Three big Simpsons fansites have gone offline just in the past month or so. Normally, I’d be ecstatic that three of my competitors have been knocked off in one fell swoop, but instead I’m perturbed. Is someone picking off Simpsons fansites? Who could it be? Why are they doing this? And who’s next?
Back in the late 90s, Simpsons fansites were a dime a dozen. Some, like the character sites, had their niches, but most were pretty generalized, meaning they had a little bit of everything: some character bios, episode guides, some .WAV files, some grainy framegrabs that would occasionally rouse Fox lawyers into sending threatening letters to teenagers, maybe some fanart and reviews, and ever-popular “grabpics,” which were framegrabs that were traced over in Illustrator or something and put on white backgrounds. But as time went on, webmasters grew up and moved on, the show got steadily worse, the dynamics of the internet changed, and the number of sites dwindled. That number dwindled even further this month as three Simpsons fansite fixtures met their frosty fate.
