Citadel Olmera

» see olmer.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Vladimir Smirnov took his handle from Olmer, a chieftain in Nick Perumov's Ring of Darkness, and on 29 June 2000 he put up a site under that name. Citadel Olmera was a portal for science fiction and fantasy in Russian, and for a while it was several sites at once. One of them, a Russian Dragonlance site, carried official status for a period. There were literary contests, there was a books section, and underneath all of it there was the forum.

Litforum opened in 2003 and ended up with more than forty thousand registered accounts. In the middle of the decade it was among the most active literature forums anywhere in the Russian internet, and it was not only a fan space. Sections existed for Perumov's work and for the artist Vladimir Bondar, and next to those sat boards for prose, poetry and nonfiction, philosophy and religion, history, film adaptations and stage productions. Two other boards under the Citadel, Prikl.ru and Neformat.net, ran text-based roleplaying games where the players were effectively co-writing.

What the forum actually did, though, was produce writers. It ran sections aimed squarely at people trying to get published: Izdatelstva for talking about publishing houses, PeroMania for posting your own work and taking criticism on it, and a Literary Society that collected information about online contests and the craft of writing fantastic prose. A meaningful number of the people in those threads went on to have books out.

~ the record ~

~ tsarkon ~

The contest was called TsarKon, it ran four times a year, and the jury was not a joke. Across its run the judges included Nick Perumov, Andrzej Sapkowski, Vera Kamsha, Evgeny Lukin, Sergey Sinyakin, Vadim Panov, and Maria and Sergey Dyachenko, along with editors of Russian and European genre magazines and people from publishing houses. Two of the four rounds each year were Super TsarKon, a blitz format with a hundred-hour deadline. Categories covered prose, long form, lyric poetry, illustration and criticism.

TsarKon stopped after 2009 and its site went unmaintained, then disappeared from the web entirely in 2011. A successor of sorts called Kreativ ran under the Citadel in 2010 and 2011, built around a rule that every entry got a detailed critical reading, enforced by a bonus-point system for writing reviews. In 2012 the Kreativ discussion moved to the forums of Mir Fantastiki magazine and did not come back.

~ the litforum ~

Another Citadel board, Forum Androny, existed to publish forgotten works by Soviet science fiction writers. It was nominated for the Internet-Roscon award in 2010 and again in 2011, losing to Fantlab.ru and then to Mirf.ru, which is a decent measure of where the site stood: known enough to be nominated, already being beaten by the sites that would outlast it.

January 2010 is when Litforum added general-interest boards, music and travel and family and pets, under a heading about culture and society. Regulars read that as the forum finally declaring itself independent of the Neformat board next door. It was also the point at which a literary forum started trying to be somewhere people would stay for reasons other than literature.

~ the long quiet ~

From the start of the 2010s the traffic fell off and most of the regulars left. Technical problems got more frequent. In October 2012 a server failure destroyed everything posted since January of that year, along with every account registered in those months, and a forum that has already lost its crowd does not recover from having ten months of conversation deleted. Litforum stayed technically open and effectively empty for the next twelve years.

The main site outlived the community by a wide margin because it had been set up to update itself, and it kept doing that for more than fifteen years with nobody watching. Anyone who kept a phpBB board alive past its moment knows that shape: the software keeps working long after the reason to visit is gone, and the hosting bill is small enough that nobody makes the decision to stop. My own forum years were Turkish and hardware-shaped, donanimhaber and frmtr, where I was building signature blocks listing my machine's specs while the people on Litforum were workshopping novels. Same decade, same software, entirely different purpose.

The Internet Archive has olmer.ru answering normally on 17 May 2025. From 17 July it returns 401 on every attempt. Today the domain still resolves, and the server answers with seventy-three bytes of plain text reporting that it cannot connect to its database. Twenty-five years of forum threads are presumably still on a disk somewhere behind it.

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