FFML shutting down

[iiradned]

Dennis Carr maintainer of the FFML has just announced that the FFML will shut down on July 1.

The archives will be packed into a ZIP file and remain available for download until the new year.

It will be sad to see it go, the FFML was the first mailing list I joined back in the mid 1990s.

Quoted below is the text of the announcement:

I suppose there's no easy way of putting it.

After some discussion with the moderators and quite a bit of thought
over the past few months, I have elected to close the FFML.

There are several reasons for this, but I suppose it can be distilled
down to two: one is personal, and the other is that time and
technology march on.

The personal end boils down to no longer having the spoons and having
to rearrange my life to better serve me. This is, no doubt, a rather
small thing to deal with - but as I examine my life in middle age and
make changes in how I live my life, I'm realizing I have an awful lot
of such rather small things in my life - and I can either continue on
how I've been doing, or I can sum up what is needed to continue for
(hopefully) another 40+ years. And to be honest, as much as I came to
love this list in the 24 years since I joined, sometimes one just has
to let go of that which they love.

To this same end, I honestly haven't been terribly active in anime
fandom in quite some time. The last time I did anything, in fact, was
a "ghost shoot" at Sakura Con in Seattle maybe 13 years ago. I
haven't been back since, and would like to go again. Hell, even a
story that I started and co-wrote with another author has been sitting
on my disk and taking up space - I might continue it. It's called
Unfinished Business and is a Tenchi Muyo exchange-student story set
where I once lived in north Orange County, California. But I digress.

The other reason, though, seems bigger. It's like I said - time
and technology march on.

This list was created in the early years of the public internet. I
don't know exactly when, as I found the list myself in 1997 when White
Wolf was still hosting and the pseudo-user Tybalt was used by the mods
of the time. In that time since, though, much has changed on the
network. Usenet, for instance, is not nearly as widely used as it
once was, with much of alt.* alone being riddled with spam. Mailing
lists came in to fill in the blanks where Usenet would otherwise not
serve, and while many such lists still exist most have simply fallen
off. Even twenty years ago, we started seeing dedicated websites and
web forums for specific purposes including fanfiction as a whole, and
in some cases those sites gave way to social media sites such as
Livejournal and Myspace - which themselves basically gave way to the
likes of Reddit and Facebook. Even Yahoogroups - our old standby that
we used as backup when Phillip Mak passed on 14 years ago and during
some other server issues over the years - has pretty much been closed
up. And all that is just a mere sliver of the progression out here.
Where I don't deny there is an aspect of not wanting to continue owing
to these changes in how we work on the internet, this evolution unto
itself is indeed a large part of what's driving this decision.

To be perfectly clear, this is not at all about the simple fact that
the traffic on this list has dwindled since even before I took the
list onto my own server. The dwindle is just a side effect of the
evolution. Long time subscribers will remember that, back when I even
discovered this list in 1997 or thenabouts, we would regularly see
upwards of 20 messages per day (and that was a quiet day!) and in some
cases expect to wait at least an hour before our message got fully
posted by the fanfic.com server(s). We were super active back then!
There was indeed a shift when Phillip took it on, things just slowed
down. And yeah, I openly admit that I had some optimism that we would
see list traffic get to the volume that once was - but that was not
meant to be, despite the "hello world" flurry of posts in July of 2007
as the boxes were notionally unpacked here. Either way, to reinforce
- the lack of traffic in and of itself is not a driver in this
decision. That lack of traffic is just a side effect of what has come
to be.

It's not an easy decision for me to make. But as much as I have come
to love this list, it's time to call it a day. This email list, by
and large, has served its purpose and served it well.

As of the time I am sending this email, I have changed list settings
to simply reject posts from anyone who is not a member (previous
settings were to hold email for moderator intervention). ffml-admins
will retain its current settings and will remain live for the
duration, so if you need to ping us off list then please don't
hesitate to do so.

In keeping with the 14th anniversary of opening the list on
chez-vrolet.net, I will close this list completely on the evening of
July 1, 2021. The archive will be packed up as it exists, and I will
have it available for download as a zip file until January 1, 2022.
The mirrors, as linked in the FAQ, will remain online at the
prerogative of their respective hosts. I don't run those, and I don't
get to tell 'em what to do. =)

The usual rules will still apply in the meantime, of course. The
moderator team will remain in place for the duration of the closure
period, and you are welcome to continue to use the list as it has been
used since time(t) = minus infinity - but going forward we are now
officially allowing the posting of links to "plug" yourself and how to
make contact aside from email once the list goes dark. So that we may
keep in contact, I encourage you to share this information. Mine, as
such, is below.

Oh. One last note, because since getting this domain in 2003 I've
seen three people who pronounce it correctly aside from my ex wife and
I (and I gotta spell it every bloody time!) - and I don't know who
here has figured it out.

It's pronounced "SHAY vro-LAY". =D

Thank you, everyone, for being here.

[Sunshine Temple]

It's understandable and a bit sad. And it undercuts just how ephemeral it all is.

But I cannot blame anyone who does that.

In December when this site moved hosts I did some thinking if I really wanted to keep Fukufics going.

But I decided that for now I could keep it going, and with Stacy's help we moved to a new host.

Though it did take me until today, to fix the (entierly my fault) DNS setting to get the wiki back up.

[Gallicus]

An archive of the posts 1995-2007 can be found here: https://www.fanfics.dev

[slickrcbd]

Any idea where else to find the rest of the archives, such as post 2007 or something searchable?

[iiradned]

Any idea where else to find the rest of the archives, such as post 2007 or something searchable?

The official archive is at http://www.chez-vrolet.net/pipermail/ffml
And mirrored at http://www.mail-archive.com/ffml@chez-vrolet.net/

The archive is from June 2007 to June 2021, although that last entry is simply the automated monthly posting of the FAQ.