The original Gossamer Archive was opened on May 4, 1995[3] by Vincent Juodvalkis after mirroring files from all the older FTP sites which collected stories from alt.tv.x-files.creative (ATXC) Usenet newsgroup.
[5] Because he was worried that the bandwidth consumption was having a negative effect on Ohio-State's network, he was considering solutions, including moving the archive to a commercial site and selling advertising space on the front page to pay for the heavy-duty bandwidth and disk space (235 MB) requirements.On July 3, 1996, Vincent announced the projected shutdown of the Ohio-State site,[6] citing a lack of time and network saturation.
[11] By early 1997, most of the other archive attempts had consolidated under the Gossamer Project umbrella, generally using the database and HTML page generation scripts created by Natasha.
In May 1998, Gossamer was listed in an article in the Yahoo!Life print magazine, and experienced a traffic spike to over 60,000 hits per site, per day.
The name choice proved to be a bad decision, as many US-based fans refuse to use a site obviously located in Europe due to concerns about speed and access.
This script was later deployed to all active Gossamer sites to prevent the bandwidth issues associated with deep linking.On April 1, 1999, all archive names based on networks or locations were retired.
During late 1999 and early 2000, the Gossamer archives received, on average, 1,000 direct e-mail, newsgroup and mailing list submissions a month.
On August 18, 1997, the Gossamer Project was discussed in an article in the New York Times which focused specifically on the X-Files fan fiction online.
[14] In the December 1, 1998 edition of Entertainment Weekly, the Gossamer Project was mentioned in the Writers Bloc sidebar for the article Fan Fiction: Out of Character by E. Klotz and the front page used as the primary image for that section.
[15] In recent years, the Gossamer Project has become a touchpoint for nostalgic discussions among fans about "the way things were" before the emergence of FanFiction.net and the ongoing decentralization of single fandoms amongst many sites and forums.
When it was easy for fans to find what they wanted, because there were huge glowing neon signs pointing them towards Mecca at every bend and fork in the road.
[18] In an article entitled "Gender and Fan Culture (Round Eight, Part One): Abigail Derecho and Christian McCrea" posted to Henry Jenkins's blog on July 26, 2007, the Gossamer Project sites and its sister project Ephemeral and their impact on online fandom and fannish history were discussed:[19] For all who might think that posting X-Files fanfic to the ATXC board did not really constitute a technological innovation, I say this: the ATXC and its successor, the Ephemeral/Gossamer archival system, have proven over the last dozen years that a simple open-source PHP archive of HTML documents will outlast a lot of other hypermedia creations.
While gamers hunt down emulators, fans of hypertext literature long for a working installation disk of Mac Classic OS, and digital historians cry over numerous broken links and four-year-old Flash animation that just never loads all the way, readers of online fan fiction sit back and enjoy the plain-and-simple HTML, reliably archived and presented in neat rows and columns for their pleasurable consumption for years to come.