Talk:Sports Night

Questions needing answers: I think Cori Lannam may have been the moderator for the general fanfiction list on eGroups/Yahoo!groups, but I'm not completely sure. Also, I cannot link to Trickster at the moment--is the slash archive still there? If not, is it someplace else? Sinead 21:43, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Hm, I don't remember if Cori was the moderator for the mailing list. Sadly, the archive on Trickster vanished several years ago, when the server crashed; I'm not sure whether Cori didn't have a backup or had just started to move on by that point and wasn't interested in reuploading everything, but it never went back up after that crash. Huge, huge pity -- that was one of my favorite archives. And argh, I can't even find the Our Boys archive on grapefruitehead.com anymore, gah! --Arduinna 22:05, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, grapefruithead went boom too. It does sound right to me that Cori was the mod for the list, but I can't swear to it. The list still exists on Yahoo, and it's called "slashsn". There is also an LJ archive at "sn_archive."--Nestra 22:45, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

She definitely was the mod on slashsn; I remember that, and her name is still on the front page of the list. I'm not sure about the general fic list, though. Thanks for the heads-up about the lj archive comm, I'll stick it in the entry. I have no idea if this is feasible, and I am not even subbed to slashsn anymore, but I wonder if it would be possible to get permission to snag the stories posted to the list and eventually put them on the Archive of Our Own when it goes live. If the posts are all still intact, it probably has a good percentage of the slash that was posted to the old archive. Sinead 00:09, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

If we can get the raw data from either archive, we can host on the AOOO. --Speranza 02:41, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm in the process of getting in touch with the friend who owned grapefruithead to see if she kept any of the raw data from Our Boys, as I, in a fit of idiocy, did not. Then I figure I should probably contact the writers archived there and see if they still want their fic to be included on the AOOO, but if we can make it work I would LOVE to resuscitate that archive, because so many good stories were lost to the series of tubes.

Also, some of Our Boys is accessible through the Wayback Machine, but, as Punk pointed out, it would still be good to get in touch with the authors and make sure they want their fic re-archived. Will keep you posted. --Sabine 03:25, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, do! Two things they should know, though: a) the stories can be collected in the AOOO under the original archive name (i.e. as part of the Our Boys collection at the AOOO) and b) individual authors they will be able to go in, edit, or delete their stories if they want to. I'm pretty sure we just require archivist consent rather than every individual author's consent for archives (which is not to say you shouldn't write 'em if you want to), in that most people who entrust a story to an archive/archivist are entrusting their story to that persons care and presumably archived because they wanted the fic preserved and centralized. Anyway, let me know if I can help in any way. --Speranza 04:53, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I did make sure that I got their consent at the time, but Punk made the fair point that people may have submitted stuff back in the older days under their real names (or names other than they use now) so I will do what I can. I suspect most people will be on board, they were excited to be included at the time! And yes, I will absolutely ask for your help. *g* Thanks for offering! --Sabine 05:01, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

For fun, here is the Wayback Machine's most comprehensive capture: http://web.archive.org/web/20060507222722/www.grapefruithead.com/ourboys/sntitle.htm -- the stories actually archived on grapefruithead still work, and are all .txt -- but many of the stories that the page links to on other sites like geocities are gone. At the time I gave people the choice of being archived or just linked, and several people did prefer a link to their own site instead. Still even many of these I bet I can recapture. /goes back to poking. --Sabine 05:35, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Aaaaand, here are the West Wing stories: http://web.archive.org/web/20060818155653/www.grapefruithead.com/ourboys/wwtitle.htm -- Ces, is this enough for you to move forward with AOOO, or should I be saving the text files individually? This is so exciting! I missed these stories so much! --Sabine 05:41, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

OMG, Sabine, you ROCK! *hugs archive!* Ces, here's the front page, with pictures and different ways of finding the stories on both sides, if you want to keep the original layout (not sure if that's an issue): http://web.archive.org/web/20060813144848/www.grapefruithead.com/ourboys/index.htm . And, bonus, Em archived DoG here, so we totally have a link now if we can't find a different one. \o/ --Arduinna 05:47, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I wasn't following this page, but YAY! AWESOME! Let me talk to ADT about the best way to do this. --Speranza 03:08, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh, thank god. I couldn't fine Charlemagne's stuff anywhere else. PolyRecs was very sad. --Nestra 05:52, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Charlemagne's (aka synchronik) website has been updated, all SN fic has been added. You can find the links at http://synchronik.livejournal.com/150635.html. Hermitsoul 07:26, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

EEEEEE! Thank you so much for the info! --Nestra 02:31, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

After adding DoG in it occurred to me that the WIP status (thanks for including that, Sabine!) could exclude it from the "notable" section; I included it because at the time, tons of people were reading it, and people were talking about wanting that final part for years afterward. But if wips don't count for other people, I'm cool with it coming back out again. --Arduinna 01:00, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I actually sort of feel like DoG has transcended being a WIP and is now just a very well known story/event in SN fandom that simply remains unfinished. I mean, Em has no intentions of going back and finishing it, and its unfinished status is almost a fannish event in and of itself, sort of? I'd be behind leaving it in, but if there's been a Fanlore consensus about unfinished fics I totally understand taking it out. --Sabine 02:05, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Cool, that's pretty much how I think of it -- and nope, I don't think there's any fanlore standard on wips. So we're good! --Arduinna 05:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I'd say it's notable! I was going to put it in myself, but when I didn't find it immediately, I gave up. ;) --Punk 02:07, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Heh. I figure, DoG deserves its own fanlore page anyway, so having the URL in hand right off the bat doesn't matter. (And even if it's no longer online, it can still be written up, so.) --Arduinna 05:02, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Her SN stories are not (yet?) at her new website, but one can still download that story in the SN zip file from her yahoogroup EmLand. So maybe not linkable, but not completely lost to new readers either.--Ratcreature 08:13, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

I think a lot of WiPs are notable, even if they are unfinished and remain forever so. This is definitely the case in HP fandom. --Kyuuketsukirui 09:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

2004 section

I'm not quite sure that it's clear in this section how the Yes, Virginia/machete beta terminology relates specifically to Sports Night fandom at large. I'm having a little trouble parsing the second sentence, I think. --Sinead 03:36, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree; the first sentence needs more info to make it clear how it affected the fandom itself (and I'm not sure that one small group of fans' migratory pattern would really have that wide an effect), and the second sentence is information that should go on the individual fans' pages as their personal timelines, I think. I'd say go ahead and take it all out. --Arduinna 07:48, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Source, attribution issues?

I'm a little concerned because I just found out that large chunks of the text on this page were apparently copied wholesale from the Fan History Wiki, and I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about that. Opinions? --Sinead 05:07, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh, bah. Having looked, yeah, it's not good -- attribution aside, I can't figure out how much of FHW's stuff is copyable given their copyright notices. So I went the simplest route, and cut everything I could find that was copied from FHW (what I couldn't cut, I rewrote) from the "intro" section and the by-year timeline, which seem to be the places where the copying happened. The intro section was really canon & behind-the-scenes heavy anyway; it can't hurt to revamp things into a less detailed overview to give more focus to the fandom itself. (I'm happier with a less rigid timeline, too, so hey, it works all around *g*) --Arduinna 18:22, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

ETA - and by "can't hurt to revamp things", I mean, can't hurt to start over with a slightly cleaner slate; I don't think the overview section is anywhere near done yet, nor the history section. :) --Arduinna 18:54, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Your changes look great. I agree wholeheartedly that there was too much focus on the show, and not enough on the fandom.--Sinead 02:06, 21 May 2009 (UTC)