Welcome back to the RGFC... soon, anyway!

We’ll have something much more substantial up here soon, but right now, we just want you to know that we’re coming back.

Several years ago, our main tech people and administrative people all got enveloped by their day-to-day lives (university, parenthood, grandparenthood, and major career changes) and the site slowly fell into disuse. Eventually, all of the programs that maintained the site shut down one by one.

We are now in the process of bringing things back online, with a focus on two areas in particular: the creative works that our members contributed (both fan fiction and fan art) and the community that we built. So as things return (and this is a process that will probably take several months), expect to see those areas reappear first.

So here’s the plan…

April 6, 2022

So here’s the order of what will be coming back first:

  1. The RGFC Message Board — Unfortunately, the old board has gotten so out-of-date that there’s no salvaging it. That sucks, but it’s also an opportunity for a new beginning. We imagine most of you don’t remember your passwords from a decade ago, anywyay, and it’s been about that long since the board’s been active. We do have all of the old data from the board, just no way of effectively porting it into a new board (and trust me, we have tried, but the update programs just can’t cope with a database that’s a decade old… 🤷🏽‍♀️), so if there’s a particular story or post that you remember and want to see if we can recover, we can go hunting for it in our downtime (but there may not be much downtime right away). Anyway, we would love to have old friends return and sign back up, once the board goes live. Keep watching this space for a link.
  2. The Fan Art Gallery — Bringing back the fan art shouldn’t be too difficult… 🤞 Further down the road, once the main items on this list have been brought back, we will try to bring back our other image galleries that contain source materials for fan artists to work from, should there be interest. But a lot of time has passed, so we will see. How necessary they are will depend on what kind of artists’ community re-forms here and what they express a need for.
  3. The Fan Fiction Archive — This is the Big Project, and the part that will probably take the longest to achieve. We’re working with a pretty elaborate system that will make every story super portable, so that they will never get lost again. With more than 150 works to apply it to, this will take a while to finish, so it might be a few months before it comes online. In the meantime, you can check out a prototype of what this new archive will look like, over on Ardath Rekha’s website. This is what will be done for all of the stories and RPs we collected in our archive more than a decade ago, allowing you to read them online, print them off in a beautifully formatted form, or load them into the eReader of your choice and keep them with you always. We’re very excited!

After that, we’ll see what happens, and what the community that returns here is interested in having. In the meantime, pardon our dust (there’s a lot of it around here) and we’ll bring you more updates soon.