old RideForever dS Fic Archive archived on oocities.org (Fannish Fifty #3)

[verushka70]

Regina Keim posted to the private Fraser/Kowalski Facebook group about the old RideForever due South Fic Archive (which was originally on the now long-dead geocities domain) being saved/archived at oocities.org.

You can only search by Author, as far as I can tell. But of the few fics I've briefly checked, some authors include character/pairing/rating etc. information at the top of the fic.

A few issues:

1. oocities.org seems to be very, very slow in responding.
2. I got a security warning due to browser certificate mismatch.
3. depending on your system or browser colors, when you click on a fic, it may look like a totally blank page.

For item 1, I'm not sure if that's because of item 2, or because oocities is on someone's personal, slow domain. For item 2, you can bypass the warning by selecting "Advanced" and "proceed anyway" (or words to that effect; different browsers have different verbage but it means the same thing).

I don't advocate for anyone to do anything on the web they're not comfortable with, though - so YMMV, and if you don't want to bypass the security warning, I totally get that. But then you won't be able to see the old fics.

For item 3, if you hit Ctrl-A (to select all text) on a laptop/PC, suddenly you can see the text/fic. (On mobile, long-touch the page, and touch "Select All" in the context menu that pops up.) Or you may want or need to change your browser skin if that happens - though that may not fix the problem, either.

(Ctrl-A /Select All does, though - but if you click/touch anywhere else on the page while all text is selected, the text selection goes away... just hit Ctrl-A again to get it back/to re-select all text on the page.) Besides site certificate mismatch, the missing text I suspect is because of html page code circa early 2000s that does not play nice with modern browsers - understandable for an archive that may last have been updated seventeen years ago.

Also, for some authors, clicking on their name seems to go to their own individual web page. There may be broken links, as a result.

Comments

[delphi]

I hope the kinks get worked out, because it's otherwise great to hear about the archive finding a new home!

[verushka70]

Yeah, I knew that oocities was an attempt to save as much as possible of the old geocities sites. But I didn't realize how much had been saved (so, yay!). And I don't know if work on it is ongoing, or if it just is what it is, now. 🤷‍♀️