We are taking a break this week from Mereth Aderthad interviews, and next week, we will be taking the site down briefly on Saturday, April 19, for a major software upgrade. We are swiftly approaching four years since we reopened the site after rebuilding it from the ground up in Drupal (and eighteen years since I built our original archive), so it seems a good weekend for a digression about some of the technical history of how the SWG came to be and continues to exist and why next week's upgrade is happening.

The SWG was not intended to be an archive. I did not have the skills for such an endeavor when the group was founded in 2005, but popular sentiment that we should be an archive (and not a writers' workshop, as I intended) pushed me to gain those skills very quickly. Our archive opened in June 2007. It was built in eFiction, an open-source fiction archive software developed by Rebecca Smallwood, who created it for her own Tolkien and other fan sites and then made it available to all.

The best way to describe eFiction compared to Drupal (our current software) is that both have the ability to make archives—fandom houses in this analogy—but eFiction is a dollhouse that you buy assembled, take out of the box, and can play with right away. You can decorate it and make small adjustments as you want, but you can't fundamentally change what it is without cracking it open and rebuilding it.

Several developers after Rebecca, eFiction stopped being actively maintained, and in 2016, our archive began to show the first signs that its aging software wasn't going to work for us forever. We began researching options and eventually settled on Drupal. If eFiction is a dollhouse, Drupal is a box of LEGO bricks. The essential shapes are there, but you put them together into the structures you want, and you are in no way required to build a house. You could also build a barn, windmill, or shopping mall ... or a house attached to a barn on top of a shopping mall with a windmill attached to the side. When we rebuilt the site in Drupal, this is what we did, first reconstructing the fiction archive more or less how it was in eFiction, then adding on lots more: the ability to archive other types of fanworks, a system for sharing news, a beta-reader directory, and lots of behind-the-scenes tools that help the mods and volunteers keep the site running with minimal fuss.

We are doing a major software upgrade on Drupal next weekend, so if you notice the site offline on Saturday morning Eastern time (afternoon in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and hopefully those west of me are still getting their morning coffee when it's back up), this is why. I'm looking forward to more effective HTML permissions (so that those of you working on pages with me don't get frozen out of edits by my admin powers!) and the ability to more seamlessly handle coauthored fanworks.

The developers of eFiction are almost never mentioned, but we owe so much to Rebecca, Tammy, Artphilia, and Sheep Control, whose work gave us our original home, where we learned and built our community so that we could one day move into the site we have today. Beyond us, so many communities and fanworks would never have existed without their generosity in sharing their skills and time.

If you want to meander more through SWG history, check out our Birthday Bash challenge, which centers on a new event from our history each day (and is almost over, so it's pretty complete as of this writing).