October 13, 2009

I'll admit it.
I was tempted.
It's been over a year and a half since I did any work on the Clearinghouse whatsoever, and more than twice that span of time since any section other than the fic recommendations saw an actual update. So when word came down earlier this year that Geocities was shutting down, I was sorely tempted to just sit back and let the site fade into oblivion.
There have been two overriding factors in the Clearinghouse's decline:

When I first began this site, I made it a link index because, while I sought, like a fanfic Taloon, to gather all the stories of the world, I couldn't afford to pay for a webhost. So I went with a free one (of which Geocities was far and away the best at the time)--and thus, space considerations made hosting even a fraction of those stories impossible for me.
Fanfiction.net didn't have that problem when they arrived on the scene a few years later...so in a very real sense, someone else has already come about as close as possible to accomplishing what I originally set out to do.
Updating the site entries had become such a hassle, I didn't even want to try. I was spending more time COUNTING stories than I was READING them--and with more and more massive fic archives popping up, it just wasn't worth it to me anymore (and that's before you get into the massive housecleaning I was looking at when hosts like Anifics.com and Fanfic.net went under...let alone the impending Geocities death throes).

So my first impulse was to either do nothing, or pen a brief note--something along the lines of "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fics"--and kill the Clearinghouse off, once and for all.
That was my first impulse.
But the more I thought about it, the more I kept coming back to a couple of things:

THE CLEARINGHOUSE RECOMMENDATIONS - They were my favorite part of the site almost from the day I started doing them; I loved reading fanfic--still do--and sharing my favorite stories with my visitors was something I enjoyed greatly.
I was never sure how many people actually went to that part of the site--Geocities' stats are garbage, and only one visitor ever sent in a recommendation of their own--so it was a profound shock when, a couple of months ago, someone on a fanfic forum I frequent (as an unregistered lurker) posted a link to the Clearinghouse recommendations, urging everyone to read the fics I'd listed. Even though it was full of broken links and I hadn't added anything to it in over a year, it still had value to readers.
THE STATE OF ONLINE FICDOM - While the massive archives keep springing up, even fans of the series they deal with don't know about many of them.
Even more importantly--individual authors' pages are still out there, and against all these fanfic Wal-Marts, they're in greater need of publicity than ever before.

There's still a need for the Clearinghouse...and if I restructure the site one more time, I think I can still manage to maintain it.

So, rather than closing, Shack's Fanfic Clearinghouse is moving, to http://shackfic.webs.com.

During the restructuring, I'll post the Master List (outdated as it is) and the Clearinghouse recommendations, so that visitors can at least take advantage of them while I work.

I'm not sure how long it will take, but I can promise you this--it will get done. I will reopen, in my new location.

And I will once again say:

Welcome to Shack's Fanfic Clearinghouse.

--Shack