Shack's Fanfic Clearinghouse is a fan fiction link index. It was first conceived in early January 1998 as one exasperated surfer's response to the difficulty in finding fan fiction on the World Wide Web. Search engines would often only turn up a handful of pages, many of which came from the same sites, while the links on existing indices like Karen Nicholas' famous Fan Fiction on the Net were rarely updated and would often hang broken. The site was first completed and opened on April 18, 1998, as a series of text-only links, with a graphical section sporting site banners promised in the future. The graphical section was permanently scrapped in May 1999, and the site continued to flourish until October of 2000, when it was shut down for an overhaul that, as it turned out, took nearly three years to complete.
The Clearinghouse is manually coded using that most venerable of dinosaurs, HTML Writer for Windows.
The webmaster of the Clearinghouse, Shack, has thrown together a small bio page (he says he has, anyway). Being something of a recluse, though, he has hidden the link somewhere on this site, in a location that changes every few updates. "Think of it," Shack previously wrote, "as a game."
There is one, and only one, hard rule about organization at the Clearinghouse: No fandom shall be found in more than one location. This rule is for the sake of Shack's sanity (which, many will tell you, has a sufficiently tenuous existence as-is), and to keep the Clearinghouse manageable. Five fandoms--Star Trek, Star Wars, the X-Files, Highlander, and Harry Potter--enjoy pride of place on the main menu, both because of their size and because they span multiple media.
Though Shack has no plans to add other fandoms to the main menu, these five are far from the only ones to jump formats. All other cross-platform fandoms are listed under the medium where they originated and had their initial popularity.
Thus, all X-Men fanfic sites are found in the Comics section, whether based on the movies, the comic books, or any of the three cartoons, as are all Batman and Spiderman sites. Likewise, Street Fighter and Tekken will be found in the Fighting Games section, Sonic the Hedgehog in the Other Video Games section, Stargate in the Movies section, He-Man in the Cartoons section, and so forth.
EXCEPTION: Superman, as in many other cases, gets special treatment. The various television incarnations of the genre (e.g. Lois and Clark, Smallville, etc.) are essentially distinct not only from the comic, but also from each other; they are treated as separate fandoms, and so will be found in the TV section. All other incarnations of Superman, however--movies, cartoons, comics, etc.--are listed under Comics.
Shack's Fanfic Clearinghouse thrives on links, and gladly welcomes any and all link submissions. To submit your site, send an e-mail to shackfic@yahoo.com with the subject heading "Clearinghouse Site," and the site name and URL in the message body. You may also include anything you wish for Shack to know about your site, with the understanding that he may use or disregard this information as he sees fit. Shack will review the site, and if it adheres to Clearinghouse guidelines, he will write a description and add the link to the Clearinghouse during the next update.
The Clearinghouse guidelines are six in number:
1. It must have something to do with fanfic. For example, a site that has a fanfic review section or a fanfic archive is acceptable to the Clearinghouse. A site whose only relation to the world of fanfic is a link to another fanfic site, on the other hand, is not acceptable. (Link indices will be judged on a case-by-case basis; those that link to individual stories are more likely to receive approval than those linking to sites.)
2. Pornographic literature is not welcome. Lemons, slash, Treksmut--it doesn't matter what you call it, the Clearinghouse won't link to it. Geocities policy prohibits such links, and Shack himself has serious problems with making the already ludicrously easy access to this kind of material any easier. There is considerable leeway with this rule, particularly with larger sites and more adult series; but the bottom line is that if better than half the stories on a site are rated NC-17 for explicit material, it won't be linked.
3. The fanfic must be accessible. Shack follows a simple rule of thumb here: If he can find the fanfic easily, so can the Clearinghouse's visitors. Not counting loading time, it should take no more than two minutes to go from the URL you send to your fanfic. So, if the fanfic on your site is too difficult to find from your main page, consider sending the URL of the page which houses your fanfic instead.
Shack does not use Micro$oft's sorry excuse for a webcrawler as his primary browser. He never has, and he never will. Utilize links that only work with Internet Explorer at your peril! If Shack doesn't happen to feel like going to the trouble of opening IE that day and risking tens of thousands of pop-ups, viruses and hackers in order to double-check your site, you're up a creek.
4. The site had better not crash Shack's browser. This should be fairly self-explanatory. Two crashes in one visit = no Clearinghouse listing. Most webmasters shouldn't have anything to worry about; Shack uses modern browsers, so it would take something truly boneheaded (like a graphical applet link) to run afoul of this guideline.
5. No stories based on actual people. This covers fanfic based on professional wrestling, bands, and other celebrities. Its existence came as something of a shock to Shack, and is far too close to stalking for his tastes. (The storylines in professional wrestling also move at such a pace as to render any fanfic archive irrelevant. Shack would urge anyone interested in writing wrestling stories to look into getting involved with an e-wrestling league, where talented writers are always in high demand.)
6. No book-based fanfic. Fan fiction based on works existing only in printed form, on the other hand, runs far too close to piracy for Shack's comfort, especially given the way some authors (Terry Goodkind springs to mind) aggressively pursue legal action against fanfic authors who dabble in their worlds. Crossovers are acceptable, as is fanfic for books that have made the jump to another format (thus, for example, Lord of the Rings fanfic can be found in the Movies section). Harry Potter, obviously, is in a class by itself.
If Shack discovers that a link to your site is broken and, if moving, you have not left a link to your new page (in that case, he will simply correct the link) your site will be removed from the Clearinghouse pages; if he has not heard anything from you regarding it in a month, its entry will be deleted altogether, and you will have to resubmit your site. If you are linked to the Clearinghouse and close your page, please e-mail Shack so that he can remove it from the Clearinghouse listings.
Please note that Shack reserves the right to remove any site from the Clearinghouse listings without notice in the event that he decides the site no longer adheres to the Clearinghouse guidelines.
The template for entries in the Clearinghouse is as follows:
Site Name
Categories: Listed in order of prominence, fanfic-wise
Story Count: Usually a rough estimate, especially for larger sites
Comments: Any observations Shack might have about the site. Usually involve navigational issues, featured fandoms/stories, when the site was last updated, etc.
Date Clearinghouse entry last modified
A NOTE ABOUT COMMENTS: There are a considerable number of sites in the Clearinghouse listings that have gone long periods without updating. In many other link indices, these sites would be declared dead--and, on some (to Shack's great irritation) the Clearinghouse has been listed among the deceased. It goes without saying that steps have been taken to prevent a repetition of that experience here.
In order to balance the potential for an author or webmaster to resume work on a site and the reader's interest in knowing nothing has been done of late, sites that, at the time of the last entry modification, have not been updated in at least a year will be noted as such. When possible, the date of last update is gathered from the site's own records; when that is not available (and it isn't on a stunning number of sites) the "Page Information" command in Mozilla is utilized. If neither method is successful, Shack will give the site the benefit of the doubt, even if there has been no noticeable change in site content.
Only sites that have been declared dead by their own webmasters are labeled "no longer updated."
You are more than welcome to add a link to Shack's Fanfic Clearinghouse on your page. Please link to the Welcome Mat at http://www.geocities.com/shackfic. If you wish to use a graphic, please use one of the images below:
DO NOT LINK DIRECTLY TO THESE IMAGES!!!
That's called "bandwidth theft." It's poor 'Netiquette, contributing to server overload and slower connections for everyone...and Geocities now automatically blocks independent loading, meaning all you'll end up with is a broken image. Please download the image to your own server.