at the times when ADM created most of his fanedits and send them out to people to review them and share them, it was not standard to spread them big time and even if they were shared, it was on the OT community. Most of the people back then are no longer really active in the fanediting community. Those were the old times, before anyone thought about permanent file storing places like Rapidshare.
Now it sounds like being decades ago, but in fact it is just about 2 years and it was just standard procedure.
Lots and lots of fanedits got lost back then. The torrents have died for a long time and the newsgroups files were deleted after they reached their expiration date of 45 to 90 days, depending on the group.
Now there are quite some collectors from the old times among us, but not all of them are sharing, most because they had to make bad experiences with people just grabbing stuff and giving back nothing at all, not even to the community. I think the community we have on FE is a much more sharing one and sooner or later the old stuff will pop up again for us all to enjoy.
What we could really use currently is someone to download from the newsgroup and upload to Rapidshare for a permanent home. If anyone is interested in doing that, I can offer them access to my RS account for uploading or offer to upload any fanedit myself if they just send it to me.