MuggleNet.com is, with The Leaky Cauldron and The Harry Potter Lexicon, one of the few Harry Potter fandom websites with an international following and more than a quarter century of reporting, commenting on, and celebrating everything to do with the Wizarding World. These sites were daily stops from Generation Hex during Potter Mania, 1999 – 2012, the years the books and first film film adaptations appeared.
In July 2020 with the advent of the Trans Wars, however, MuggleNet broke with Rowling, Inc., with which entity they had previously served as an unpaid marketing extension, in fidelity to their beliefs that human beings can become the other sex by believing they are. MuggleNet made this move, all but declaring the author of the Harry Potter series ‘She Who Must Not Be Named’ on their site’s posts and podcasts, by linking arms in a brotherly boycott with every other fandom site (except this one and The Rowling Library).
The difference in those closed ranks, though, was that the founder of MuggleNet, Emerson Spartz, had sold his website in 2020 to Topix Media Lab, a magazine and paperback book publisher that had already been printing Potter titles with MNet cooperation for years. The new owners oversaw a reformatting of the site and published a wave of new book titles but for the most part retained its staff of many years, most of which were technically volunteers, and its large archive of posts and podcasts.
In September 2025, though, Topix decided to clean house and start over. They fired everybody and in April 2026 wiped the site clean of its past. As The Leaky Cauldron’s ‘Amanda Kirk’ wrote last week in a piece titled ‘MuggleNet Has Become a Horcrux:’
In 2020, the site changed ownership to a company, Topix Media Lab, that had been in partnership with MN for its print publications. For some years after the sale, operations at the site appeared similar from the outside, albeit with a seemingly bigger push for ad revenue by Topix. In September 2025, Topix emailed MN staff to inform them that their services were no longer required. Staff numbers had fluctuated but some had remained dedicated to MN for nearly 20 years. Unless the owners planned to shut down MN, why abruptly dismiss all that institutional knowledge and devotion? The mystery deepened when Topix posted an ad on LinkedIn looking for a single full-time paid staff member to run the site. Qualifications listed for the position included an MBA.
The staff decided to fight back in court — and watched Topix guard its legal flank in April by dropping all their “volunteer” labor efforts overboard of the site with a new MuggleNet in everything but name:
As reported in La Gazette du Sorcier, in February 2026, some former staff members filed a class action suit against Topix in New Jersey District Court alleging that it had violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying them for their work on the site. The complaint is publicly available and alleges that Topix improperly classified the MN staff as “volunteers” whilst obtaining economic benefit from their labour. As that suit wends its way through the legal system, posts have appeared on MN social channels hinting at change for the site and, on April 23, a rebranded site appeared, with no advertisements and with most of the historic content gone. (This sudden change has been dissected on the Harry Potter subreddit under the title “RIP MuggleNet”.) You can follow the progress of the case here.
‘Amanda Kirk’ thinks the Topix Media Lab is doing what its doing to position itself for a Big Juicy Deal with Rowling, Inc., in conjunction with the teevee adaptation of the Hogwarts Saga coming to your living room this Christmas:
Why remove all content, decades worth of fan contributions, and start over with a clean slate? Why dismiss all staff and hire an MBA? What is the goal, the benefit of this new approach for Topix, the site’s current owner?
It might have something to do with the upcoming HBO Harry Potter series. By renovating the site and clearing out all the old content and people associated with it, they can approach Warner Bros./HBO about securing an exclusive sponsorship deal to promote the new series. Unlike a brand new fan site, this relaunch brings with it the reputation and following of MuggleNet, but it no longer has any content about the movies or critical references to the author, just a blank canvas for promotion of the new series. The appeal to Topix is obvious: A lucrative contract as an official outlet for a series expected to run for nearly a decade.
That makes sense, of course. Topix Media Lab bought MuggleNet to make money and the new Harry Potter programming on the horizon promises to bolster the website’s value significantly, maybe even bring it back to its glory days pre-2020. Which glory days included a hand-in-glove all-but-partnership with Rowling, Inc.
I think what The Leaky Cauldron is missing, though, is that, by suing Topix Media Lab in February for benefitting from their labor without compensation, the legacy MuggleNet staff pushed the site’s ownership to dump all that content in April so that it could argue in court that said content was both worthless and no longer benefitting the owners, if it ever had.
That decision to Clean House enabled Topix to re-position itself with respect to Rowling, Inc.. Not to mention welcoming the greater part of international Harry Potter fandom that either never cared about making their love of the books all about celebrating those afflicted with gender dysphoria and attendant mental illnesses or is tired of the Trans Wars. By dumping all their pre April 2026 content, the new MuggleNet has erased the former staff’s hysteric Rowling calumny and omnipresent transgender fixation. That guards their legal flanks and opens the doors to a restored relationship with Team Rowling, HBO+, Warner Brothers, as well as that infinitely greater part of Rowling’s audience that has never gone to a fandom conference.
There was some great work in what MuggleNet just erased from its site. Beatrice Groves’ ‘Bathilda’s Notebooks’ entries? They’re all gone. (We’re changing the links at our Beatrice Groves Pillar Post here so that all her MuggleNet work will have Wayback Machine urls for easy access.) My podcasts at MuggleNet? They’d long ago taken down the work I did with Keith Hawk on MuggleNet Academia — which Keith reposted at that link — but the 44 shows I did with Katherine McDaniel as ‘Reading, Writing, Rowling’ before I jumped HMS Caitlyn Jenner can only be found via the Web Archives.
But with the few jewels that were tossed, the new MuggleNet has also taken down their July 2020 post that spelled out its resistance campaign to Rowling the Transphobe (it, too, can be read on the Wayback Machine: ‘Our Commitment’). It can still be found at The Leaky Cauldron and The Harry Potter Lexicon where apparently it remains their active policy.
I’m delighted that MuggleNet has reinvented itself and done its best to erase all memory of its positions during the madness of the Trans Wars. An apology to Rowling and the sane part of fandom and Potter punditry they called bootlickers (and black-balled from their conferences) would be better but tossing everything in the Memory Hole is a great beginning. Here’s hoping that Leaky and the Lexicon will re-invent themselves, too, without needing to drop their staffs and erase their archives. Every Confundus Charm has its expiration date, after all.
Post post: From my July 2020 post about my last MNet appearance:
I am leaving and will not be working with the “#1 Wizarding World Resource” until they retract both their in-house and public assertion that J. K. Rowling is a transphobe (and that as such The Presence represents a danger or is “committing harm” to fandom members) and their attempts to ‘cancel’ her. I left on good terms both with Professor McDaniel and Kat Miller, the MNet Creative and Marketing Director, no bridges burned, but it was time for us to acknowledge we disagree on essential matters and our relationship needed to change to reflect that disagreement.
Post post post: ‘MuggleCast: The Harry Potter Re-Read Podcast’ checks in on the new MuggleNet — ‘MuggleNet is Dead!’
I admired the fierce loyalty to JKR of the last ‘Keeper of the Keys’ at the Alohomora! forums at MN, “KyKid 942”; I imagined that he was summarily dismissed when the forums were closed. I feel the precedent of being shut down was there to be seen from that point on.
i used to work as a volunteer for one of the podcasts, and was expected to make it work like a full time job, even though i already had a full time job. hopefully anyone in the future who works with them will be paid.