Funny story, I had it released in the mid-90s. There are versions of it still on the wayback machine. You younger folks might not realize this but there was a time where there were a lot of fun internet happenings, and there was no spam. People hadn't figured out how to spam yet. There were also no T&C's or laws governing membership accounts. The first version of my site had no membership accounts. People would just create a chapter and assign a password for that chapter so no one else could edit it. And it was on GDBM, which could only handle one simultaneous connection.
Eventually, two things happened: the site got busy enough that people started experiencing errors when trying to submit/edit to the same story at the same time, and, spammers started realizing they could write chapters about certain erectile dysfunction medications. :) They also guessed some chapter passwords and overwrote them.
I didn't have a quick fix for this, plus I had ignored the site for a while, so by the time I realized, the site was overrun with spam and all my authors (who I had no way of contacting, remember: no user accounts) had disappeared.
So I took it offline for twenty years. I had copious backups, and over time I would reconstruct the story history. I had learned php by then from my career, and so I started rewriting the whole thing, which was honestly a huge project, especially because now every chapter has revision history. I had tried relaunching the site a couple of times without attracting any writers.
Then Covid happened and I was able to relaunch it and find writers. It's been fun since then. I have approximately zero commercial intent for this; I can't bear to turn on ads in the middle of an immersive reading/writing experience. Maybe someday paid accounts for extra features or a share of the copyright. My most fun idea for any sort of revenue is printed books for completed stories, or a mobile app "reader" with more features than ebook software. I think a wide release could be counterproductive since all the members currently kind of know each other, chat on Discord, and have writing nights. So it'll probably be a slow invite sort of thing.
