SciFi.com is going to nuke its fiction archive

Joel sez, "Ellen Datlow and the Sci Fi Channel's acclaimed webzine Scifiction stopped putting up new content in 2005, but the archives have remained available … until now. Now, the site has the notice: 'As of Friday, June 15, 2007, SCI FICTION will no longer be available on SCIFI.COM. SCIFI.COM would like to thank all those who contributed and those who read the short stories over the past few years.'"

Man, this sucks. What: hosting all that ASCII was too expensive for NBC? Charlie Stross and I had a story up there, a romp called Jury Service that was our first collaboration. There are zillions of links to it — all of which will die on the 15th.

Link

(Thanks, Joel!)

Update: SciFi's Craig Engler sez, " "Just a quick response to your note about the Sci Fiction archive. The hosting costs are not an issue but there are rights issues around various stories that crop up from time to time. Given how few people visit the Sci Fiction archive it makes more sense to remove it rather than have someone continue to track the rights to all the stories year after year. For instance, although zillions of people may link to Jury Service, in May we recorded only 48 complete visits to it (by that I mean visits to all 4 HTML pages of the story). And for the record we are not using nuclear weapons on Sci Fiction — one of our coders will gently remove the files from the server." "