Just giving everyone who may have had content hosted on sub-Q Magazine’s website a heads up that as of today (possibly earlier!) the site no longer seems to be operational.
The magazine closed in August of 2020, but Tory had been keeping the website online. I guess she is no longer doing that–I haven’t heard from her one way or the other in a year or so, so I don’t know for sure.
If you had content in sub-Q that you didn’t have a backup for, please let me know, as I probably have a copy of your files somewhere in many cases.
(If you have no idea what this thread is about, sub-Q was a web-based IF magazine that ran from 2015-2020.)
I don’t know how thorough these backups are are, but it appears that sub-q has been archived thousands of times over the years. It looks like some of the articles click through, at least.
It’s been down at least a bit longer than that – I noticed it a few days ago.
(Edited: in the first version of this post I said it had been down from at least May, when I made these wiki edits; but archive.org has a snapshot from September, so I must be misremembering what prompted me to make those edits.)
I know it was working earlier this month or late last month, because I went in and made some changes to a contributor’s bio statement at their request.
The site has been showing a security certificate error since earlier in the year, though I’m not sure when. So that might be why you remember it being down for longer!
I can definitely ask Tory what she thinks, although it might be too late at this point. I don’t know if she has backups of the files and I would only be able to find 2018-2020 (when I was EIC). I might also not get a response from her–I didn’t when I gave her a heads up about the certificate error earlier this year.
It looks like the contracts would probably allow it, anyway. They gave sub-Q “the right to store one digital copy in an archive,” and also had this clause:
Platform Acquisition: (This clause allows HML to assign the rights the Author grant to HML under this agreement to someone or something else, as HML might if, for example, HML were to become part of another website.) The Author agrees that HML may assign this agreement to others, so long as the terms of this agreement and the visual presentation of the Work, per clause 3, remain unchanged. If HML does assign these rights, HML will notify the Author in writing.
Contacting everyone might be a bit of a pain but could probably be managed through sufficient digging around in the wayback machine. (Honestly, I’d be surprised if most folks aren’t known entities either here or in my short fiction circles anyway.)