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Story totals from random fandoms are from FanWorks.Org, FicWad, SkyHawke, AdultFanFiction.Net, FanDomination.Net, MediaMiner.Org, FanFiction.Net and FanLib as of June 13, 2007.

Comparing references on BlogPulse to FictionAlley.Org, Sugar Quill and FanFiction.Net in the last half of 2006

FanFiction.Net, Sugar Quill, FictionAlley.Org compared when FanFiction.Net has +"Harry Potter" added to the Blog Pulse Trend Tracker.

Icerocket Trend Tracker: FanFiction.Net + Harry Potter, Fiction Alley, SugarQuill.

BlogPulse trend chart for the last six months as of May 25, 2007 comparing FicWad, FanLib and FanFiction.Net.

[edit] Introduction

This section needs more information.

[edit] The Archivists

FanFiction.Net get together in 2000. Xing Li, the site founder, is the Asian guy in the back.

Xing Li was founder and owner of FanFiction.Net. He is currently based out of Los Angeles, California. He came from the X-Files fandom but otherwise has very little fandom experience and is not directly involved in fandom.

[edit] Funding

FanFiction.Net was created by Xing, while he was a student at University of California, Los Angeles. The site was originally hosted on a server connected to where he worked. His employer recouped part of the cost in order to use it as a test for how well their servers worked. The costs became increasingly large and his employer wanted compensation for part of those costs as costs rose to over $2,000 a month. FanFiction.Net tried paid accounts, which met with much user resistance. The site eventual switched to advertisements to pay for itself.

For additional information on funding, A look at some fandom based money numbers located off site.

[edit] Timeline

[edit] 1998

On October 15, 1998, FanFiction.Net was founded by Xing Li. The repercussions of the founding of this archive would be felt for years to come as a certain amount of fannish terminology and discussion, posting habits, centralization of small fan fiction communities revolve around the site.

[edit] 1998 to 2002

From October 15, 1998 till September 12, 2002, FanFiction.Net had an active policy forbidding ActorFic while they have Musicians and other real person fic categories. [1]

[edit] 1999

On September 4, 1999, "Harry Potter and the Man of Unknown" by Gypsy became the first Harry Potter fan fiction posted to FanFiction.Net, what was to become the largest archive of Harry Potter fan fiction on the net.

[edit] 2000

2000 was the year of FanFiction.Net. The site reached a point where it is an archive utilized by many fan fiction archives as their primary source. People began the referring to feedback as reviews. Discussion about quantity of feedback turns to number of reviews. Some fan fiction communities seemed to be populated by fan fiction novices obsessed with the quantity of reviews.

Early 2000, the earliest Draco and Ginny fics are posted at FanFiction.Net. (According to the memory of several early D/G authors, the earliest was by an author named Bumblebee who has since removed all his/her fics from the web.) These early stories are not well received, as many people believe the pairing is unlikely as it has no basis in the novels.
In "2000/2001, they were running at least 4 enterprise-level servers (three "file" servers, one database server); nowadays it's probably a massive server farm. They're definitely paying by the byte traffic-wise, that's one of the issues when you get up to the level of service they have to be at." [2]
Late September saw one of the early instances of Cassandra Claire having her work copied. An author had posted Cassandra Claire's work to FanFiction.Net under the name. Cassandra C1aire. This was reported by Heidi8 and Cassandra Claire. The story was removed from FanFiction.Net because of the plagiarism and misrepresenting of the author. [3]
In October 2000, Cassandra Claire was, on FanFiction.Net, soliciting opinions for what should happen in her fan fiction. The question posed was who Hermione should end up within her story. [4]
By October 2000, Heidi started writing her own fan fiction, [5] She posted her stories to HP_FanFiction and FanFiction.Net. Her stories would later be posted to HP_Paradise.
On October 31, 2000, Unquiet posted part one of "A Different Lesson" the hpslash mailing list. [6][7][8] Part two of this story was posted to FanFiction.Net. This was another early Snape/Harry story.
November 2000 saw concern about FanFiction.Net's review alert feature. Cassandra Claire would make her one and only post to fanfictionnetwriters asking if review alerts were down. [9] This type of thing goes towards demonstrating how central FanFiction.Net was to both Heidi and Cassandra Claire's fannish experience and the importance of reviews in that community. Heidi was actively plugging Cassandra Claire still and her plugs were generally similar to "Cassandra Claire's work archived at FanFiction.Net." Her own work was also archived there. Both read fan fiction that was posted there. Its up time, down time and feature functionality were important to their fannish involvement. It was also important in terms of promoting Cassandra Claire's work. The more reviews Cassandra Claire had, the more she received and the larger her readership became. Heidi just could never match Cassandra Claire in this way and never seemed really to try to match her.
Cassandra Claire was still writing her epic story and actively publishing it. By this time, she had posted it to two mailing lists and FanFiction.Net. On December 18, 2000, Cassandra Claire posted chapter 9, part 1 of Draco Sinister on ParadigmOfUncertainty. It had the following disclaimer and author notes:

Disclaimer: Not mine, JK's. There are quotes in here from Red Dwarf

(back when it was funny), Blackadder, Buffy, and I realized I'd

criminally neglected Terry Pratchett so far, so made up for it by

nicking several quotes in this chapter at once.

A/N There's a fair bit of telepathic communication in this story,

which is indicated in italics. If you can, read it in Files, where

the italics show up. Otherwise, I apologize if it's at all confusing. [10]

This disclaimer is a bit important as Heidi and Cassandra Claire would later both claim that Cassandra Claire's disclaimers were both okay and properly done, citing the material correctly. This is the disclaimer for the chapter that eventually led to Cassandra Claire's black listing from FanFiction.Net for plagiarism.

[edit] 2001

By 2001, among other reasons, FanFiction.Net made age discrimination almost impossible if you wanted to get new material.
During January 2001, fan of Cassandra Claire wrote an unauthorized sequel to Cassandra Claire and Eliza Diawna Snape's stories. Neither Cassandra Claire, nor Eliza Diawna Snape were particularly pleased that a fan had done this. Various parties wanted the stories reported to FanFiction.Net so that they would be removed. As these stories were derivative, fan fic of fan fiction, and were not plagiarism, that seemed a bit tricky to do. Heidi stepped in to offer her legal advice on the situation on a post to HP_Fanfiction dated January 3, 2001. [11] Heidi starts off the post acknowledging that fan fiction is a violation of copyright and trademark because of its derivative nature. In regards to the issue of people writing fan fiction based on fan fiction, it might "sound weirdly hypocritical" [12] but that Cassandra Claire could conceivably go after the fan fiction author for violating Cassandra Claire's "common law trademark use of her name, the same way someone who went around calling himself STEVEN KlNG would be infringing on the horror writer's mark." [13] Heidi wanted to see if Xing Li might be compelled to remove the story though she thought he would not do anything about the name issue.
In February 2001, Cassandra Claire continued her presence on FanFiction.Net and widened her exposure to the broader fan fiction community when she was interviewed in a column which appeared on FanFiction.Net. The column appeared on February 2, 2001. [14]
In March, Harry Potter AuthorFic category was removed from FanFiction.Net.
On May 14, 2001, the Harry Potter fan fiction community that surrounded Cassandra Claire became aware that a thirteen year old author was plagiarizing Cassandra Claire on FanFiction.Net. Cassandra Claire's fans were appalled that some one would plagiarize Cassandra Claire. [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] Cassandra Claire's fans were leaving her reviews that could be construed as harassing because the author plagiarized their favorite author, Cassandra Claire. Cassandra Claire told the members of ParadigmOfUncertainty "I also agree with the people who say to give this kid a break -- she's only 13 -- and like I said, I'll deal with it. ;)" [24] and offered a "cookie" for one of the chapters for her stories. Cookies are short extracts of a story or chapter, designed to entice the reader to read the fic. Notice the behavior pattern: Cassandra Claire's fangirls were being extremely mean and harassing. Cassandra Claire was made aware of her fans' behavior. Rather than clearly tell them to stop, she offers one throw away line and then tries to make everyone feel better. This type of behavior foreshadows the events of Charity Wank where the fans are not told to back off and stop behaving badly. Interestingly, this would have been a good time for Cassandra Claire to discuss her own borrowing found in her stories as it made for a good parallel with the current situation.
On May 16, 2001, Not Just Dallas Winston by Lioness Black became the first English language Outsiders story published on FanFiction.Net. [25][26]
In the time since at least April to July 2001, FanFiction.Net had forums. There was a forum for each fandom and several site forums for various discussions. One of the frequent topics of discussion on these boards was Cassandra Claire. People talked about how much they liked these stories, enjoyed these stories and would frequently reccomend these stories.
Around June 13, 2001, Avocado read Cassandra Claire's Draco Dormiens. Avocado posted a review on FanFiction.Net. The review generally praised the story and mentioned the "Black Adder quotes and Sorcery and Cecilia" [27] Avocado also sent private feedback to Cassandra Claire via e-mail in which she mentioned those quotes again, and "commented that she wrote too well to borrow so much dialogue from other sources." [28] Cassandra Claire responded to this e-mail saying "that she enjoyed the quotations, her friends enjoyed the quotations, and, generally, she planned to keep using them." [29]
On June 15, 2001, Avocado discovered that Cassandra Claire had plagiarized from Pamela Dean. Avocado discovered that this was not just a few words but extensive plagiarism, involving passages. [30] After discovering this, Avocado e-mailed Cairnsy to ask her if this was plagiarism that would warrant action on FanFiction.Net's part.
Cairnsy replied to Avocado on June 16, 2001. [31] Cairnsy told Avocado that the lifting was not acceptable and that she was forwarding these passages on to the rest of FanFiction.Net's board to let them about it.
On June 19, 2001, Michela Ecks was told by Meimi, a FanFiction.Net administrator, that Cassandra Claire was being investigated for plagiarism. Meimi told Michela Ecks to keep her mouth shut because she had a track record of not keeping her mouth shut. She ignored Meimi's advice. She e-mailed Cassandra Claire, warning Cassandra Claire that she was being investigated by FanFiction.Net for plagiarism. This e-mail was never acknowledged, nor replied to.
On June 21, 2001, Meimi e-mailed Cassandra Claire to inform her of her impending black listing from the FanFiction.Net for plagiarism. [32]
On June 22, 2001, Cassandra Claire was blacklisted from FanFiction.Net for plagiarism. Among the sources she inserted uncredited material from in her stories were Red Dwarf, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Blackadder, and Pamela Dean's novels.
On June 23, 2001, Cassandra Claire's supporters react with a certain degree of rage on various mailing lists and message boards. Other fan fiction communities go "Huh? What's going on?"
On June 24, 2001, FanFiction.Net Admins on FFN-Writers mailing list told Cassandra Claire's fans that the Cassandra Claire case was investigated. Then the admins asked them to move on.
June 27, 2001 was the date of the first FanFiction.Net submission of Angel Sanctuary fanfiction. [33]
July 11, 2001 heralded in some ethically questionable actions on the part of FictionAlley.Org's founders. While they might not have liked FanFiction.Net, Heidi did not think it was a violation of FanFiction.Net's rules to promote their new site as fics on FanFiction.Net by posting cookies to stories with a go to this site to read the rest, general site pimpage. [34] Zsenya, who had been invited by Heidi to help with this new archive, was on the mailing list. Zsenya expressed concern over this as she thought this was a violation of FanFiction.Net's terms of service. [35] After Zsenya expressed this opinion, it appears that she de-affiliated herself with Heidi's project as she never made another post to FictionAlleyWriters. Heidi's willingness to post non-fics as stories to promote Fiction Alley on sites she did not like, breaking those sites' Terms of Service in doing so, would happen again in September 2002.
On July 28, 2001, FanFiction.Net began what would be an extended downtime. This was a considerable help to the launch of FictionAlley.Org, and Heidi and others on the FictionAlley.Org staff capitalized on this downtime in their posts on HP_FanFiction. [36] These parties used the opportunity to plug FictionAlley.Org. This extended downtime continued until at least July 31, 2001. There have been rumours floated in fandom that the timing of FanFiction.Net being down coinciding with FictionAlley.Org being opened was suspicious. In an interview on AIM with Steven Savage in July 2006, he killed this rumour citing that the server had been having problems for some time because of the traffic load and additional features offered on the site. FanFiction.Net was not hacked and FictionAlley.Org had nothing to do with it. This is supported by a post made by Steven Savage at that time on fanfictionnetwriters which mentions the server problems. [37]
FanFiction.Net continued to have more downtime in August from around the fifth to the eleventh. [38][39][40] John Walton and others related to Fiction Alley used this as an opportunity to take additional pot shots at FanFiction.Net and market their site as more reliable. [41]
During the fall of 2001, the Harry Potter fan fiction community started to suffer its first real fractures. Prior to this, almost everyone had been on FanFiction.Net: slashers, canon purists, and fanon enthusiasts. Fiction Alley filled some of the void but not everyone went there. There would be no one big site to replace FanFiction.Net. This fracturing would not necessarily be visible to many parties who were not necessarily aware of the parts who had basically closed themselves off, segments like Snapeslashers. The community would also create a number of redundant archives, which allowed for people to further sequester themselves based on friends and shipping preferences.
Around September 5, 2001, FanFiction.Net was still crashing repeatedly. [42] FictionAlley.Org appear like they were still trying to capitalize on this problem.
Prior to the release of the first movie, there were 197 Lord of the Rings stories posted to FanFiction.Net. Fifteen stories or seven percent of these were slash.
Between December 18, 2001 and the end of the year, FanFiction.Net’s total number of Lord of the Rings stories climbed to 135. Seventeen stories or fifteen percent were slash. (http://www.khazaddum.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1866-p-2.html)

[edit] 2001 to 2002

The Blink 182 slash fan fiction community based at FanFiction.Net was producing early and influential works in the community. Among these works are “Advantages of Alcohol,” “Letters After Death,” “In My Room,” “Defying Gravity,” and “Deafening.” (xcacophony: http://www.livejournal.com/community/fdnet_history/725.html?replyto=1749 )

[edit] 2002

FanFiction.Net banned all fan fiction rated NC-17 from their site. This left parts of the fannish community in turmoil as the fan fiction community has never been a cohesive group with a single group understanding. FanFiction.Net’s policy change said NC-17 was banned but the site took no action in defining what the difference between material rated R and NC-17 was.
On April 21, the MST3K section of FanFiction.Net was removed. Reactions were mixed; authors of MSTings blasted the admins for the removal, while the vast majority of actual MST3K prose authors tried a more diplomatic approach. Various MSTing websites popped up around the internet as a result, and the MST3K prose authors made their permanent home at the MST3K Fanfiction Page, where they still reside to this day.

[edit] 2003

Fallout from previous incidents like Cease and desist letters for adult content and FanFiction.Net’s policy regarding adult fiction, MSTs and Real Person Fic (RPF) necessitated some changes. One solution to the need to create new archives to fit new needs was the creation of numerous automated and community specific fan fiction archives.
By the end of the year of 2003, there were 9,178 Lord of the Rings stories published on FanFiction.Net. [43]
On February 23, 2003, Msscribe reported that she had been plagiarized on FanFiction.Net.
On March 23, 2003, FanFiction.Net became part of FictionPress, LLC, incorporated in California.

[edit] 2005

In April 2005, several German record labels sent cease and desist letters to German websites. [44][45][46] The letters demanded the removal of all song lyrics from their sites and asked for €1600,57 remuneration for every song which had the lyrics listed. In response to this, several archives like FanFiction.Net disallowed SongFic in order to be liable to similar threats.
Fanfiction.net moderator Octavarius invaded the Sly Cooper fandom. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] 2006

In June, Wize, a member of FanFiction.Net and a participant in the site's chat room dating back to 2000, had a virtual get together of members from that time period. [47] He managed to find some 32 past members who registered. He found another five members who refused to join because they had moved beyond it. Most members had stopped writing fan fiction, had moved to original fiction and were generally non-fannish.
Also in June, the 250000th Harry Potter fan fiction was added to FanFiction.Net.

[edit] 2007

In July 2007, FanFiction.Net's server had periods which resulted in pages taking a long time to load.
By July 2007, FanFiction.Net was using Varnish. [48]

[edit] 2008

April 23 - A Newgrounds spam group called the "Barney Bunch" spams many archives. Some users from the Pokemon fandom start a resistance movement against them.
September 16 - A new abuse email address (reportabuse@fanfiction.com) is listed on the homepage, as well as an email for category suggestions and character lists (categories@fanfiction.com).

[edit] Past moderators

Cairnsy
Flourish
Meimi moderated message boards and generally advised Xing.
Michelle Savage moderated the mailing list.
<aim>h2oequalswater</aim> Michela Ecks ran Writers University and wrote the first terms of service for the site.
Sheryl Martin advised Xing Li when he first founded the site.
Steven Savage chose columnists.
Tara O'Shea created one of the images for the site and wrote a column for the site.

[edit] Current moderators

Most of the fan based staff was gone by 2002. The active fandom based staff have not heard from Xing since 2004 or so. It appears that there are new staffers, most probably paid and not necessarily active in fandom. They have appeared on comments on posts on Fandom Wank about FanFiction.Net. [49]

[edit] Users

Below is a partial list of past and current site users.

[edit] External links

FanfictionNet site

[edit] Petitions

[edit] Sources

A newbie's guide to fanfic lingo. (2002, March 5). Toronto Star, p. D04.
Bhatti, S. (2001, May 20). www.fanfiction.net. The Fresno Bee, p. E6.
Casimir, J. (2002, November 1). For the love of.... The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved December 1, 2002, from http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/01/1036027033529.html
Chatterton, S. (2000, October 27). The Daily Website: www.fanfiction.net. The Independent (London), p. 18.
Flench, C. E. (1999). Young adult authors on the Internet (Publication No. 0731-4388). Book Report. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. IR539995)
http://www.khazaddum.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-1866-p-2.html
Li, Xing. Personal e-mail correspondence. Date: October 12, 2000.
Lyon, A. (2001, January 4). Literary teens flock to www.fanfiction.net. The Fresno Bee, p. E10.
Mahue, L. (2002, March 5). Writers create own sequels. Toronto Star, p. D04.
O'Connell, P. L. (2005, April 18). Please Don't Call It A G-Rated Dispute. The New York Times, pp. Section C, 8.
xcacophony: http://www.livejournal.com/community/fdnet_history/725.html?replyto=1749
Yearwood, E. (2002, February 14). Not content to simply daydream, an increasing number of young music fans are writing their favourite celebrities into unauthorized fictional stories which are posted on the net. Canadian Press Newswire. Retrieved September 27, 2002, from http://www.lexisnexis.com

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