Fanfic Symposium

The Fanfic Symposium is a site hosting meta essays from various contributors, founded in 1999. The website is still online, but hasn't been updated with a new essay since December 2006.
:For a list of the individual essays, see the subpage: Fanfic Symposium/Essays
Fanfic Symposium Discussion Site is the discussion LiveJournal for Fanfic Symposium, where all columns may be discussed.
The website's landing page introduces the site as follows:
==An Original Announcement==
==About the Site==
Essays that were submitted were called "columns", and anyone could submit one as long as their column met the submission guidelines, which basically boiled down to: the topic had to be of interest to fanfic readers and writers. (There were also some formatting guidelines.)Fanfic Symposium Submission Guidelines, accessed November 21,2008. The site got a whopping 40 submissions in its first year -- or first six months, more accurately, since the first essay was posted on June 9, 1999.Column index from early 2000 listing all the 1999 submissions, including two removed later, via Wayback Machine. Accessed November 21, 2008. After that burst of pent-up meta, things settled down to 15-30 essays per year until 2006, when a bare 9 were posted as a last gasp of activity.Symposium Columns by Year, last updated December 28, 2006. Accessed November 21, 2008.
The original purpose of the Symposium was to host essays about fanfic, in particular, but the scope broadened very quickly, and topics ranged all over the media-fandom map, including writing, genres of fanfic (h/c, smarm, AUs, crossovers, darkfic, etc.), feedback and concrit, zines vs. online publishing, BNFs, male privilege, recs and their purpose in fandom, Mary Sues, race and fandom, domestic discipline, POV, beta-reading, fanfiction.net, profic vs. fanfic, slash (... lots of essays on slash...), PWPs, RPF, fannish ethics, the fannish community, and far more, including many essays on individual fandoms.
One of the hallmarks of the Symposium was the way people would write essays in response to earlier essays, right from the beginning. For instance, on November 24, 1999, an essay called Joxer?!?! And Other Things I Don't Get was posted. On November 28, someone submitted Ares/Joxer? Sure!; on November 29, someone else posted Response to Joxer?!?! And Other Things I Don't Get; on November 30, a third person posted Why Joxer and Ares?. This was an active, interactive forum for broad-ranging discussion.
In addition to posting response-essays, the Symposium originally also accepted letters in response to columns, which Cereta would post on a Letters page.Symposium Letters page from December 1999, via Wayback Machine, accessed November 21, 2008. Later, when the Symposium got more active, she added a message board for more real-time conversation.Symposium Message board from January 2000, via Wayback Machine. Accessed November 21, 2008. (Sadly, the very active pre-2000 messageboard was completely purged in a cleanup -- see the "Admin cleanup" post on the page-- and no Wayback record exists of the earlier messages.)
In 2008, the site's creator discussed "Fanfic Symposium," and she focused on the styles of communication of the day, and of the fannish platforms available and how these things shaped discussion:
===Guidelines===
See the original guidelines here. They included: 
* What topics are appropriate?
* What if it's been published somewhere else?
* How long should my column be?
* What file format should I send it in?
* How should I format my column?
* Should I include html tags?
* Where do I send it?
==Site History==
===Six Years Later, Changes in Fannish Platforms===
===The 2008 Removal of Three Essays by Laura Hale===
Sometime between July 2-13, 2008, the site's administrator removed three essays by Laura Hale from the "Fanfic Symposium" site. The removal was most likely related to the controversy and fannish anger regarding Fan History Wiki, something that had became very heated during the summer of 2008.
* A Historical Perspective on Mary Sue: Issues and Trends (2005)
* (2005)
* A History of Male Involvement in the Fan Fiction Community (2006)
===Creation of ffsymposium===
When Trickster, the server the Symposium is hosted on, crashed in 2003, Cereta lost the message-board program, and never recovered it. Instead, she started up a livejournal community called "ffsymposium" and invited people to talk there, posting a link whenever a new column went up so that people could discuss it in the comments. While the comm did have some conversation, it never generated as much steady discussion as the message board had.
Cereta's announcement: 
The Fanfic Symposium was also associated with the mailing list FCA-L (the Fanfic Critics Association), which sometimes discussed or even sparked Symposium columns, although it carried on a lot of other discussion as well. 
The name lives on in The Symposium, a section of the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures, and gave its name to the associated Symposium Blog (now Fanhackers), published by the Organization for Transformative Works.
===Site Redesign===
There was a site redesign between March and August 2004.
The home page of the old site.
==Some Fan Comments==
In 2006, when complimented on her meta essay, a fan wrote: 
==Further Reading/Meta==
* by cereta (August 7, 2002)
==References==
Category:Fanfiction Meta
Category:1999 Websites
Category:1990s Websites
Category:2000s Websites
Category:Trickster.org
Category:Social Media Feature
Category:Multifandom Websites‎