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spiderbraidsBack in the pre-Covid era, I made a series of posts on a couple now-defunct high-profile fansites Winxers like me used to visit, and I added an extra edition in 2023 for The Yin Yang Couple (though it ultimately came back before finally succumbing for good two years later)... Looks like we can add another site to that list, and in a way, this latest demise is bigger that just the Winx fansite itself :-\
THE Unofficial Winx Club Site
Active early 2005 - November 2006
Offline early 2026
THE Unofficial Winx Club Site (as seen via Wayback Machine), featuring a masthead based on a cut scene from 1x14 (yet his review for the episode itself never acknowledged the plot-relevant cuts 4Kids made :-\)
The Facts
Created by LiveJournal Winx community moderator Frank15, this website was much less extensive than Michael Grant's website, due to being hosted on the erstwhile free website service Angelfire... It had the typical trappings of the free website fan page: character bios, episode guide/reviews, and even sightings of the background students :-)
(Most of the Winx images didn't manage to make it to the Internet Archive though :-\ but at least all the episode reviews, text-only obvi, are present and accounted for :-))
The Personal Connection
I cited this website's reviews plenty of times, as part of my Winx comparisons (and you'll see plenty of direct quotes in the Editor's Spotlight posts I made a few years ago :-)) On a less good note, though, back in the day I once asked Frank15 for permission to use his season 3 reviews for my podcast, and he told me "I would prefer if you didn't, please" :-\ (I've actually been working on a post relating to this, might post it someday)
The Demise
Frank apparently lost interest in reviewing episodes and keeping the site up-to-date after the gap between 3x07 and 3x08 in the states, with the former being the last episode he ever reviewed... Anyways, I said this latest demise is bigger that just the Winx fansite itself, since the website went down in early 2026 due to Angelfire itself conking out... After the demises of Geocities (2009) and FortuneCity (2012), Lycos (itself an old name in the search biz before Google won out) managed to keep Angelfire (and co-owned Tripod) online for over a decade afterwards, as the last remaining pillars of the original "free websites for all" era of the net (even after no longer allowing new free sites to be made), until a major outage in late February 2026 on both sites... They managed to get Tripod back up (more or less) in early March, but put up a message on the main Lycos page saying: "Unfortunately we will be shutting down in the next 30 days." (Which has long elapsed by now) I haven't seen any old hands eulogizing this demise in detail as I'd expected, but suffice to say, the rise of broadband, webpages getting fancier and more multimedia-friendly, requiring more coding know-how, and the emergence of modern social media and collaborative fan wikis pretty much put paid to the value of free website services, and with them the old-fashioned fansite with a singular (sometimes unreliable, TBF) voice (with such singular voices sometimes making blogs instead, like UnaDiNoi-Winx, the still-active Sirenix-Winx and well, this very Dreamwidth)
THE Unofficial Winx Club Site
Active early 2005 - November 2006
Offline early 2026
THE Unofficial Winx Club Site (as seen via Wayback Machine), featuring a masthead based on a cut scene from 1x14 (yet his review for the episode itself never acknowledged the plot-relevant cuts 4Kids made :-\)
The Facts
Created by LiveJournal Winx community moderator Frank15, this website was much less extensive than Michael Grant's website, due to being hosted on the erstwhile free website service Angelfire... It had the typical trappings of the free website fan page: character bios, episode guide/reviews, and even sightings of the background students :-)
(Most of the Winx images didn't manage to make it to the Internet Archive though :-\ but at least all the episode reviews, text-only obvi, are present and accounted for :-))
The Personal Connection
I cited this website's reviews plenty of times, as part of my Winx comparisons (and you'll see plenty of direct quotes in the Editor's Spotlight posts I made a few years ago :-)) On a less good note, though, back in the day I once asked Frank15 for permission to use his season 3 reviews for my podcast, and he told me "I would prefer if you didn't, please" :-\ (I've actually been working on a post relating to this, might post it someday)
The Demise
Frank apparently lost interest in reviewing episodes and keeping the site up-to-date after the gap between 3x07 and 3x08 in the states, with the former being the last episode he ever reviewed... Anyways, I said this latest demise is bigger that just the Winx fansite itself, since the website went down in early 2026 due to Angelfire itself conking out... After the demises of Geocities (2009) and FortuneCity (2012), Lycos (itself an old name in the search biz before Google won out) managed to keep Angelfire (and co-owned Tripod) online for over a decade afterwards, as the last remaining pillars of the original "free websites for all" era of the net (even after no longer allowing new free sites to be made), until a major outage in late February 2026 on both sites... They managed to get Tripod back up (more or less) in early March, but put up a message on the main Lycos page saying: "Unfortunately we will be shutting down in the next 30 days." (Which has long elapsed by now) I haven't seen any old hands eulogizing this demise in detail as I'd expected, but suffice to say, the rise of broadband, webpages getting fancier and more multimedia-friendly, requiring more coding know-how, and the emergence of modern social media and collaborative fan wikis pretty much put paid to the value of free website services, and with them the old-fashioned fansite with a singular (sometimes unreliable, TBF) voice (with such singular voices sometimes making blogs instead, like UnaDiNoi-Winx, the still-active Sirenix-Winx and well, this very Dreamwidth)
