historium | I've breached the wall into the Slash Cotillion

The Slash Cotillion, for those of you who weren't around or don't remember, was the only multifandom archive devoted to historical slash, back in the 00s. Have you ever visited historic_slash? That was an outgrowth of the Slash Cotillion. (Historic_slash still links to the archive on its profile.)

Some time after 2003, the Slash Cotillion switched over to an automated archiving system, which made it possible for authors to post stories directly to the archive. The archive grew much faster than before.

Then the website went down, and the owner disappeared.

As Fanlore says, "Sadly, very little of the site was stored on the Internet Archive. However a few links remain dating from 2003 . . ."

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash_Cotillion (with links to cached pages from the 2001 and 2003 versions of the archive)

But tonight I managed to extract more than that! Somebody showed me the trick of bringing up an index of all the pages of a cached website at the Internet Archive. I was able to use that to break my way into a portion of the automated version of the archive.

(*Drum roll, please.*)

https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://cotillion.slashcity.org/*

The stories not currently listed at Fanlore are on the second and third pages of the archive.org index; look for "efic/viewstory". Or you can browse through "efic/categories" on the first page of the index, though some of those category pages lead to broken links.

(If you've never used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine before: When you click on a link in the index, you'll be shown a calendar. Just click on one of the blue dots on the calendar, select one of the linked times - it doesn't matter which - and you'll be sent to the cached page. If you don't see a blue dot, change the year on the timeline at the top of the page.)

The Slash Cotillion was my introduction to historicalfic. I'm delighted to see more of it available again.