My Website Is Back Up! & FSNNA 2023 "(Re)Archive" Presentation

[dawn_felagund]

Keeping a personal website running while also leading an archive is really hard. Of course, I prioritize the SWG with the limited hours that I have each week to work on site building. The collateral damage of that reality is that I never work on my personal site,¹ it becomes horribly outdated (both in terms of the software—it also runs on Drupal—and the works archived there), and eventually I become mortified enough that I take it down while I work on sloooowly getting it back online.

I took DawnFelagund.com down several months ago because it needed to be upgraded to Drupal 9 (and thank you to Russandol for helping me through that process! and getting the site running on Composer and teaching me how to use it!) and just needed to be fixed up. I built it as one of my first Drupal sites, and I was still experimenting with modules for the SWG rebuild, so it was not only full of garbage from those test runs but was very awkwardly constructed because I hadn't mastered modules like Views and Paragraphs that are really what makes Drupal such a powerful platform, so I was doing some awkward-ass workarounds that I've since solved properly.

It's still not done, of course (a website is never done ...), but dawnfelagund.com reopened today!

What pushed me to reopen it was presenting today at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. This year's format required a poster, which I loved because I enjoy making graphics. BUT. There was no way to share a text-only version of the poster, and not everyone can use visuals, so I wanted to have a text-only version available, which required getting my site back up, and ... you see where this is going. FSNNA provided me the impetus to work on my site. Thanks, FSNNA!²

That's my second SSP:

(Re)Archive: The Rise and Fall (and Rebound?) of Independent Fanfiction Archives: Early online fandoms had multitudes of small, often highly specialized fan-run archives. Presented at the Fan Studies Network North America 2023 conference, this presentation looks at archive trends in the Tolkien and Harry Potter fandoms, considering what factors lead to the proliferation, decline, and closure of small archives, including what it means to "rearchive" after an era of high archive closure and consolidation.

I need to continue getting my work added to the site, but my next big project for it is building a hub for the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, where data can be easily viewed, filtered, sorted, etc., in addition to interpretation, commentary, and so on that currently lives across multiple locations online and in my files. The next iteration of the survey will be its third and will span ten years of Tolkien fanfiction, and already, the data and all the information I am regularly working with is becoming unwieldy. I am increasingly running into the issue of "I know I ran data on this but where is it??" so I need to get my data tamed before I add another big chunk of it to the mix.

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1. Someone from Fandom Past who was Not a Good Person once criticized Rhapsody to me, because Rhapsody had offered to help her with a web project and was moving slower on it than This Person would have liked. And the crux of her criticism was that Rhapsody had updated something on her personal site but hadn't completed a next step on the project she was helping This Person with, and This Person felt this was a symptom of neglect on Rhapsody's part. I remember, at the time, feeling tremendously defensive on Rhapsody's behalf, as a site builder who also had a languishing personal website (I probably would have been incandescent now, but I was younger and nicer back then) because we almost never get to work on our own sites because we're always building/fixing everyone else's. "The cobbler's kids go barefoot," I said then, and I still think it's apt.

2. I don't know how to fix this, the need for external pressure to make me work on things I actually really want to work on. I love site building! It's a weird hobby but definitely also a favorite hobby. I sometimes think I sign up for conferences and try to publish things mostly to give myself inflexible deadlines and force the issue of working on my own projects. I know I'm not alone in this. Is this even a fixable problem? How have others solved this?

Comments

[hhimring]

The website looks good, Dawn!
And the poster is very interesting.

I notice that you don't mention spam, understandably.
Although it is not so much a factor, I suppose, as long as the community supporting the archive stays very active; it does seem to be a factor why automated archives get closed down, eventually: when the proportion of genuine posts begins to be outweighed by spam attacks, which poses challenges for the archive owner and mods, if they are trying to keep up the archive on the side.
Spam seems to be an increasing problem for many sites, including fan sites; DW is currently struggling with it.

[dawn_felagund]

That's a really good point! We've battled it for the entire duration of the SWG's life. It was always poor Rhapsody who caught it because the spammers generally had Pakistani IPs, they'd hit us overnight, and she was the mod with the easternmost timezone. In fact, our recent email troubles was, in part, due to one of our forms being hit by a bot and generating thousands of emails per day, which led to overages on our account. (It was then compounded by a string of support people who didn't really know what they were doing and broke it further, but the original issue was the bot attack. We've since added CAPTCHA to that form and corrected the issue.) The stupid thing is that this bot wasn't sending us anything; it was just subscribing to the newsletter thousands of times each day, and the confirmation emails generated were jamming the system. The senselessness of these attacks somehow makes them more frustrating. I can understand the comment spam on the Heretic Loremaster trying to sell me erectile dysfunction pills and cheap NFL jerseys! This less so.

One of the fun parts about the kind of research I did to make the timeline (but also why it was so time-consuming) is getting to visit each of these old archives and look around. Some did indicate that they were having spam attacks; the usual solution to that was to shut down submissions. By this point, the archives were usually inactive anyway. It didn't seem to lead to the closure of any sites, but it did make their inactivity permanent, so to speak. It seemed to be comment spam; I didn't run into any spam fanworks (like what was hitting LotRFF under Keith Mander's fabulous leadership) in any of my explorations.

I'd say the spam issue continues to point back to making technical tools and education available for fans. While DW is battling it at a scale beyond what would hit an eFiction archive (or Drupal :), a smaller site is pretty easily protected, but you have to know how to do it. When Russa came on board as a mod, she knew enough coding to alter the eFiction script so that we had to approve accounts; that ended our spam problem there. She added CAPTCHA as well, which was our most recent solution too. If scripts were being kept up-to-date, they're likely addressing this anyway; Drupal has several anti-spam solutions (hence our email issue was easy to fix once we managed to talk to someone who gave us enough information to understand what was happening), and eFiction probably would have addressed this too if it stayed active. Alas. But fan site admins also have to know how to implement these fixes, which comes back to education and why projects like Fandom Coders are so needed.

[hhimring]

As far as I remember, it was the increasing vulnerability of the site (not just to spam, perhaps) that was the trigger for the closure of Henneth Annun. But Henneth Annun was relatively unusual in being hand-coded, but automated, so had different technical challenges. Also, a number of options were considered and discussed at the time, including freezing the site. HA had already been on a slow downward spiral for some time. Part of the site did stay up, of course, but not the fic.

[anerea]

Whoop whoop! What a good feeling to have your site up again, and so glad you did (and could) prioritise it for this.

And also congrats (and thank you) on your presentation, and also all the work that went (is going) into it!

I binged loads of your fics soon after discovering fanfic and before realising people were still around in the fandom to receive comments, so they're on my (rather overwhelming) list of fics that have been too powerful to disappear into my forgettery and which I'd still love to let the authors know how they impacted me, so I've used your site-re-upping as a motivation to leave a comment or two...