I started reading fanfiction online in the late 90s. At that time, there were a few options for posting fanfiction online. One was mailing lists; there were several. One was personal webpages, often connected through links. One was Usenet, which was a precursor to forums and had several fanfiction boards. Most notable (to me) were rec.arts.startrek.creative (asc) and rec.arts.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated (ascem). Not that I ever actually managed to get on usenet; I knew it existed because I would find fic pages that referenced asc and ascem, but by the time I'd figured out what asc and ascem meant, I'd found fandom in other places. And there were a few archives, even back in the 90s, mostly hand-coded by the owners because that was what you had to do.
One of those archives was the Wonderful World of Makebelieve, hosted on the Squidge website along with several other archives. Squidge was run by a guy named Walter, purely as a passion project/labor of love/service to fandom.
By the early 2000s, there were a couple of different archive softwares floating around, and any fandom with a critical mass of fanfiction writers would have its own archive. A larger fandom would have several; the usual split was a slash archive and a het/gen archive, or perhaps a slash archive and a het archive and a gen archive. A really large fandom, such as Harry Potter, would have archives for each major pairing and/or fandom faction. Each archive would be run by a single fan or a fan and their friends, mostly out of their own pocket, and sometimes they'd have a way to donate to help fund it and sometimes they wouldn't.
Eventually, that fan or fan group would lose interest and stop paying for hosting and the archive would disappear. (Or a server would crash and the data would be lost. Or someone would die. Or any one of a million other things would happen.) This is why, to this day, I save a copy of every single fanfiction I like enough to bookmark. I have seen too many beloved fics go dark. The first beloved archive that I lost was fanfix.com, which died in 2003.
That was one of the reasons that Open Doors was a part of the OTW from the beginning. This was seen as a normal part of fandom life: people do cool things for a while, and then they move on. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to save those archives and put them into the care of someone who will keep them going, in some form? And that's what Open Doors does!
(Not all archives go down; Squidge is still around, and in fact was the first non-AO3 site to use the OTW archive software, as Squidgeworld. It now has a nonprofit board so that Walter's not the only one funding it and doing the background work. Ad Astra has been around since 2009 and is still going strong, now also using the OTW archive software. It, too, now has a nonprofit board.)
So like. who cares if fanfiction.lol doesn't become The Next AO3 Behemoth? Who cares if it doesn't last forever? That's not the point! The point is that someone is doing something cool in fandom, isn't that awesome! Whether it gets huge or stays small, it's great that he's doing it! And if it does fold, guess what! We now have Open Doors, so there's a really easy way to save any fanworks on the site should bk-poetry or the authors wish them to be saved.
There is literally no downside to this.
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
annaxmalina
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
