Some Notes on the History and Current Status of AGORA

AGORA, the Aromatherapy Global Online Research Archives, was founded in the late 1990's by a group of aromatherapists led by Michel Vanhove, who now lives in France. The concept was to share linked together pages, hosted at various donated Internet websites, about Aromatherapy and related topics. Although at the time we probably thought that it might help drive traffic to our various websites, our main concern was to help spread information and to set up a distributed, non-centralized system. I (Rob Stitt) volunteered to be the technical manager for the sites, and for a number of years ran a mailing list for the volunteers to help coordinate setting up the sites and in theory keep AGORA maintained.

However, since 1998, the Internet has changed a lot. Although we attempted to enforce a standard look on the various sites, not everyone followed the internet coding standards that were emerging at the time. By today's standards, this site looked archaic. It wa still full screen, although most monitors are now wide screen. Some pages were left justified, some were centered. Some used tables to control the layout, some didn't use anything, and a few used primitive css.

In about 2005, we lost access to the index page, so that it couldn't be edited, even though it was still there until early in 2012. I managed to copy the files that were there before its inevitable demise.

In 2013 I moved the Index and the files that were hosted with it to this site. Since all of the pages link back to the Agora Home Page, which then links to the Index, you probably got here from there.

Some Caveats about the Current Index

There are a number of broken links, either because of some dead websites or because of structural changes in the Web. I am importing pages from the Wayback Machine to get those resolved and either move the article to a new host site, or get it reconstituted. I plan to mark the bad links but leave them on the page as a reminder of AGORA's history. I will check the intenet Archives to see if I can find things. However, some of the articles may have been lost or are completely inaccessible. In a few cases some pictures were not saved by the Archiving software, so they are probably lost.

Almost all email addresses are obsolete. To contact an author, you can still click on the Index links, but be warned that they may not work. I am endeavoring to get them corrected, but will leave them up for now until I determine the new addresses; you might get through.

Please be aware that Aromatherapy has also changed since the turn of the century. Many aromatherapists who were active in 1998 have moved on to other activities. Websites have changed, been shutdown, or merged with others. The mailing lists that were the main source of aromatherapy communications in the 90's have been replaced by blogs, Facebook Groups, or Twitter. AGORA is still here, we have a Twitter feed and perhaps we'll start Facebook page to link people to it.

Progress since 2013

Since 2013 the site has been upgraded to be fully responsive, suitable for use on Tablets and Phones. All pages that have been found have been updated to a standard format. In many cases it was necessary to move the pages that had been hosted elsewhere to the AgoraIndex.org site. For more information on the status, see the notes in the right sidebar.