a free web hosting site founded in the mid-1990s that closed on October 27, 2009.

The project was formally announced on July 13, 2009.

From a July 17, 2009 post at the OTW blog:

As we reported earlier this year, GeoCities, which hosts many fannish resource pages and archives, announced that it will be closing down at the end of the year. They’ve now announced a more specific date: October 26, 2009.

In response, the Open Doors Committee of the OTW would like to announce our GeoCities Rescue Project.

If you are the owner of a fanfiction archive or resource, meta or other fannish page on GeoCities and you are looking to house your fiction or other content, the OTW can help! Open Doors is teaming up with the Archive of Our Own and Fanlore to preserve as much material as possible.

Fanfiction: We’re offering AO3 beta accounts to fanfiction authors currently hosted on GeoCities –both single author and multiple author archives are welcome–so that you may preserve your fiction. If you are not the author, owner or site administrator, you can still document and memorialize parts of a fanfiction site on Fanlore, but we need an authorized person for an AO3 account. Contact Open Doors for more information!

Resource sites: If you are the owner of a fannish resource site, we recommend a page in Fanlore with a summary of the information and purpose of the site along with screencaps of the entry page and/or other key pages to convey the feeling of the site. We have volunteers who can help you set up a Fanlore page documenting both the content and feel of a GeoCities page. Even non-owners of a resource site can document and memorialize a site on Fanlore. Contact Open Doors for help or for more information!

For either a fic or a resource site, please include the URL of the site you wish to archive/preserve, and an email address. If you are the administrator of a multi-author site, please include email addresses for each hosted author (if possible).

From the OTW's Geocities Rescue project page:

GeoCities Rescue Project: GeoCities, a web hosting site founded in the mid-1990s which gave free home pages to its users, closed its doors on October 26, 2009, and took down all its sites. Many fans used the site; therefore fandom lost many early archives and resource sites when GeoCities closed.

If you were the owner of a fanfiction archive or resource, meta, or other fannish page on GeoCities and you do not have another hosting alternative, we can help! Open Doors is teaming up with the Archive of Our Own and Fanlore to preserve as much material as possible. Fanfiction: We're offering AO3 accounts to fanfiction archives (both single author and multiple author archives are welcome) so that you may archive your fiction. (If you are not the owner or site administrator, you can still document and memorialize the site on Fanlore. Contact Open Doors for more information.)

Resource sites: If you are the owner of a resource site, we recommend a page in Fanlore with a summary of the information and purpose of the site along with screencaps of the entry page (to convey the feeling of the site) and key information. We have volunteers who can help you set up a Fanlore page documenting both the content and feel of your GeoCities page. (Even non-owners of a resource site can document and memorialize the site on Fanlore. Contact Open Doors for more information)

If you're interested in either archiving fic or preserving a resource site, contact us. Please include the URL of the site you wish to archive/preserve, and an e-mail address. If you are the administrator of a multi-author site, please include e-mail addresses for each hosted author (if possible.) GeoCities Rescue Pages include:

• Alassenya's Fiction: Alassenya on AO3; Alassenya on Fanlore.
• Dafna: dafna on AO3; Dafna on Fanlore.
• gardendoor: gardendoor on AO3; T.W. Lewis on Fanlore.
• grav_ity: grav_ity on AO3; Gravity_not_included on Fanlore.
• Hanofer: Hanofer on AO3; Hanofer on Fanlore.
• jaekayelle: jaekayelle on AO3; Jae Kayelle on Fanlore.
• jj_minerva: jj_minerva on AO3; jj_minerva on Fanlore.
• Pagan_Twylight: Pagan_Twylight on AO3; Pagan_Twylight on Fanlore.
• PatL: PatL on AO3; Pat L on Fanlore.
• smutty_claus: smutty_claus on AO3.
• Sweet Sorcery: Sweet Sorcery on AO3; Sweet Sorcery on Fanlore.

According to a March 2010 post, nearly 40 sites had been rescued.

As part of the rescue project, many fans helped to record Geocities fansites' existence in Fanlore, whether personal sites, fic archives, resource sites, links collections, and other. Much of the organizing and conversation happened in the Fanlore Dreamwidth community, while people spread the word through mailing lists, LJ communities, and individual emails to Geocities site owners.

The effort is ongoing.