Two years ago, we announced our Year of History: an endeavor to ensure that historical materials that had become unavailable or difficult to access due to our site migration and closure of various social media would continue to be available. This was and is a big job. The SWG is twenty years old, so that is twenty years of fanworks, conversations, and documents that trace our evolution from a small Silmarillion-focused social group—one among thousands at the time—to one of the only Tolkien fanfiction archives still online.

Working with the editors of The Fëanorian Zine pushed us to resurrect the Special Projects section of our site, where the zine would be hosted, and we've slowly been bringing the various special projects hosted there back online.

These are mid-2000s static HTML pages. Some of them used PHP includes, which was very fancy technology to me at the time! But beyond that and the obligate linked stylesheet, all that makes them tick lives in those HTML files, and when we migrated from a site that was partly static HTML pages and partly eFiction to a site that was entirely Drupal, the effect on many of our special projects was like dumping a bucket of freezing water over them. They technically still lived on the site, but their layouts and displays were broken when Drupal took over the site, and many of the links no longer worked.

Seven in '07 is the latest to come back online. This was our very first special project, focusing on the house of Fëanor and inspired by the calendar date 7/7/07. The SWG's archive opened on June 6 that year. Apparently, sometime in mid-June, I realized that the calendar that year contained the date 7/7/07, and that was an opportunity we could not pass up. On June 13, I opened a call for submissions for Seven in '07. My husband and I were in the middle of buying our first house. We moved in on June 29, without internet. My sister handled the updates to our web server, and Tárion Anaróre, one of my comoderators, handled announcements. Seven in '07 debuted on July 1 and featured a Fëanorian a day until the fateful date of 7/7/07 (Amrod and Amras shared a day). I have a distinct memory of logging into the internet at a Panera Bread to look at the project because I still did not have internet. Later, the project was popular enough that we decided to add pages for Nerdanel and Celebrimbor, which were posted at the end of July.

The central concept was that each day's character would have a short biography, presented along with fanfiction and fan art about that character. Oshun authored the biography for Fëanor, which also marked a turning point toward more detailed Character of the Month biographies that she'd lead for over a decade before passing into the West in 2024.

It was a big moment for our group, orchestrated in about two weeks and endeavored only about a week after opening the fanworks archive that is now the center of our site and itself a significant accomplishment at the time. Seven in '07 would encourage future special projects: opportunities to present and promote Silmarillion fanworks in a way that we hoped made them special (and I'll admit that I loved designing all those static HTML pages and their obligate linked stylesheets!)

As the Fëanorian Zine attests, we are still open to new special projects, so if you have an idea or would like to collaborate, just reply here or email the moderators to start the conversation!