Slashpoint

Slashpoint was an early mm open slash mailing list, created in October 1996 by a grad student at University of California, Davis and housed on the university server, like most lists of the day. At one point it had roughly 200 members -- a very respectable size for the time.Slashpoint home page via Wayback Machine, accessed November 18, 2008.
==The Mission==
The listowner, Laura Akers, created the list as part of her studies, to try to figure out why Constance Penley's theories about slash -- that (K/S) slash was a way for women to write about egalitarian relationships that wouldn't have been possible in the het ST:TOS universe -- didn't seem to hold true any longer. Laura was an X-Files fan who saw a ready-made egalitarian heterosexual relationship onscreen -- Mulder and Scully -- and yet people continued to write XF slash, sometimes even deliberately creating a power imbalance. So she set up the list to gather information about why people write slash, promising to keep it going and active for at least five years, since that was how long she expected her studies to last.Slashpoint FAQ via Wayback Machine. Accessed November 18, 2008.
Laura was upfront about the academic purpose behind the list, and very clear on how any information from the list would be used both by her and by the other academics on the list.Slashpoint's Privacy and Security page via Wayback Machine, accessed November 18, 2008.] Thus reassured, people joined the list in droves. 
==The Early Days==
In the early days, the list had an "archive" -- a collection of stories whose titles would be posted to the list once a week (along with a list of slash sites). List members could request any title they wanted, which would be emailed to them. The stories were not put up on the web, partly in hopes of convincing writers who were wary of the Web to include their stories in the archive, for limited distribution.Saved email, posted October 1996. Accessed November 18, 2008. The "archive" doesn't appear to have survived beyond the list's first year, possibly because web-based archives were growing steadily and making it less necessary.
Eventually, the FAQ included a list of websites and archives for people to find fictionSlashpoint's Where Do I Find Slash? via Wayback Machine, accessed November 18, 2008., although this wasn't a patch on Karen Nicholas's huge Slash Fan Fiction on the Net site.
==The Active Years==
During its active years, like other pan-fandom lists of the time, Slashpoint was a clearinghouse of information and discussion. It had announcements of new public lists and archives; announcements of personal websites (or updates of same); requests for betas; zine and vidtape announcements; mentions of articles in the press or academia (both rare, at the time); rants on bad writing and crappy grammar; show-pimping posts; (plaintive) requests for tapes; personal-address changes (how else would we keep track of each other?); slashy actor gossip; con reports; informative links to or quotes from gay sites; philosophical discussions on how people's nationalities affected their fanfic (and slightly less philosophical discussions on using Brit or Aussie English for American shows, or vice versa); spirited discussions of whether criticism was a good thing or not; anime and manga (and yaoi and shounen ai, etc.); the legalities of fanfic; sexual and gender identity; you name it, people talked about it. The list even occasionally had fanfic, including round robins, although fanfic wasn't technically allowed.Saved list mail from 1996 through 2000. Accessed November 18, 2008. 
Slashpoint grew quickly and was hugely active early on, although after the first year or two it settled into a pattern of lulls and bursts of activity (often fights, since contentious subjects got the most response), as happened on most lists. Fans joked at the time that lists were subject to yeast growth curves, including choking on their own waste (or at least, ending up with fans intimidated/annoyed by flamewars into no longer posting). The unusually high concentration of academics who carried on academic conversations may also have contributed to intimidating some people into no longer posting; by the list's later years, many conversations turned academic within just a few posts.
==Differences Between Slashpoint and Virgule-L==
On May 6, 1997 Sandy Herrold was asked about the differences between Slashpoint and the Virgule-L mailing list, the first slash mailing list. It is reposted here with permission. 
==The End==
The list ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Laura Akers had stopped participating and even responding to email (making it impossible for people to either leave the list or sub to it, since automated subscription functions no longer worked), and the list began being regularly hit with spam.I need to look this up in a different email archive, but I'm pretty sure that's right. -- Arduinna Eventually, people just stopped posting anything at all. 
==References==
Category:Slash Mailing Lists
Category:1990sCategory:2000s