What parts of fandom history were you a part of?

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Title:	What parts of fandom history were you a part of?
Creator:	GooseBook and commentors
Date(s):	August 2022
Medium:	reddit
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External Links:	What parts of fandom history were you a part of?
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What parts of fandom history were you a part of? is a reddit post at r/FanFiction posted in about August 2022.

The Original Post

Were you on an old-school Star Trek mailing list?

Ever find a printed copy of a fanzine at a yard sale?

Did you have a fic purged during Strikethrough?

Were you an AO3 early adopter?

Did you take part in some tumblr nonsense for the ages?

If you've ever told a witch "do not cite the old magic to me, I was there when it was written," let's hear about it!

Fan Comments

General

I joined ffnet in 2000 and had multiple fics removed during the first nc-17 purge. I also remember when it was commonly referred to as the pit of voles, which seems to not be a thing anymore.

I used to have a lot of fanshrines for various characters or fandoms, including one that was actually starting to get somewhat popular until I lost interest. Also had one of those fanlisting sites that was approved by thefanlistings.org which I am shocked to find is still up. Sadly my sites are long gone, though I still have all my old coding saved. I started making websites in 2000 and kept active with it until hmm maybe 2008? I remember running a TCG for a little while in 2007 and I think it carried into 2008.

I ran a fandom newsletter on LJ for over a year starting in 2006, for the Kingdom Hearts fandom. Good experience, but one I'll never repeat. Oof.

I was there to watch strikethrough go down and took part in discussions about it on LJ staff related journals, although I didn't lose anything in the purge myself. My fics were on LJ but I never posted them to communities and back then I wrote for small/dead fandoms so never had a huge following. Thankfully also didn't personally have any friends lose stuff, but I definitely kept up with what was happening and so I saw/read early discussions about AO3. Didn't participate in those, though. I also joined inksome! which was an 18+ LJ clone created in response to strikethrough and I'm really sad it never took off because I loved it. A la carte userpics, yes pls. I've yet to run into anyone else who remembers the site even though it lasted for three years.

I got my AO3 account within the first few days (Nov 15) of beta opening up to everyone, my userid is in the 1300s 🤣 I got it from an invite an LJ friend handed out, I never had to go through the queue.

I joined tumblr in 2010 during the glee era which I guess was during the time the site was getting popular? ngl I found the tumblr part of glee fandom very intense, even worse than the LJ part, so I only lurked, and when I lost interest in glee a year later I didn't touch tumblr again until 2017.

There's probably other things I'm forgetting or just don't seem big enough to mention. I was suuuuuper active in fandom during the livejournal days. I participated in a lot of communities, jumped in on a lot of the trends, watched a whole lot of fandom drama as it was happening, etc. So in that sense I was a part of fandom history, I guess. These days I find it hard to be/remain active in fandom because it's so fragmented and also so toxic in a lot of places. I stick to my dying fandom and talk to my few fandom friends and ignore everything else.

I got into fanfiction in the 90s sometime. I can't even remember the exact year. I was a fan of the original Star Trek, but more into the novels (though I did go to a convention once)! I think fanfiction truly blossomed in me with the Sentinel and Stargate fandoms. I posted on YahooGroups and the stories were archived to independently run websites (I believe they were Geocities, maybe LiveJournal, not sure). When I started my full time job after grad school, I faded out of fanfiction. I discovered it recently through a sudden obsession with Bucky Barnes after reluctantly watching FATWS awhile after it had fully dropped.

Most of my earlier stories are lost. Someone found a few of my Sentinel ones in a particular series archived on a website, but I have no idea where any of my other Sentinel or Stargate stories are. I had one published in an actual zine. Yep, a hardcopy paper thing. LOL.

Oh, and when I rediscovered the Sentinel fanfiction, I also discovered (or rather had my memory refreshed) that feedback at that time was called LoCs for Letters of Comment (at least in the circles I ran).

Back then, there was less slash and ship. Don't get me wrong. There was still a LOT of ship and slash, but my perception was that there was also a lot more gen. It was more even between the two (and gen might have even nudged out ship or slash in some circles). Feedback was more common (based on percentage of readers).

And ALMOST everyone was nice :) LOL. At least, that was my experience.

... I spent a lot of time visiting the Cascade Library, and still go there from time to time when I'm feeling nostalgic (yep, it's still there!) - then I noticed your name. If you're the same person that used to post there, I've spent many happy hours reading (and loving!) your stories! Coincidentally, I now write Loki stories!

...I witnessed a pretty major ship war in the mid-00’s that gave me trust issues.

There were still kinkme prompts that people would write entire stories in the comments for.

All the disclaimers.

“R&R, no flames please!”

Drapple.

Authors and talking to the characters in A/Ns.

Superwholock.

FFnet updated their tags to include up to 4 characters.

And I watched the dramatic and visceral shift in fandom ideology/rhetoric as Voltron kept releasing.

Also the 2018 Purge.

Never had any of my own fics struck down [in the Fanfiction.net Purge], but a lot of my favorites were purged in the great four: NC-17 and RPF ban on FF.net in '02, as well as LJ's Boldthrough and Strikethrough in '07.

I started out reading fic on independent fic archives on GeoCities and Angelfire before discovering FF.net. They used to post writing tips on the front page back then (and Xing sometimes wrote as well).

It was the height of the songfic era, and the fear of Anne Rice's lawyers seemed to have a firm hold over each author (even if they didn't write for any of her fandoms).

They were good times.

I was part of a Sailor Moon email list way back in the day with some of the great classic SM authors: Alicia Blade (aka Marissa Meyer), Lilac Summers, etc. I'm sure none of them remember me, but I did post some of my fanfic there. And I *definitely* read theirs. If anyone remembers the big Sailor Moon plagiarism scandal with the author named Ashley, I remember reading her chapters as they were being released and thinking they were so good they could be published. Well, turns out they were...

I was also a member of Gryffindor Towers in the very early 2000s, posted my fics on Sugar Quill and Checkmated, joined in shipping debates on Fiction Alley, and read both the Draco Trilogy and After the End as they were being released. I vividly remember reading the last chapter of After the End the morning Order of the Phoenix was released, while I was waiting on my copy to be delivered.

ETA: I also remember the days before FFN existed, when your only options were email lists and fandom-specific websites. When you submitted your fics in .txt format and asked readers to send you an email with their comments, and when you had to email the author if you wanted a notification when they posted a new chapter.

I lived through a lot of fanfic/fandom events now I realize...I've seen in real time the msscribe saga, Agony in Pink and the ff.net purges, saw My Immortal when it was new... I saw the rise and fall of SuperWhoLock on Tumblr, the rise and fall of Star Wars fandom both old and new in all online places, the wane and "death" of LiveJournal, the rise and fall of Quizilla stories. I was on Gaia Online and The Pendragon Adventure forums, watched them come into popularity and fade away, watched some authors turn from fanfic writers to published authors.

I'm not as old as the ancient ones who paved the way of fandom. But I followed after them in the next generation, I learned their ways of "don't like don't read" and multishipping, I stepped out of active fandom and took watch and lurked instead as they did, and passed what I knew to the next fans who asked and watched time pass and saw things change, some for the better (more representation and inclusiveness) some for the worse (purity culture, Twitter).

TL;DR: I'm in my 30s and grew up online. So I've seen some shit.

I started writing on FFN, but I spent the most time on LJ. I was very much there for Strikethrough, although I didn't personally lose any fics.

In terms of fandom history that I was part of:

I used to run a kink meme. I know there are still a few floating around, but LJ was really the height of their popularity.

The Ship Manifesto LJ community? was a big thing for a while. I definitely also wrote one [or] two of those.

Also -- In absolutely ridiculous historic fandom things -- Does anyone remember Fandom Secrets on LJ? I was the subject of more than one fandom secret.

I also read Fandom Secrets daily for a long time. It was fun.

I used to read Fandom Secrets like it was the morning newspaper. Loved it.

I discovered alt.startrek.creative on Usenet way back in the early 1990s. I spent hours browsing it on a nongraphical computer terminal.

But probably before that, actually. I got my hands on an ElfQuest fanzine called “Yearnings.” I might still have it.

i saw a/b/o be invented. i experienced the shift. i remember a time when a/b/o was not a thing. people used to write cis mpreg with ass babies, we used to die like men.

Way before abo, I found a website that was an archive for mpreg fics of any fandom, and I sat down and read all of the most bizarre ones.

I use to post of Quizilla. Nuff said. Remember limes?

...I was actively shipping Dean/Castiel from Supernatural on November 5, 2020.

Tumblr exploded. (So did Twitter but I'm not on there.) It was crazy and I loved every second of it. It honestly felt like we'd all been tucked morosely in our own little houses quietly waiting for the end with only three episodes to go, and then everyone screamed, ran out into the street, and proceeded to party their fucking faces off for a solid week. I hadn't even been shipping it for 12 years like some people had so I can't imagine what those folks were feeling.

Not everyone had a good reaction, even people who ship it, but I stuck to the "hell yeah" crowds and it was an awesome time.

Shrek/Donkey and the Blues Clues fic may have caused some psychic damage.

i lived through rise of the brave tangled dragons, and even saw/consumed some of the content itself

I managed to avoid most of the big events but for a taste of old school fic posting, there’s a memory from about 98/99.

To post a fic to my first site you had to 1) apply for membership by filling in a questionnaire and promising not to be a dick 2) email your fic to the site owner 3) wait for them to approve it or decline it 4) wait until after 6.00pm so you could use the internet at home to look at it and hope the owner had uploaded it that day.

We run Christmas gift fic/art exchanges and you had to give your rl address so art could be photocopied and sent in the post as the site couldn’t handle it.

The slash lived on a different site, and to join that one, you had to have references from a couple of fandom people who promised you weren’t going to cause hassle.

I watched the ffnet takedown in 2002 in real time and never saw a lot of my favourite fics again, but didn’t loose any of mine.

And I was there for the great 2020 swell of fandom and fic in the early lockdowns. I hope I never see anything like it again but it was a wonderful community feeling to be part of.

If you've ever told a witch "do not cite the old magic to me, I was there when it was written," let's hear about it!

I don't think I have ever done that before, but the more some parts of fandom seem to sink into activist induced revisioning/rewriting of the past, the more I want to yell at some of those people that no, it was not rampant homophobia that made a Harry Potter het archive not accept stories that had slash pairings as the focus.

There were at least five times as many slash archives, most of them exclusively just for one pairing, than there were het or gen archives. It made finding the stories one wanted to read simply easier to put it all on separate archives.

By Hawking's left toe and Einstein's toupee, there were archives exclusively made for family relationships, like the Severitus or Sevitus type of Harry Potter AU or the Vader raises Luke Star Wars stories.

I started off on fandom specific archives when I was 8 - specifically, a friend of mine who was 12 explained what fanfic was to me and wrote out the URLs to a Star Wars archive (and also chat room), to tide me over while we waited for the next Young Jedi Knights book.

From there, I made it to FFN, where I have a 4-digit ID and not only remember FFN Purge#the purges, I remember when the first ever Harry Potter was posted... in the Misc Books section.

I also remember Fanfiction Academy fics, where (fictional)bad fanfic authors would be sent to be taught by the characters in their fandom on how to write, with hysterical fangirl shenanigans, and readers would submit their ‘applications’ to be featured in the fic. I'm enshrined in at least three different fandom academies, if I remember correctly.

I was in a few Yahoo Groups for fandoms and RPs, and I will always remember the explosion that happened in the X-Men Evolution group after The Cauldron Part 1 aired - 11 year old me was at the computer all Saturday and Sunday as everyone argued over if Scott had turned evil (he was my favorite, so of course I had to be there).

I got a LiveJournal at 13, when you needed a code - I got mine from a friend in order to join a RPG, so the journal I used for a decade has Colin Creevey's name attached to it.

I was there for the ridiculous ship names on FictionAlley, and Cassie Clare stitching together quotes from other sources and calling it fic. I was also an active member of fandom_wank, which I miss every day.

I created a fan community on LJ for a minor character from a crime drama, and to this day I think that every fic written about him came from me and my two friends in the community. (Between LJ fading out and AIM dying, I lost track of both of them - Smithy, are you out there?)

I was an active poster on the Television Without Pity forums, as well as avid reader. I think I even had a few t-shirts from the site.

I was also part of the campaign where we sent Mars bars to the studio to convince them not to cancel Veronica Mars.

I read the Draco Trilogy while it was still being written/published, however I started reading only after Cassandra had put up that bs disclaimer, so I mostly just had fun watching out for Buffy quotes.

I was part of the multitude of people who took it upon themselves to explain Mr. Ogi Ogas and Mr. Sai Gaddam exactly why their survey was stupid, shitty, and a disgrace to science, in the incident that later became known as SurveyFail.

I don't know if anyone here will relate ? but over a decade ago it was a thing to write your fanfic in your notes app on your phone, screenshot it, and upload each those screenshots to instagram. We got creative with the fonts and stuff, some people downloaded third party apps to make theirs look prettier and whatnot. It was really aesthetically pleasing to me for some reason lol I'm not sure why this was a thing but I made a friend during that time who I wrote a couple things for on Quotev. Fun times :)

I remember when Miraculous Ladybug and it's Love Square were 4 different tags on AO3. I was there for all of 'em. Ladynoir, Marichat, and Adrienette and Ladrien. And then, one day, for no reason at all, they forged one tag to rule them all. Adrien Agreste - Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng - Ladybug. Thousand of fics concerning a specific angle, mixed together. Glorious chaos.

I was around for diaperward*

Twilight Edward/Bella diaperkink fan fic. They ran that poor woman off the internet LMAO

I was there during the Quizilla 7 Minutes In Heaven Days, and when scriptfics were still popular.

I remember reading stuff on Quizilla. Good lord that makes me feel old.

I was backstage with Sean Astin at GenCon when he proposed over the phone for Jordan Wood to Abbey Stone during the failed TentMoot. I'm also an old-school Xenite who subscribed to the original fan club kits.

I started a 'subscribers story'-trend on the main german speaking fanfic site of the early 2010s that accidentally spiraled into it's own subgenre.

I didn't even notice until years later, when I wanted to show my really old, bad fanfiction to a friend. I logged in for the first time in a decade to find my old fics that, at the time, only had a couple thousand reads, being a part of some sort of legacy. They added a whole new tag for these type of stories and my fics were credited as the first ones of their kind.

Funniest part is that it has been so long, the fandom is long dead (at least on that particular site) and the KPop crowd is completely dominating the tag I accidentally birthed with my cringy self insert German youtuber fics.

Edit: I cannot believe I am doing this on my main reddit acc but there is another part of fandom history that I am part of Wattpad, 2010s, One Direction fandom. The world was entering the absolutely critical phase of "I am being sold by my parents to a famous person" trope and I wrote a fanfic about 1D adopting mermaid me (yes. You read that right. I was a mermaid in my mind) and before you ask, yes, of course all the outfits my self insert wore were posted on a special Instagram account.

I read Star Trek fanzines back when they were usually mimeographed, back in the 70's. I subscribed to Menagerie & read "A Trekkie's Tale" (the origin of the term Mary Sue) when it was first published. I donated most of my old fanzines to a library archive years ago, & kinda regret it now...

I lost a fic at ff.net- it was a ‘dark fic’ to me at the time, but looking back it was pretty tame.

So many discussions through yahoo groups. People were also big into writing about fandom when I got into it in the early 2000s - I wrote articles about fic and interviewed well known authors and generally had a great time in the community aspect of it.

(Also I remember rules about how many times you could post on boards or lists each day because the servers couldn’t handle too much. The old 4 times an hour rule of The Bronze is a fond memory)

I don't quite know when it happened, it seemed to be a slow and steady build, but I was present when writing and reading fanfic became something to talk about publicly. I'm from the dark ages of don't tell anyone, make sure no one can trace your accounts back to your personal accounts, and make sure you plaster everything in "I don't own X I just play in their sandbox" so you didn't get sued or at least a cease and desist.

I was there when fanfic dot net cracked down on "lemons" and had to follow writers to WordPress accounts and other sites. A lot for fic writers left FF net in protest.

I was there for all the supernatural drama, serious and funny. The great Jensen Ackles Hair war will go down in history because it was so bloody stupid. I watched spn Twitter go up in flames whenever jpad did something problematic and asshole-ish. I saw death threats, and threats of physical assaults at conventions (to the point where event organisers had to step in) over ships and people saying Misha was their favourite. (When I stopped participating in the spn fandom online, I realised I had the same feeling of relief I had when I broke up with my toxic ex. It was eye opening to say the least.)

I watched decade long friendships go down in flames when it was announced Kristen Stewart cheated on Robert Pattinson.

There was a time where the only way you could get a black background on your Tumblr dashboard was to donate 5$ to help towards some massive oil spill. What year was that anyway? 2009?

I'm in my late 30s, so this may take a while:

I remember the olden days of dial-up internet, back when you couldn't browse the web and make a phone call at the same time; everything went all screwy if you tried. And during that same time frame, where the webrings, fandom sites, and fanfic repos really started to take off. (I think there's one or two people on here who remember Icy Brian's RPG site. That's where I got my start in consuming fic. And trying to write it, though I never had the guts to actually submit anything.)

And I remember the slow integration of broadband, and the fandom migration to Livejournal for fannish things... And I was there, Gandalf. I was there when the strength of LJ failed. And the massive panic that followed, as everyone desperately tried to back up their RP and fanfic accounts, lest the purge take them next. I was there for slow, painful death of LJ and the rise of Ao3, Dreamwidth, and Tumblr.

...So that by the time Tumblr got around to doing THEIR purges, I was just sitting there going "this feels quite familiar."

And then there was the 2020 pandemic, where I went a little bit crazy, but in a very quiet and productive "I think I'll just write 100,000 words in two months" fashion.

I remember lurking around Flames Rising forum The Fireplace on ffnet, probably around 2006-2008. It was a gathering source for trolls. Not that I was one, but it was one of those train wrecks you couldn’t help but be drawn to.

I was in the HP fandom when Thanfiction released the story DAYD. I remember reading the story and then finding out the writer had some sort of cult afterwards.

I remember reading fanfic on quizilla and mugglenet.

And now I’m part of the 2020 lockdown swell of fanfic.

Naming no names but…

My friend and I would take the bus to the main branch of the library to use the internet for free. Chat rooms were okay, even if we refused to answer A/S/L questions with anything but obvious misdirects. But I also spent hours searching out fanart on webrings and painstakingly writing down the URLs on notebook paper for later. I still recognize a lot of those early pieces when I run into them in the wild.

Wrote all the HTML with a borrowed how-to book at my side for my first attempt at a fansite and loaded each page in Netscape Navigator to make sure the links weren't broken before I got a few precious minutes on dial-up to upload the files.

Set off a multi-website flame war when someone kept doubling down on Author B having done a trope a certain way before Author A (one of my favorites) did, despite the publishing dates being right there on the site where we were arguing. Went back to my turf (a fairly large fansite) and someone was mocking the both of us for the flame war in the chat room, so I angrily announced that I had been defending our author and flounced. Came back once or twice on a sockpuppet account to watch the chat but the magic was gone and the site folded at some point.

Went to a one-off convention in another state for a different author I liked and met a bunch of people from my first BBS forum in person. Got a little weirded out how many of them recognized my face from my little fan gallery (I hosted some member photos for a different subsection of the forum on my free webhost fansite), given how many members hung out on those forums.

I guess I'm also a fairly early adopter on AO3? I didn't realize until the last year or two that my profile number is relatively low. It just seemed like everyone I was connected to had an account, so I decided to go for it since I was getting back into writing.

I was aware of Strikethrough at the time, although I don’t think I was affected by it. All kinds of fandom wank, too, when we still called it that. I was in a few LJ communities for sporking (anyone else remember that?), which…I now feel bad about. I read and wrote my first fics on TolkienOnline, I believe, and I can’t remember if that was before FFN existed or if I just didn’t know about it at the time (I also had an account on A Teaspoon and an Open Mind for a bit). I was definitely a pretty early adopter for AO3, and I was especially thrilled to discover how much easier it was to edit published fics there compared to FFN.

My first fan fiction was published in an APA (Amateur Press Association). My earliest writing digitally was posted on a BBS (Bulletin Board System), which predated Usenet and even the widespread rise of the Internet.

There is a 'ship (Adric/Nyssa) I have been carrying the torch of for 40 years. At times I think I was the only one in the world who actually wrote about it.

I am a veteran of the Ranma 1/2 shipping wars on Rec.Arts.Anime (Ukyo is a much better match for Ranma than Akane!!) Entire continents were deforested to produce the electricity needed to fuel that conflagration.

And don't even get me started on the toxic wasteland that was Rec.Arts.DrWho in the early 1990s. Expressing the wrong opinion there could get you killed. There's a reason why I've generally ignored DW fandom ever since. ("You see me now, a veteran // Of a thousand fannish wars // I've been living on the edge so long // Where the winds of flame-wars roar")

When I was first writing fanfiction, the term "ship" hadn't been invented yet. Same-sex fanfiction was referred to generically as "slash", from the abbreviation "K/S" (Kirk/Spock, the very first major gay ship). Also, "slash" was often considered a derogatory term for the genre.

Most fan fiction was published on paper publications known as "Fanzines". In my attic, I still have a number of the Star Wars, Blakes 7, and Doctor Who fanzines I bought - and occasionally wrote for - in the 1980s.

I'm in my late 50s right now, I still write fanfiction, and I don't give a crap what anyone thinks. I've also worked on and even run numerous conventions, far too many to count.

Rec.arts.dw in the Usenet days (so like... late 90s) Just... all of rec.arts.dw. People being VERY PASSIONATE about their preferred era of the show, random books authors dropping in to talk about how their stuff was totally more legit than whatever other piece of EU contradicted it, the legendary Lawrence Miles Ragequit Thread. Good times.

Used to submit stories for the 13th Tribe (BSG) in the late 90s, one of the paper fanzines just as the internet was taking over.

I wrote, as far as I can tell, the very first (or at least, earliest that hasn’t since been deleted,) Harry Potter genderbent fanfic in sometime around 2013. It is terrible. I still get glowing reviews and followers on it to this day, despite it being the brainchild of a very amateur thirteen year old writer.

I remember seeing My Immortal being posted in real time and how it was driving people crazy. It was like the Howard Stern of fan fiction. Love it or hate it we all came back to see what she would write next!

I got my start posting RPF slash on FF.net way back when that was still allowed. Thank god that was purged.

I started some MSN webzone or whatever it was called to host my work so people could leave comments in my guestbook. I set up a Homestead page instead of Geocities. Maybe there were more spinny skull gifs available there, I dunno.

I moved to LiveJournal, then to DeadJournal, and all the other variants. I had to monitor all the "sporking" groups to see if any of my fics got riffed for being awful.

I dropped out of fanfic for a long time and have only just started getting back into it. It's crazy to see how much has changed since ye olde days.

I was part of the yahoo group that invented the marriage law challenge. (It was a Snape/Hermione group called WIKTT, if anyone's curious). At first, the trope was mainly for Snape/Hermione. But over the years, I've seen it spread to other pairings as well.

This may be relatively recent to some, but I was around before "Sanders Sides (Web Series)" was a canonized tag and everything under it fell into "YouTuber RPF". The day we got a separate tag, it was like the entirety of the fandom rejoiced.

I used to post on BZPower during the early days of Bionicle.

I was part of the Gillian Anderson Estrogen Brigade waaaay back in the day.

I just barely managed to see the tail end of an era where the characters and/or author have a little skit or whatever it's called at the end of every author's note. I also vaguely recall a few fics with random author's notes in the middle. To be fair, I started reading fics on Wattpad and that site was one of the last ones to drop those little trends.

Oh, I remember this!! I only ever really saw it on FF.net tho.

The skit thing was wild! I read whole ass author notes that was q&a's between the characters and the author's lol.

I remember those! I also remember popular authors of the fandoms I was in having “interview” chapters or even entire talk show-style fics as bonus material for their fanfics. I completely forgot that these were a thing.

Oh the skit thing! Yes! I hated that! I think they called it an omake or something. It was so weird to me the first time I read it.

Omg those used to be on every ffn fic, especially any anime/manga ones. It was cute to a point, but some people really went overboard 😭

...i was one of those skit writers...i also did author's notes in between...THIS WAS A SUPPOSED TO BE A SUPPRESSED MEMORY

Yes, I remember that! It's weird, I thought it was cringe at the time but now I miss it.

I was going to upload a chapter to [to Fanfiction.net] one of my fics on September 11, 2002.

That was the day that FFN "closed" to "memorialize" the 9/11 attacks but really they were purging all the NC-17 fics.

Anyway i didn't get to upload that day and some of my favorite stories were purged and I'm still salty about it 20 years later

I remember reading the new guidelines about FFN not allowing RPF or Explicit material. (I don't think I paid enough attention to realize stories were being purged though).

I remember when you had to thank your reviewers on FFN in your author's notes because there wasn't a message system.

I remember collecting e-mail addresses of people who wanted to be notified of new chapter updates because FFN didn't have a subscription/notification option yet.

I think I even remember a time on FFN when they didn't track your stats so you had no idea who was reading your stuff unless they left a review.

To add, I remember when we actually could use HTML in fanfics on FFN, so we added different colored text for effects, etc. Around 2000-01 timeframe.

Holy crap I forgot about the subscription thing! I bought notebooks specifically for contact details and notes on readers lol

The ffnet stats were interesting, when I joined in 2000 they had them, and then they removed them at some point for awhile, and then eventually added them back. I also remember when I joined that there was no "chapters" feature. We all had to upload each new chapter as a new fic. I guess that was good practice for posting fic on livejournal a few years later lol.

I made an account on FF.net back when the site's tag line was still, "Unleash your imagination and free your soul."

Livejournal was my golden era too. I miss those days! Remember the flashfiction communities? And the profile pics--I had hundreds. You could have whole conversations just using different profile pics.

Stupid Russian Orcs buying LJ. I tried Dreamwidth and...it's nowhere near the same.

I belong to the group of people who started fanfic writing as a hobby during the Covid lockdown because their other hobbies weren't available /work from home/no travel etc. I think there are quite a few of us.

Enough to swell AO3's readership.

Oh, that's a good one! It's so recent that it's hard to think of it as history, but you're right. Kind of a modern day version of Boccacio's Decameron, with all of us staying inside during a plague and telling each other stories.

I wrote a single one-shot in October 2019 just to get a particular idea out of my head and correct a grievous situation in canon, but in March of 2020, when I was forced to begin working off-site, I delved back into that fandom to produce a sequel. 900K words across a dozen fandoms later, and here I am.

Same here! Covid got me into so many hobbies I may never have gotten into, fanfic writing may be one of my favorites.

I finished off a book series during quarantine and found myself hungry for more, what with nothing else to do. I began writing an alternate ending (of which I’m 13k words in!) but that was taking too long- I wanted to read it now! I couldn’t just wait for me to finish! I had knew vaguely of Ao3 (how I found out about is a saga in of itself) and decided to take a gander. The rest is history, as they say.