This is the first post of what I’m thinking will be a three-part series on the actual process of saving fan sites.
I should have started documenting my steps a long time ago, but I guess I’ll just have to see how well my memory serves me. Looking through the folder on my computer that contains all of the website mirrors, the first site downloaded was Paige’s Page on April 13th of this year. It was her page that really inspired me to start this project because Paige had over ten years of content on her Blogger site. If her site were to become unavailable for whatever reason it would be a huge blow to the community. Soon after, seeing that Duelist101 had been pulled gave me a sense of urgency to actually being this project. In either case if there was a publicly-available backup none of the content would be lost. So how do you even begin making an archive of an entire online community? Find out just how big the community is.
I created a spreadsheet with columns for site names, the URL, whether it is still active, if it’s strictly Pirate or mixed with Wiz, and other things I thought important. This is a dynamic list that I updated as I went. When I found a new site I added it to the end. After I downloaded a website, I made sure to update that information and fill in how I hosted it with a .p101 domain. I would like to migrate this unorganized spreadsheet to a database that anyone could query but that is not a high priority. As of right now this remains my master list.
But the spreadsheet above did not start with all of that information filled in. I started at the Pirate101 Official Fan Site page and followed each link. While on the site I would poke around for a bit to find information to add to the spread sheet. All the basic info could usually be found on the homepage but I also clicked a few links to see if there were any additional channels (YouTube, Twitch, etc) or significant, unique details.
What really sped up the search for additional sites was when one would have a list of links to external resources. Blogger is really helpful for this because its users could directly link to other blogs that they followed in a sidebar. Some sites (Blogger and non-Blogger) had dedicated pages with links to other communities. One resource that I had overlooked until fairly recently was Pirate101 Central’s blog listings, where people would post links to their external blogs in a forum.
A Deadly Pirate’s Blog 
The Dragonspyre Pirate 
The Gunner’s Daughter
Of the three examples above, only one is still available on the web; A Deadly Pirate’s Blog and The Dragonspyre Pirate are only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Often I would be on a live site and click on a link only to find the destination no longer available. To show how extensive the link rot is, at the time of writing 15 of the 27 links on The Gunner’s Daughter have rotten. This means that the websites are no longer registered, under new ownership, or locked by site admins. This is one of the core problems I am trying to solve with this archival project.
As I have mentioned several times in this blog, the Wayback Machine has helped this project immensely. It is a free service from Archive.org that periodically saves snapshots of websites at a point in time. If I click on a link and find that it is dead, I can then plug it in to the Wayback Machine. It gives a list of every time a page was captured so I can then go back in time and find the latest version that hosted the desired content. In the case of A Deadly Pirate’s Blog as seen below, the domain is currently empty. Using the Wayback Machine we can see that for several years the author displayed a farewell message but removed all other content. The last capture with actual content was saved on September 3, 2012.
I recorded the information I gathered about each site into the master spreadsheet. This process continued until I had exhaustively searched every single link on every single page. Every time I thought I had found the last undiscovered website I would stumble upon another one. I have been searching off-and-on since April and I am still finding new ones, the most recent being Arthur the Pirate just today. This is part of the reason I have been putting off the documentation of the actual archival process: it is still ongoing. Undoubtedly there are more sites I have missed so please let me know if you find any.