Shecky's Illusion Archive (website)

Shecky's Illusion Archive was a website dedicated to grand illusion stories that was online from 1997 to 2011.

=History=

The site went through five major iterations.

Original version
On 30 September 1997, Shecky981 posted to the alt.magic Usenet group offering to share pictures of stage illusions. After another user stated that alt.magic was a text based newsgroup and binary posts should not be made, Shecky981 created created a mailing list for trading pictures of stage illusions, and in a 12 October 1997 post they announced the creation of a webpage dedicated to stage illusion pictures. The site was initially focused on pictures of stage illusions, and hosted on Mindspring, but also hosted grand illusion stories and trading of magic video tapes. Shecky981 later stated that it received 20,000 hits within the first month.

In November 1997 the site became unavailable on Mindspring due to bandwidth limitations, and was moved to AOL.

Second version
In April 1998, Eric J Carter posted to alt.magic to announce a relaunch of the site on his personal webspace.

Third version
In 1999, the site was taken over by Doug and Vaughan, and moved to Geocities. In 2000, the site was moved to Pipex, on webspace provided by Vaughan.

Fourth version
On 29 May 2001, the site was taken over by new management and moved to a new location on Geocities. In January 2002, the site underwent a rebuild.

Fifth version
In June 2002 the site moved to Netfirms, and remained accessible there through 2011, when Netfirms was taken over. Although this was the longest lived incarnation of the site, no new content was added.

=Legacy=

Shecky's Illusion Archive is notable for being the first website dedicated to grand illusion stories.

Many of the earliest grand illusion stories were first posted to Shecky's Illusion Archive.