Unknowable Room
From Fan History Wiki
The Unknowable Room, or often abreviated to ur.org or UR is a Harry Potter fanfiction archive offered to public in October 31st, 2005. It hosts both fanfiction and fanart, and their forums are pretty popular.
The Unknowable Room has its own features as well: the UnknowableWiki, Scrivenshaft Challenges, the Hourglass Awards, Fic Exchanges, and The Owl Post, a Harry Potter newspaper dedicated to the many aspects of fanfiction.
[edit] History of the Unknowable Room
A few years ago, almost everyone posted their stories at FanFiction.Net, the largest fanfiction archive that existed. With time though, more stories using netspeak, terrible characterization and awful grammar which deeply bothered other older members of the site, but they could stand it. After the site decided to ban NC-17 fanfiction though, trouble arrived. Many popular stories were deleted without further warning (Cassandra Claire for example) and decided to leave the site.
Another really popular (had more than 6000 reviews James/Lily story was Sarinileni's Lust or Love which was deleted because of this new rule fanfiction.net had imposed. She irritably understood that she had crossed the line -- her stories were NC 17, so fanfiction.net had the right to take down her story but she felt slightly hurt. She decided she would edit the story to fit with the site's rules, and was fit for the R rating. Sadly though, the story was once more deleted, leaving Sarina devastated.
This deletion caused many notable Lily/James authors to support against Fanfiction.net, mainly Solarism, causing many people to leave the Pit of Voles. Sometime during this episode, a few people started thinking about creating a fanfiction archive of their own.
Dede (Solarism) carefully picked other eight fic authors to help her with this idea and become the archive's administrators: missers [1], ChristyCorr [2], Silverspinner [3], everblue3 [4], FirstLightofEos [5], YKuang, erak and of course, Sarinileni herself.
On January 1, 2007, UnknowableWiki was announced at its parent website, Unknowable Room. [6]
[edit] The Great Break
The Great Break was a LiveJournal community created by this nine administrators in order to help organise everything. Many people joined the community, most of them who had left fanfiction.net after Sarina's story deletion, and agreed to create this new Harry Potter fanfiction archive.
Most of the authors wanted to importve their writing or others' which led to be one of the Unknowable Room's more important goal: Education. This inspired the creation of the Mentoring Program among other things.
Finally, after the release of the Half Blood Prince, the admins dubbed the archive The Unknowable Room, one of the chapter titles in HBP.
