The sad death of SSS

It was sad to read on Fetlife the other day of the demise of the soc.sexuality.spanking newsgroup. It’s been largely dormant in the recent past, and the current moderator’s now decided (absolutely fairly) that the effort and cost of maintaining it is not something he can continue to support.  As his final post on the group on 10 December explained:

I’ve just told our ‘bot host to cancel the hosting account. The group will stop working very shortly.

A couple of days later, on Fetlife, he added:

I still have the keys to the domain registry account where the group’s domains are kept. Because posts to the group are sent via those domains, ownership of the domains is de facto ownership of the group. That account is due for renewal in April, at which point I’ll almost certainly just let the domains expire (and be picked up by some spammer, no doubt).

SSS was where I delurked into the spanking world, posting a story on 12th April 1998. The friendly response to that encouraged me to write more – and to realise I wasn’t alone in having this until-then-guilty secret interest in corporal punishment. I met all of my early play partners through the site; made even more friends; first made contact with Haron (who, as longer-standing readers, will know used to be my wife and blog collaborator). It also strongly contributed to the fact that the Spanking Writers blog is a literary endeavour, by demonstrating that the written word doesn’t need photos to provide kinky inspiration. I have much to thank it for: it’s sad to see it go.

I hope that, at least, the Google Groups archive of the site’s posts will survive to provide an historical record: surely they will? There’s so much wonderful stuff there from so many people: it’d be a real shame if the collective effort that went into contributing to the community was to be lost.

One thought on “The sad death of SSS

  • 21 December, 2012 at 6:59 pm
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    The end of an era. SSS was at one time the ONLY place to go for “our thing”. It will be sadly missed and my hopes that someone will take up the mantle and continue their work.

    Reply

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