Hogwarts.nu

» see hogwarts.nu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

It opened on 23 November 2001, while the first film was still working its way across Europe and the fourth book was the newest one. A few private individuals put it up. Within a couple of years it had been taken over by a limited company, Henrik Skotth Konsult AB, which is what happens when a hobby site starts costing real money in bandwidth.

What went up was not a fan page. Hogwarts.nu was a community platform with profiles and forums, dressed in the fiction all the way down. Moderators were called ordningsmän and administrators were prefekter, around a hundred of them between the two ranks. Members got sorted and got somewhere to be. The books supplied the furniture; the site supplied everything teenagers actually used it for, which was talking to each other.

A 2004 survey of Swedish communities counted 700,000 accounts on it. That put Hogwarts.nu third in the country by registrations, behind Lunarstorm and Playahead. By estimated active logged-in users it came eighth, and the gap between third and eighth is the honest description of what a 2004 account number meant. Plenty of those 700,000 had signed up once and never come back. Enough of them had not.

By 2004 I was twenty and at university, and the Swedish internet was not a place I had any reason to be. That is the dull half of the distance. The interesting half is that a site like this could not have happened in Turkish at that size. Fandom here lived inside subsections of general-purpose forums, attached to boards that were mostly about hardware or games, and it never got its own domain and a hundred moderators.

~ the case file ~

~ the name it was not allowed to keep ~

The site was originally just Hogwarts. It was unofficial, it had no arrangement with anybody who owned the name, and it was made to change. The fix was to staple a .nu on the end and carry on, which worked for five years.

~ december 2006 ~

The closure is filed under rättighetsskäl, rights reasons, with economics alongside. Both were real. An unlicensed Harry Potter community carrying six figures of accounts was always going to be visible to the people who owned the property, and an unlicensed Harry Potter community also cannot sell anything to pay for its servers, which is what makes the rights problem fatal rather than annoying. The two reasons were the same reason wearing different clothes.

Henrik Skotth started Fenixforum.se afterward. Successor forums almost never inherit the crowd, and that one did not either. The 700,000 scattered into the Swedish networks that were already sitting above them in the rankings.

~ the address today ~

hogwarts.nu is still registered and still resolves. Ask it for a page and it refuses, which is a different thing from a parking page and a different thing from a site. Somebody is holding the domain and not using it.

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