It is with great sadness that I read the news from dustybeard on the wamstoryarchive that he will be closing down from February 2015.

Yet another great WAM resource to be lost, and one in a niche (WAM fiction) where there is very little else out there.

As I have posted on the site I am unable to offer funding or hosting for the archive (although if we could look at some form of fundraising I would gladly contribute).

However, I would be more than willing to step up to the plate in other areas, for example admin type roles, etc.

My question would be are there any commercial site holders out there who would be able to offer basic hosting facilities (would not need to necessarily worry about the ratings and comments systems, just a basic html index and archive???)

I know that the splosh forum was saved from a similar fate and it would be nice to think that we could do the same for the wamstoryarchive as well. I do not know the traffic volumes that the archive generates but I cannot imagine that it would be too excessive for some hosters to consider it.

If all else fails then I may look at some of the free forums that are available out there and see if we can do something about saving the stories. This would by necessity be almost a 'last resort' but I would really hate for it all to be lost for ever.

I can easily host the archive. Do you have contact with the guy who runs it? If I had the site database it'd be much easier than trying to rebuild the whole site manually...

I do not know him 'personally' just that he is dusty, writes under the pen-name of dustybeard.

There is no email address listed on the wamstoryarchive.com site for him but I am sure that if a comment was left then he would respond positively, I will post an additional comment pointing him to this thread.

Thank you for the offer, maybe there is still hope for WAM fiction!!!

i hope it can be saved! i love that site.

Same here. it was bad the last time the archive went down, because some stories were lost i believe.

Someone(s) should make a backup archive of all the stories, just in case maybe?

This site inspired me to write some stories and it was the only time I was really able to contribute to the community which was an awesome experience. I hope it can be saved.

If the site can be kept open I could take it over and have about 10 stories on it within 2 months and with luck 20 by the end of the year.

Would that be okay?

Would be a shame to lose this site as some great extreme messy paint stories on there ;(

Did anyone rip this site before it went down?

All is not completely lost. I ripped 300 of the stories before it went down, plus with others I already have I reckon that 90+% is safe.

I am in the process of sorting out more access to my entire collection of WAM fiction, will post more shortly.

I'm sorry to hear this site is disappearing! There's some amazing mud stories on there and I had been working on stories that I had ultimately wanted to post there (but never got them to a point I felt comfortable submitting). The Blog setting here doesn't work well enough for stories in my opinion and the story archive was the best option I could find. Here's hoping someone else can help build a new option.