FoLCs, I now had a couple of minutes to poke around and here's what we know:
The domain lcfanfic.com wasn't renewed as normal on April 26th. Instead, it lapsed and is now in limbo.
We (Sara and I) have reached out to Lauren, who maintains the Archive and Labby, who served as General Editor for a very long time on the Archive. Labby hasn't heard from Lauren so all we can do right now is hope Lauren's all right and it's just a clerical error.
Meanwhile, Sara and I are also discussing fallback solutions to make sure our Archive can survive if the worst did happen. We know of some backups out there and there is also the Internet Archive, which seems to have a complete snapshot of the HTML version of the Archive (not the epubs, word documents etc). It can be reached here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230302094102/https://lcfanfic.com/
I did check a couple of random story links and the story was there, regardless of age or random location in the list. So, I'm hoping it's all there and can be rescued, too.
Since the Internet Archive is a stable source of data, the information is available there and can be browsed just like before (except for the ebooks). This means we still have an Archive, so we will take a beat to ensure the next steps are done properly. First of course, we wait and see about Lauren. If the worst did happen, we will work on getting the Archive back up and running on an official LnC system and not as a backup via the Internet Archive. This would be a major endeavor, though, and thus take a bit. Please rest assured that both Sara and I are also hardcore FoLCs with a deep love for the stories written in this fandom and entrusted to the Archive so while it may take a bit, we do plan of getting things up and running properly
Michael
