Obscure AH Websites

Flocculencio

Donor
Diamond said:
Does anyone else feel like the overall amount of AH stuff on the web has declined in the last year or two? A huge number of existing sites/scenarios/etc have dropped out of sight, and next to zero new ones have appeared... :(
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Might that be because of us? Are we the Wal-Mart of the AH community? :D

After all, we're not as anal about plausibility as ASHWI and we've got a very large group here. It's al lot easier for someone to post their TLs and ideas here and get feedback than it is to set up their own webpage.

Plus, we're the first site which pops up on a google search.

I, for one, stumbled on this by accident simply by typing www.alternatehistory.com into my browser.
 

Straha

Banned
Here's an AH board which doesn't have political correctness OR the same blue theme that every AH site has. Dark Side of The Moon forums. and if the different theme isn't enough to make you join perhaps the presence of a future history board is.
 
Sargon

Sargon

Donor
Monthly Donor
Max Sinister said:
Hrmph. A competing forum, and half of the posts are by you? Sorry, am not impressed. No link for you!
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That's why I want more people to post there, after all I pay for Gold status there to keep the ads away, it would be nice if more people post there, and I post frequently so people don't feel I am neglecting it. At least some people like Abdul Hadi Pasha and Tom B post there besides me. Grey Wolf used to post there too when he had net access and is a mod, so it can't be that bad ;)

Many of the past posts were wiped out in the Great Ezboard Board Crash, I lost hundreds of posts from a lot of contributors at that time, so it's not my fault. You can still find links to some of those old posts there as hot topics, but there's nothing to link to. It's really heartbreaking because I worked so hard to build it up and spent a lot of time making a logo, board etiquette etc for it. <sigh> Anyway people post there, so some are happy enough with it.

And it's not a competing forum, how could anything really compete with here which is the best? :p The more places for AH the merrier I think Ian once said :) If mine is a competing forum, so's Grey Wolf's and all the others that do AH :D

As you can see, AH is just one of many subject areas to be found at the Stronghold. There are sections on Rome and Byzantium, SF, General Chat, Naval History, Royal History, East Asia etc. Go on Max, start posting there, you know you want to :D

Sargon
 
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HueyLong

Banned
I don't have a website to post, but more a website to ask for.

Does anyone know the site with "Alternate Zoology"? Also included alternate diets, and a theory on how nomads could industrialize. Google turns up little beyond bigfoot.
 

Strategos' Risk

Bumping this thread for posterity. Who knows how many obscure standalone AH sites have been lost in the past decade alone?

Looks like the extensive Dai Nippon Teikoku setting's Angelfire website is miraculously still in existence.

Japan, officially The Great Japanese Empire (Dai Nippon Teikoku), is one of the world’s largest archipelagoes spanning 4,600 kilometers (2,900 miles) from north to south along the Asian landmass and 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) from east to west. Its total expanse is roughly equivalent to that of the United States. Japan is comprised of five major islands (and thousands smaller ones) located between the Kamchatka peninsula and Taiwan, and all along the equatorial line between Palau and the Marshall Islands. The total land area of Japan is 471,106 square kilometers (184,025 square miles) which is slightly less than the area of the state of California plus the area of the state of West Virginia.
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The population of Japan in 2002 was about 130 million persons making it the world's seventh most populous nation after China, India, the United States, the Soviet Union and Indonesia.
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I've never actually read it in full, but it's worth checking out. Even its timeline is only one aspect of this big world-building project.
 

MaxGerke01

Banned
Finally at long last the timeline I remembered reading about Amerindians dominating the world after an asteroid or cometary strike in Europe in the 15th century was available on Pteranodons AH page which is still there ater all this time but this timeline is not for some reason :(
Does anyone know who Pteranodon was and if he is on this site or another one and if some can you direct me to him as I woud love to read this timeline again and save t this time....
 

Deleted member 2186

Strategos' Risk said:
Bumping this thread for posterity. Who knows how many obscure standalone AH sites have been lost in the past decade alone?

Looks like the extensive Dai Nippon Teikoku setting's Angelfire website is miraculously still in existence.





I've never actually read it in full, but it's worth checking out. Even its timeline is only one aspect of this big world-building project.
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Thanks for the link, i once found it and liked it but over time as many of these websites you know what it is about but you do not know the name of the website.
 

Strategos' Risk

I encourage people to update threads like this with links, because the AH Directory isn't being updated by Ian anymore, and neither is Uchronia (I don't think it tracked websites anyway). I think it might be a real problem for websites to be preserved on Internet Archive, but virtually inaccessible because people have forgotten their existence.

lordroel said:
Thanks for the link, i once found it and liked it but over time as many of these websites you know what it is about but you do not know the name of the website.
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Happy to help. There's a satisfaction both to keeping the memory alive, and maybe to relive the memory again. There's some classic works of AH pre-2010s that are still around, or at least archived, that might be helpful for current projects.
 

Deleted member 2186

Strategos' Risk said:
Happy to help. There's a satisfaction both to keeping the memory alive, and maybe to relive the memory again. There's some classic works of AH pre-2010s that are still around, or at least archived, that might be helpful for current projects.
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Well there are a lot of hidden gems out there ready to be brought back to the surface, thanks for finding this one.
 

Strategos' Risk

Saw this from a no-reply thread:

Sideways said:
For a while now I’ve really wished this website had a culture of Rec Lists. It seems a shame how old timelines get lost and new members have to try and catch up on a canon of work when it’s never really described what is important and what’s not. To try to fill that gap, I plan to write a regular rec list of AH that I have enjoyed particularly.

To kick this off, I’m going back to the AH I read when I first got online as a pre-teen. It was a different time. My Gods. It was different. “TLIAW” was just a collection of letters, most timelines were literally time lines, following a year-a-paragraph format. There was no such thing as a vignette. Or rather, most things were vignettes.

I was obsessed. Here are some of my favourites from the time that I think hold up if you’re not a child.

An Evil British Empire -
Alison Brooks was one of the early AH writers, and is mostly famous for coining the term “Alien Space Bats”. Back in pre-2000 times she wasn’t the most prolific writer, but she was one of the silliest. I could (and probably should) link to the first story with an ASB in it. But this story, with Moriarty secretly running the British Empire, is particularly strong in my memory for some reason.

The Human Timeline -
A very 90s alternate history space opera. It has a United Federation of Planets, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton get cameos. It starts off kind of Star Treky, then it goes all Babylon5-ish. It’s epic. Parts of it don’t hold up very well, but I absolutely worshipped it at the time.

Thieves Honour
I loved Alternate History Travel Guides. The setting was a collection of worlds that had developed a way to connect parallel universes and had opened themselves up for tourism. There’s lots of good examples of what are now called vignettes, but this story about the theft of the Mona Lisa particularly stuck in my mind over the years.

What if all Americans DISAPPEARED?
A little time line where all Americans spontaneously combust. The French get insulted a bit, Monica Lewinski gets a mention for some reason. This happened a lot back then.

Going back to the archives through the Wayback Machine really does demonstrate how far we’ve come in the last decade. Most of the time lines I read avidly back then are similar in quality to ones that, today, would be considered an unpromising first attempt from any newbie to the forum. It’s also odd to see how this website goes from being a site by a guy called Ian, to being a comprehensive directory of AH with a discussion forum, to absolute domination.

I kind of miss the old ways, though I was only ever a lurker. I wrote a time line when I was eleven. I think Hitler flew a Zeppelin for the navy of Nauru. I submitted it to a website and got a very polite response from a kindly gentleman whose name I wish I could remember.
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Stephen Abbott's Alternate History Website used to be a huge one in like 2001/2002. Looks like the last archive was in December 2005. Nothing beside remains. It has a ton of material and probably deserves a thread of its own.

I even tried writing a follow-up to his "all Americans disappear" timeline above. Funny how John Birmingham @Birmo ended up writing several books with a similar scenario.
 

jmberry

MaxGerke01 said:
Finally at long last the timeline I remembered reading about Amerindians dominating the world after an asteroid or cometary strike in Europe in the 15th century was available on Pteranodons AH page which is still there ater all this time but this timeline is not for some reason :(
Does anyone know who Pteranodon was and if he is on this site or another one and if some can you direct me to him as I woud love to read this timeline again and save t this time....
Click to expand...
It took clicking through the site several times, but I managed to find the scenario in question: http://web.archive.org/web/20010625144811/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4123/andrew.htm
 

Strategos' Risk

Re-linking to this thread as well

Alternate History Sites of Yesteryear

The late Nineties were a fun time to be in as an alternate historian. Numerous sites took advantage of the burgeoning internet to post their own timelines for anyone to see. Few of these adhere to the standards we have, but they were fun to read if you had an afternoon to kill. However, these...
www.alternatehistory.com
 
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