2003
From Fan History Wiki
2003 was the year that LiveJournal changed the fan fiction community forever and the start of the decline of mailing lists. It was the year of Fandom Wank and the year of dealing with various fall out of events in the community that happened in 2002.
While LiveJournal may have been founded in 1999, it did not begin to reach a critical mass that began to shape the nature and form of the fan fiction community until 2003. In this year, a number of people began to move discussions they had been having on mailing lists to their journals. This trend would continue well until 2005 with a number of mailing lists seeing fall off in membership and posting until people made the effort to revitalize this form of fannish communication.
Fandom_Wank, a blogging community dedicated to finding all the wankish fandom oriented discussion, informing the masses about it and generally having a good laugh, faced a number of issues this year as it began to form into one of the most influential communities in fan fiction. The community was ToSed from LiveJournal, ToSed from Blurty, briefly moved to Yahoo!Groups before finally finding a home at JournalFen. This year was qualified by several members of fandom_wank as the year of grudge wanking, where people reported wank that was really about attacking another person instead of actual wank.
This year was another building year. Fallout from previous incidents like Cease & Desist notices for adult content and FanFiction.Net’s policy regarding adult fiction, MSTs and Real Person Fic necessitated some changes. One solution to the need to create new archives to fit new needs was the creation of numerous automated and community specific fan fiction archives. This was largely possible because of two easy to install scripts: eFiction and the Automated Archive software. Some of the sites that would start during this period of building in 2002, 2003 include SoupFiction, EFanFiction.Net, FanDomination.Net, AdultFanFiction.Net, Fiction Alley and Kiln Fiction. Some of the sites created in this period would die due to lack of money, hacking, lack of use, server issues and archivist frustration. Some of these sites would become power houses in their particular fannish communities.
See also:
- Canon released in 2003
- Cease and desist letters recieved in 2003
- Conventions held in 2003
- Fan fiction archives founded in 2003
- Fan fiction awards given in 2003
- Fanzines published in 2003
- Legal issues in the fan fiction community in 2003
- LiveJournal communities founded in 2003
- Mailing lists founded in 2003
- Technology innovations in 2003
