Fanpages - an internal dilemma

[Sgirl]

I just want to know - how many of you in this community still hold on to fanpages for really old anime or manga properties?

Do you let the pages simply stay static or are you updating them still?

I opened up several Kenshin-based or Kenshin-related sites years ago -- probably last decade. I still keep all pages but have (until recently) had no desire to change the handcoded pages (done back then with dreamwevaer) into something current.

Lo and behold, Kenshin is back both in animated OVA and in film.

ANd now I"m wondering if I should convert all these old pages into something in a database structure (probably Wordpress) in case people actively want to find content again.
This past month, I've taken the liberty of converting some stuff (the Japanese history stuff) and noticed an immediate improvement in traffic to those pages.

Just curious if any of you are holding onto similarly old stuff like I am and what your experiences have been with web traffic and visibility?

Would love to see your links too please .... I'd love to know who else is slavishly maintaining fan pages.

[greg]

I am the owner of the Linna Yamazaki Shrine, devoted to my favorite character from Bubblegum Crisis. I actually am not the original designer of the page, but I have made several updates. I actually inherited it from somebody long, long ago. It's a relic of the '90s when everyone was making "shrine" pages devoted to the admiration of various anime characters. I haven't really touched it much over the past 13 years or more. BGC fandom has rather quieted down over the past 15 years ago, especially now that typical anime fans are a bunch of Pocky munching retarded cosplayers who only know new anime.

[usamimi]

I actually look back fondly on the days when anime fanpages where super popular. I had one back in the day (a Fushigi Yuugi one!) that was nothing fancy, but I had people say it was nice, which always made me happy.

A friend of mine's had a Sailor Moon fanpage since the late 90s, and it was static/un-updated for a long time....now with the new anime coming out, she's going to revamp it and re-open it when she gets some free time. I think it's a neat idea, I like the thought of fanpages making a comeback instead of having dumb "fan pages" on Facebook or whatever, lol.

[Kame-Sen'nin]

I also miss fan pages! I'd love to see them make a comeback...but it would be so much more difficult than it used to be.

I remember searching for DragonBall websites in the nineties, and the majority of results I'd come across (by a wide margin) were fan pages. Now, you have to seek those pages out specifically, and so many are retired or outdated that it's like we've lost a piece of anime fandom history.

Is still visit some of the pages that are up from time to time, but it's not quite the adventure it was back then.

Who knows, maybe a comeback is possible. Maybe Neocities will take the place of Geocities and we'll see more anime fan pages!

Better get those animated GIFs ready

[greg]

Unfortunately, FaceBook and blogs have replaced traditional homepages. Now, nobody bothers learning HTML anymore. Most everyone just uses blogs these days. I much prefer a traditional homepage layout with a table of contents. With blogs, content is organized by date and you must search for keywords to find what you want. It's just not the same! The positive thing though is that we no longer have to see any "THIS PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION" with yellow and black bars, and that picture of the man with the shovel whacking a mysterious dark lump with a shovel at warp speed. Is it a lump of dirt? A sack of potatoes? A puppy?

[Animusubi]

I used to have a pretty obscure fanpage dedicated to a villain "Dark Serge" from the video game Chrono Cross, called Negative Vibration. Otherwise I just ran a normal Geocities website for my fanart called "The Bread Box". Neither are up anymore and I didn't bother backing them up to other sites (though I did save the html).

[PinkAppleJam]

I guess Wikipedia has eliminated the need for fan pages, though reading fabrics or people's memoirs about their introduction to a series or a character is always interesting to me.

I would definitely keep the original pages, I love seeing old websites like the Linna shrine page. Maybe just put everything on the front to scroll through, without links to new pages, as we all have broadband/ADSL and can load loads of tiny images

[usamimi]

There are SOME fansites on the web that are still around after all these years. When I was doing my podcast ep about Utena recently, I was happy to discover that Ohtori.nu (an Utena fansite/forum I remembered from high school) is STILL alive and kicking. Some Sailor Moon fansites are still floating around, too. It kinda makes me happy, because I really like stuff like that...fansites are generally more warm and fun than just a Wiki.

[Sgirl]

oh wow - I remember ohtori.nu. Glad to know it's still there.

I've felt at times I've lost the battle more to Tumblr than to any of the other sites. I see a lot of fan content on Tumblr -- the tagging system made it easier to seek out. (Now that Facebook has tagging implemented well, it's possible it might be able to link fan content more properly but I'm skeptical ... FB is one of those places where they keep trying to force people to pay to ensure your feeds aren't getting obscured by their algorithms. As such, I know a lot of creators don't want to rely on it as a primary delivery platform.)

I did find it rather easy to take everything and dump it into Wordpress with a few hours of work. (*I had to find a plugin to allow multiple themes on one install so I had delayed this for some time.) But now I'm happy -- the two fansites are now off hardcode web and in theory I'll be able to update content more quickly if I get increasingly "active again." (The two sites are http://red-bird.org/meiji2 and http://red-bird.org/icefire )

That's a big if though... I always used to update the fansite in response to a demand . I'll be watching my stats (now easier with everything on Wordpress) to see who comes in and why.

[usamimi]

Yeah, it's weird how almost all of "fandom" has moved almost exclusively to tumblr. It's annoying because it's hard to find specific posts, though--esp. if you're looking for something in a big fandom (like Sailor Moon, for example). I mean, on the one hand it's cool to see that fandoms for some things are alive and kicking, but on the other hand, there's no real way to organize anything properly on tumblr, nor to keep certain things static or in the same place. Everything's always shuffling about...