When I started the SWG, it was not a mission-driven organization, something like AO3 where there was a problem in the fandom that required a solution centered firmly around a set of values. The SWG, which started in the tail end of the LotR film-driven heyday of the fandom, was started because I wanted a writers' workshop for Silmarillion-specific writing, and that did not exist at the time. I figured it'd be me and few friends who might be interested. I clearly remember thinking that, if we reached ten members on the Yahoo! Group, that would be a lot. (To compare, twenty years later, there are 1,239 registered members on the SWG archive.)

But that means that when it became clear that the SWG was becoming a "real group" (you can read that in Pinocchio's voice if you'd like), then part of that was figuring out who we were and what direction we'd take ourselves. A lot of that work seems to have happened in 2008—not surprisingly, given that the website and archive opened in June 2007. In May 2008, my comods and I first posted the SWG's mission, which still exists and remains essentially unchanged eighteen years later. (Here is the original wording.) One item felt a bit like it pushed against the grain of the fandom at the time:

Connectivity. To recognize that we are only a single small group in a vast online Tolkien fan community and to work toward connecting and sharing with the Tolkien fandom at large, as well as aiding members in finding groups and resources that meet their needs where the SWG cannot.

With so many Tolkien fanworks groups at the time, the climate of the broader fandom felt a bit like the low-key community quibbles over questions like which pizza place is best. Inter-community tensions rarely reached the level of overt conflict, but there was definitely a sense that using a community space to support another group needed to be done with care, which makes sense because there were so many fandom communities clamoring for a finite number of fans' finite amount of free time. Because we were a Silmarillion group in a mostly LotR fandom, we had the liberty to buck that a bit, and we decided to do that: not just to welcome signal boosts (which many groups did) but to create systems and spaces for promoting events and groups beyond the SWG.

Of course, the eventual shape of that would become Around the World and Web, which still exists today, but the initial idea was something called the SWG Yellow Pages. Like most of the hand-coded pages on our original site, they still exist; they just exist without formatting. But if you're willing to cast your web-reading mind back to 2005 (when it was not unknown to run a website that didn't use CSS formatting), the Yellow Pages are a time capsule of the fandom in the SWG's early years.

Like many of our early ideas, it never fully caught on. Organizers and webmasters weren't particularly eager to request inclusion in the Yellow Pages, and since they were a static HTML webpage—which means they needed to be updated by hand—then it was easy to let them go ignored for long stretches of time, which we definitely did.

Still, they remain in the dusty corner of our website, like a phone book from twenty years ago that, for fellow fandom olds, is fun to page through and remember all the places you've forgotten once were.