Hi all,

with the imminent closure of the WAM Story Archive (may already be gone for good due to bandwidth issues?) I have been looking at ways to continue the genre of WAM fiction.

There are options, firstly I have ripped over 300 of the older stories from the archive, and along with the ones that I have on my hard drive already, I estimate that about 95% of the archive wil be available again.

Additionally I have a lot of WAM fiction that was not on the archive this time, in total approaching 1000 stories, nearly double what was online.

I am willing to share these with everybody, but the question is just how to do this.

As a temporary basis I have uploaded the stories to a free forum board on the internet. Now this is a nice relatively easy way to store and archive the stories as well as allowing the addition of new material and keeping everything clean. However, the downside is that it is questionable (!) as to whether it falls within the terms of content of their service and therefore could be taken down without notice.

The other end of the spectrum is to do what dustybeard has been doing which is basically paying for domain name, server space, traffic etc. However I have neither the time nor resources to do this personally.

Finally there is the 'in-between' option where an already established third party supplies the hosting facilities for the archive and myself or others maintain it. My time and grasp of internet hosting means that this would need to be a very easy to maintain solution to make it worthwhile.

So, kicking it open to all of you folks, how do you think the archive should be run going forwards from now???

The inbetween option.

The middle one does strike me as the best overall option.

Let me know when you get everything online as I'm still continuing to write stories for a couple of my existing series to provide new material for the new archives.

I agree that the middle option does sound the best, but it does rely on having another site owner / hoster willing to put up the hosting and traffic for a forum board (or easy to administer site!)

Any nice volunteers out there

In the meantime if anybody wants the link to the forum that I have dumped the stories to please pm me and I will let you know the link (but be patient!)

Not going to share it completely publicly yet as still not finished and want to minimise the risk of it being taken down again.

I'd consider hosting it - but there's no way to contact DustyBeard that I can see... Comments went unanswered, and he's got no email on there.

Now the site's down again as it's exceeded bandwidth, so I guess it's using quite a lot! I'd rather know what the expected costs are before I promise anything, but I'd hate to see it vanish.

Henry

We have plenty of space for all the stories you can upload, and don't charge anything. Whatup son?

I volunteered to host it but I never got a response from the guy running it, either.

Hey mess master, if you like to have more stories on umd then maybe a separate section just for stories like wetlook,messy, male.....like you already have. I know you have a section for blogs and stories but with the many on wamstory it needs to be its own section. Just my 2cents.
Rich

Good point. I am prepared to update the Blogs and Stories section to better present the content if need be. If we need some sort of categorization or separation or whatever, we'll take a look and figure out what's best, and I'll update the section when I get some time. The stories themselves can be added at any time though.

I'd propose splitting blogs and stories into their own dedicated sections, as well as dividing it into different subsections as was already noted.

Of course I would be remiss not to mention places like TellyGunge.

Sounds good to me - the only reason for keeping the current one open is that there are a lot of stories there already, under each owner's name. I can't really upload someone else's for them...

But thanks for the reminder, MM - I'll have to upload mine! I always saw the 'blogs' tag and figured it wasn't really applicable.

Is there already an existing story section on UMD? If so, please tell me where. Thanks

It's combined with the blog section. http://umd.net/blogs

Tried to see how many blogs there are, but it looks like the "All blogs" listing stops at a hundred -- so some page numbers are needed there. Sorting by date might be nice. It's easy to find all posts by an "author", although on the "All blogs" listing member's names that have spaces in them don't click to anywhere. Separating Blogs and Stories makes sense, though it's a bit of a mess as there are common Member Blogs and then there are Download Store Blogs (hopefully easy to distinguish on the back end).

Have to admit that with the multitude of dazzling pics and vids here I haven't payed attention to the "story" side of WAM for a while. Can definitely understand how this part of UMD could get neglected. If there are enough people interested maybe some of the sorting out could be crowdsourced with a Form on each Blog/Story; i.e. "This is a Blog | Story (choose one)","This is Messy | Wet | Male | Female (choose one, more than one?)". Not sure what else would be useful on that form. Would think that such a form would not be mishandled/abused by the crowd; could just be temporary for the "Grand Sort", but kept permanent on the page where folks post a new blog/story.

Would be ideal if those really invested in having a solid WAM Story Archive on UMD to weigh in here (or a sticky thread) before such a sorting/categorizing process got underway!

+1

Yeah, I have also sort of thought that the stories / blogs section here is not really fit for purpose (sorry MM!!) Sort of difficult to sort through as well as the other problems previously mentioned.

As I posted earlier I have saved a lot of stories to a free forum board. The thinking behind this was that it would be very easy to administer and could be passed on just by adding new admins etc.

Also, forum boards do lend themselves quite well to this type of thing if kept clean and moderated. Obviously, the downside I completely failed to consider in my rush to try and 'archive the archive' was the terms and conditions where the use of adult content is not allowed :-S

The way I envisioned it was a board for stories with sub-boards per author and then sub-boards again within these if they have lengthy multi-part story arcs.

These can only be edited by a moderator (although the author could be given rights to modify their own boards)

There can also be boards for comments / discussion and submissions. My vision of how it could look is at wamstoryarchive.freeforums.net, you will need to register to see the stories but should be fairly easy.

If something like that could be replicated here it would be ideal. I would be more than willing to spend the time transferring the stories across between the two.

More advanced features etc can always follow later!

Hey, quick turn around on those page numbers and names with spaces issues, MM!! The categories thing is obviously more involved, so hope you get solid feedback on what's wanted. Custardwam, your feedback does look very helpful! Especially providing a model for MM to work from. The place that model is hosted looks a little bit sketchy according to Google's diagnostic: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=freeforums.net. Having said that, the site is "not currently listed as suspicious" so maybe I'm being a little picky. Still, if there's a more reliable place you could post just the main pages (not all the stories even) it might be even more helpful

Another small(?) suggestion, MM: an index of authors might be useful, either listed in a dropdown box or on its own page where sorting can be done alphabetically, by popularity, number of stories, or most recently published. Also, if a "crowdsourcing form" does get created, the authors in that list could be messaged and asked nicely to fill it out for each blog/story they've submitted in the past.

Of course all this is all only as high priority as the WAM Story fans make it to be. They should know that adding new database fields, submission forms, and index pages carries its own special headaches. So the more interest shown for change and the easier you all make it for MM, the more likely it is to happen!

I'd just posted a story on the Archive last week and saw the notice after doing so. That was a bummer.

But I'm glad to see the interest in keeping it going. I've re-posted my newest story here and will eventually try and dig up the others I'd posted there (I'd only done around a half dozen).

Here's to keeping this thing going.

It is a bummer that the archive is leaving, but it would be AWESOME to have both it and UMD conglomerates into one site so that all my activities are on one thing! I just hope all the greats are able to move their material over without a problem and the site overall can welcome everyone in well with the ability to properly recognize all of the work that has been done. I know I haven't had time to writr anything with schooling prolonged, but I do hope I am able to ckntribute/re contribute properly.

This actually would be very interesting to do, i used to enjoy writing, have a few ideas for a WAM story, just need somewhere to type it all out and post it up for everyone to read. Have not done it for years, but might be fun to try it again. If there wa a way i could make money out of it, i would, but i can't, it's just writing, so if i do it, it's going to be nice jjust to share with story lovers who like to use their imagination when reading something.

On one hand it's difficult to attract many people to stories when there are real images of scenes on the same place. Still I think keeping all here is OU best bet for survival right now. Who knows? The addition of an updated story section could allow for some popularity wih those that actually wam like that
Fingers crossed.

I definitely concur (as someone who has actually used her blog to try and post stories) that some better separation between the general blog and a story post would definitely be highly desired. Also some (minor) categorization wouldn't be amiss either.

Having read the messages here (and feedback elsewhere) it certainly seems that the best way forward is for the archive to be hosted by an existing provider.

I have had a couple of offers from others but feel that if we can get it merged in with the UMD that may be the best way forward.

Messmaster, is it possible to create a new forum board for stories, alongside wetlook, messy, male wam, etc. and for a person to be a moderator of this board only (eg able to create sub-boards etc)

If so (and you were willing to let me have that level of access) I could then recreate the board structure from wamstoryarchive.freeforums.net here at the UMD and it should then be relatively straightforward to keep it clean and organised.

I could also have a go at sorting out the blogs from the stories etc and get them ported across to a new forum.

I don't envision that the traffic / bandwidth required for this would be too high (although the original archive has hit bandwidth limits a few times recently so there must be a reasonable amount of interest out there!)

The WAM Story Archive is back online again

I presume that the site has a rolling bandwidth allocation and has kicked into a new period. I have double checked and found the last few stories that I had not mirrored across to wamstoryarchive.freeforums.net and ensured that they are all there now.

The only remaining stories I cannot get out of the archive are those submitted but awaiting publication. If those authors wish to drop me a link / email to the stories I will add them in to the mirror archive as well.

The mirror forum is currently standing at 1048 stories now (and I haven't even started on some old mud stories!)

Many thanks for all the work you've done so far CustardWam.

I agree it would be great if the stories could be incorporated into the UMD with a way to sort things into authors, series and some sub-categories.

I would be glad to help in any way, I would be more than happy to either help pay to host and run a forum, or help the people at UMD incorporate the WAM Story Archive into their site. I have some experience doing web development so I would be able to assist them with any changes that they would need to make.

If we decide that hosting our own site would be a better option, I think splitting the bill, or collecting donations to pay for the hosting and domain would be a very good idea, that way it wouldn't be a huge burden on just one person.

A friend told me that a bunch of stores had already been transferred over.
I don't see anything like that though.

A replacement forum is up and running at wamstoryarchive.freeforums.net although you will need to register before you can see the stories themselves.

However, well worth it as there are now over 1200 stories on the site and more coming online all the time.

I am also trying to clean up formatting and find correct author attributions for some of the 'anonymous' stories although this will be a long slow job I think!

There has been talk about the best long term solution (there is always a possibility that freeforums.net may take the site down, hence the registration required before being able to see any stories) but nothing firm has been agreed yet.

Ok, understood. Thank you. : )
On one hand it would be nice to have everything in one place here on UMD, but at least this way there's a knee chance at survival now.