PokéWars! archival on AO3

[Mario Panighetti]

Hey everyone!

My name’s Mario, but I was a member of AGNP back in 1999/2000 and was known as Marpa Stelos or Anonymous at various times. I tried to reach out to Rob from the Pokewars! Pavilion (http://pokewars.pipian.com) but that email appears to no longer be active, so I'm hoping he still checks in here on occasion or someone possibly knows how to contact him.

I really appreciate all the hard work he did archiving everyone's PokéWars! stories on the Pavilion via the Official Pokewars! Archive (http://pokewars.pipian.com/archive) (and thank you to Pipian for keeping up hosting all this time). It’s been wonderful revisiting this part of my childhood (I was 16 at the time I wrote PW! stories) and seeing my old writing and artwork. This is the first fanfic I ever posted online, and probably the only collaborative fic of its kind with which I’ve ever been involved, so it’s nice to see where I effectively got started with Internet fiction.

Primarily though, I was writing to see if Rob or someone else would be interested in helping to find a more permanent home for the PokéWars! archive. I'm currently in the process of archiving my own PokéWars! stories on Archive of Our Own, a project from the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works which attempts to provide a safe place for fics throughout the ages to be preserved into the future. I am including the posts from other writers whenever they intersect with my own to create more cohesive storytelling in these archival posts, but I find that as I progress through this effort, I believe it would be preferable to be able to include the broader PokéWars! narrative from all the other authors with which I did not directly interact. Put another way, I’d love to see The Official Pokewars! Archive get transferred to AO3 in some capacity.

This archival effort could come in the form of a manual effort on volunteers within the community, but it would be much more efficient to reach out to the OTW’s Open Doors project, which might be able to assist with a bulk import of all the posts from the page archive, or from this Google Groups archive:

https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org

Anyone who would be considered the curator of the PokéWars! stories, feel free to reach out. Thanks in advance!

~ Mario Panighetti (aka ig88sw82, aka anakin0327, aka Marpa Stelos, aka Anonymous)

[William A. Rendfeld]

I'd be good with something like this being done. Worst case scenario, I saved copies of every story featuring my characters, so I could just follow in your example.

[MASTER260]

In 2014 I went a little nuts and started asking everyone to delete tons of things I made on tons of sites, including from the PokeWars Pavilion I think, but you can still find all of the stuff I posted on non-Google Groups Usenet archives. So since I've calmed down since that time, I would actually like if the stuff I made got on any new sort of PokeWars archive. It's okay if it's too much effort, though. You'll find that I started recovering everything, only to delete it all again, but I never finished so most of the stuff would be in older posts. I still feel guilty because I feel like I messed up the continuity of the PokeWars... ):

[Tech Weaver]

A while back, I started copying my old stuff in a Tumblr blog, but gave up on it after a short while. I don't know if I can be of much help, since you probably already know all the places I would look for them.

[David Chan]

So, I was cleaning out an old container of college stuff in the basement and found a whole bunch of stuff that brought back memories. I googled my old aol email address (chnse4life) and funny enough the first search result was this (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.nintendo.pokemon/c/uSxyC_kfwG4). The list of folks brought back a lot of memories. I was super active between 1998 i think to about 2000. Then college life absorbed all my time and I drifted away from the group. I made random drops to the AIM chat room where I think Dread or Cat-Gonk was around till 2002 or so, but that was it for me.

@mario, I saw your post (when I came scouring this old newsgroup) and saw your name and I think I remember you as well. I had to read old posts from 1999-2001 to remember what pokewars was lol