Willkommen, jolan tru, welcome!

As the owner of a major Star Trek website it is part of my "job" and a genuine interest to keep an eye on the development of the Trek online fandom. But the number of notable fan websites that I loved to visit keeps shrinking over the past couple of years. I know from discussions at the Subspace Comms Network that I am not alone with this worrying observation.

Many sites that used to be formidable resources and ought to have been kept alive by all means have vanished without a trace. To name only a few, Maximum Defiant is lost just as Star Trek in Sound and Vision, The Ultimate Star Trek Collection, Star Trek Australia, TrekEnterprise.com or Trek5.com. Others have not been updated in years and may disappear as soon as their domains or hosting contracts expire. Ironically the free websites hosted at Geocities or Tripod with all their technical limitations may survive everything else, even if they have not been taken care of in years. Yet, many of these practically abandoned sites have become places to avoid because of the overkill of banners and other ads forced upon them, as well as because of countless dead image links.

While old sites kept vanishing or were becoming hopelessly outdated, hardly any ones were launched in the past few years. At least there are almost no decent new sites that would have lasted more than a couple of months until they ceased being updated.

Read the full essay.

Bernd Schneider