heidi | Sep. 25th, 2005

Someone just emailed the FA help desk to ask how she could find the oldest Harry/Draco fics on FictionAlley. I explained that when we started in the summer of 2001, there were already a lot of H/D fics in fandom, then explained how she could use our Chapter Owls to find Really Old fics. So I share it with you now...

When we went live, it was with a few dozen fics by two dozen authors, including two Harry/Draco fics, Snitch by Alex and Irresistable Poison by Rhysenn. You can find them at http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Al and http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Rhysenn respectively.

To find more old Harry/Draco fics, go to http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/ChapterOwls and find the oldest Owl newsletters via the Messages link (click Messages, then First). Start with the first owl and do a "find" on the page using ctrl-F for Harry/Draco, then Draco/Harry, and you should find a lot that way, as you go through each day.

You can, of course, find any keyword in a title or a summary that same way, or even use Yahoo's somewhat-improved search engine atop the Yahoogroup. To merge in a question we had a few weeks ago, this fandom didn't really do "merged words" as ship markers until probably 2004 or late 2003, so searching for "Snarry" or "Hinny" won't get you any older fics at all.

Then again, I once was asked about whether we had "sirius is not dead" fics that were pre-OotP, and I replied "all of them are". Le sigh.