Does anyone know what happened to the Wam Story Archive? When you go to the web address it says it was taken offline. Any idea as to why?

http://wamstoryarchive.freeforums.net

As the message says, they applied section 25(a) of the Terms of Service

25. TERMINATION

(a) By ProBoards

WITHOUT LIMITING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF THIS AGREEMENT, PROBOARDS RESERVES THE RIGHT TO, IN PROBOARDS' SOLE DISCRETION AND WITHOUT NOTICE OR LIABILITY, DENY USE OF THE WEBSITE AND/OR SERVICES TO ANY PERSON FOR ANY REASON OR FOR NO REASON AT ALL, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION FOR ANY BREACH OR SUSPECTED BREACH OF ANY REPRESENTATION, WARRANTY OR COVENANT CONTAINED IN THIS AGREEMENT, OR OF ANY APPLICABLE LAW OR REGULATION.

To sum up, the reason can be stated as "just because"

I hope there is an archive somewhere and that the site will pop up again. Such great stories on that site. Fucking close minded douches. I highly doubt there was a TOS violation.

:ohbruther:

So what now? Can we move everything here to the UMD and suggest a more robust stories section/set of features?

Well, phooey. I'm glad I saved the stories I'd posted there, and hopefully the others were archived by their respective authors.

ProBoards explicitly disallows erotic content in its Terms of Service. Wam Story Archive contains many such stories and was in violation. That may or may not have been the cause.

We have also had an inactive admin for a while, it could be that he or she received warnings or requests from ProBoards about something potentially trivial but they received no response.

We could post stories here, even if the editor isn't the best. Could we maybe use reddit? The only free hosting provider who explicitly allows erotic content in its Terms of Service is neocities, but neocities doesn't allow databases and serverside scripts so can't host a forum...

I set up a meeting place here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/temporary-communication-group-for-wam-story-archive

(full address is https://groups.google.com/forum/ # ! forum/temporary-communication-group-for-wam-story-archive , but without the spaces, but the link above should work fine)

If you're a lurker or a writer of WAM Story Archive, go there and be notified when a backup or a replacement shows up. Also please notify people in that group when you see a backup or a replacement.

Absolutely. We can mold UMD's Stories area over time with your suggestions. https://umd.net/stories

MM

Because we want to with no reason at all seems like close mindedness. However, I will agree there was erotic content and someone may have reported it for Proboards to look into. Which they did and took action. Somewhere there was a person that is why we can't have nice things. Similar to when a previous well known story site was taken down.

I'd be interested in helping upgrade the story section here on UMD, if you need any help. It was easy to find stories by a specific author on the WAM SA because they were sorted in alphabetical order by writer, with prolific authors given the spotlight.

Sorting the stories into categories by the type of mess involved (wetlook, pies, gunge, etc.) would make the section easier to navigate. Or stories could be organized by pairings, if any: M/F, M/M, etc. Some stories would fall under multiple categories, of course.

This all makes sense. It would seem like the admin would come and go. I just assumed that ProBoards allowed erotic content. Seems like a weird place to set up shop if it didn't.

I have a story section on my website - anyone can submit a story to me and I'll put it up

candycustardwam@gmail.com

I would support sorting the stories by author, as, to be honest, I find the current stories/blog section of UMD almost unnavigable. Fortunately, I too have a backup of all my old stories and would be willing to help, in any way I can, to get a new site/blog up and running again. Though naturally, I fear my stories are too "lewd and lascivious" to be safely posted anywhere at present.

As long as the stories are in there, we can go back and mess with the sorting, presentation, filtering, etc over time. I can make it do pretty much anything, but just need to know what everyone wants.

MM

It would be a massive shame if all the story that had been uploaded to the story archive over the last few years were lost forever. Do they all still exist somewhere or did someone back them up? There were loads, including some series that had been going for years!

What I'd love to see for the stories section here are stories being searchable by tags

I found a copy of the last story I wrote "Welcome to 21" which I just posted here https://umd.net/stories/welcome-to-21. It's a long one, but if hardcore lesbian piefights are your thing, check it out.

As far as the ones I wrote back in the 90's (Allie's Bet, etc.) I still need to track them down. Fingers crossed I have them on an old hard drive.

http://oldweb.today

and

https://archive.org

I can't get the stories to show b/c you have to be logged into them.

Good to hear that the WSA may yet live a good life on the UMD.

I agree with the sorting suggestions. Trying to find specific types of stories on the old WSAs could be tricky at times. If someone is willing to trawl through the wayback machine, at least a good portion of the stories from the first two WSA incarnations should be recoverable.

I didnt even know it had been resurrected yet again until i saw this thread QQ.

Yeah this sucks cause I too had a bunch of stories on there. I really hope I still have the backups. I really hope I didn't lose all of my stories. I know I had some but others had over 100

I wonder if the owner happened to snag a copy of the website before the takedown?

Some of the stories are on literotica under the same usernames. That is also an alternative long term home I would suggest if it doesn't work out here.

I'm afraid I have to take some responsibility for this. My one and only contribution was a few weeks ago, and then it closed. When I finally contributed something to its prior incarnation years ago, it also closed down a few weeks later. This is the first post that I remember putting on this forum, so apologies in advance if I take the website down

As and when we know where we are going with re-establish a similar listing of these, sadly currently unavailable, stories, I have back-up copies of the ones I wrote.

You need to try going further back, I should have made a note of what year it was it was showing the stories successfully.

Hello everyone, lurker here. I posted something to this effect on the Google Group already, but I made an effort to back up the previous wamstoryarchive.com when its closure was announced, but stopped partway through when the new archive was posted. I didn't delete what I had though, so I have 344 stories from that incarnation of the archive, dated no later than February 2015. I have a few more from the newer site that I had saved for other reasons, as well. I'll gladly upload what I have once I know where to do it, although it seems like other people may have much better backups than mine.

A January 2017 backup was mentioned on Tellygunge, and I THINK I recall the admin, custardwam, claiming to have a more recent backup than that when recruiting moderators a few months ago, although they're MIA right now. It might take them quite some time to notice the takedown, since they were recruiting mods on the basis that they didn't have enough time to moderate themselves... if I'm remembering right, anway. But one way or another, the Archive will certainly continue somewhere; it's just up in the air where it will happen and how recent the backup is.

In the meantime, I made some notes for myself in 2015, so I know that the last working date for wamstoryarchive.com on archive.org is this: https://web.archive.org/web/20150113070332/http://wamstoryarchive.com:80/
The search function doesn't work, of course, but you can navigate to some extent using the author links on the left nav.
Additionally, here: https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://wamstoryarchive.freeforums.net/thread//*
is a list of every page that it TRIED to archive from the most recent site. Of course, since you had to be logged in to see most stuff, the only links that really work are from the Submissions section before it was also made private. It's slim pickings, but there are a few stories accessible there.

BE WARNED: When using archive.org, just because you can see a link to something doesn't mean it was actually archived. Don't get your hopes up until you have the actual story on your screen; finding a page that links to it may very well disappoint you.

Finally, if you really need your WAM fix now, reminder that ecgunge.net still exists. ...Actually, any reason we can't use that? It has a forum setup for posting stories... I mean, you can't actually register right now because of a captcha problem, but...

I have quite a few stories saved from over the years (Mongoose, I have all your stories if you still need them), but I got a bit complacent with the Wam Story Archive so have lots of gaps there.

The ones I'm particularly looking for are some missing chapters of the Campaign from SlapstickMatt (16, 17, 18, 19 and 21, I've got all the rest), Rooms (part 9 onwards) and the interactive stories (which I don't think where hosted on the site, but were linked there).

I also always wanted to read the Nemesis series but never got around to it, so hopefully that will get posted somewhere in its entirety.

There were also a couple of stories that I really liked but can't remember the names of. One was a one shot story about a presenter of a messy show who was getting gunged as revenge in its series finale, but secretly liked it.

The other was a short series based around a TV show where each presenter proposed a way of gunging the other and the audience had to vote on which one they wanted to do.

I'm sure there were others too, so hopefully someone's got a complete backup somewhere!

I can plug a few of those holes for you now. I have what I believe is the short series with competing presenters you described, Mess Testers by hamish1024. I also have Chapter 16 of the Campaign, though unfortunately none of the others. ...Well, I have 15, but it sounds like you already have that. Anyway, here's a download for those: https://mega.nz/#!RNpBFZyK!dW24tAdPvq3Yi8sGoXKI4lFf7S5Ueq0uQckYyjtCDFQ

There's some chance I have the one-shot you mentioned, but I couldn't find it with a casual search. But you're also in luck with Nemesis; the author, Kiwimayotte, mentioned having all of them earlier in this very topic.

Thanks so much! Let me know if you're missing any stories and I can have a bit of a search, although most of my collection comes from the 90s and early 00s so I'll have fewer of the stories from the archive.