Archival / future of forums

[Jedi Master Spock]

Okay, so... things broke again, and it is really past time for me to hand this off completely to someone else, web hosting and all.

I may have temporarily fixed things on the back end as far as the most recent error, which was Spamhaus flagging everyone (including me), but it's been a very long time now since I was active in the community, and I know there's a lot of material that people want to have available for reference in terms of essays written.

I'm posting here for public input... people may or may not be able to log in and post to reply to this, I may have found the right switch to flip to let people do that. Currently, domain e-mails are not active, you can reach me at starfleet.jedi@gmail.com.

EDIT: Since the spambots are in full force, I've turned off new user registration - the forum is mostly inactive (see below) and we'll be looking at solutions for an archive / read only form of it.

[Mike DiCenso]

Other than mass spambot attacks, there's almost no traffic, and so no good reason now in my opinion to keep things going. This forum served its purpose, and even Stardestroyer.net and Spacebattles.com are on the slow decline now as far as Versus debates are concerned. The big drivers, Wong, Poe, Young, and so on are gone. The Star Wars firepower has been effectively neutered and Disney's ruined the franchise in general, except a few things, like Andor, and that show doesn't add too much to the debate. It's a show about the politics of how the Empire gained power and the Rebellion got going. Same with Rebels.

Maybe other people will disagree, but there's not much point left to this.

[2046]

Original Universe Trek tech, Lucas Universe Wars tech, and the Versus debate between them remain a favorite mental-escape hobby of mine, but at this point expecting other participants in a faster paced forum setting at a distinct URL is kind of like pining for a LAN party.

The owners of Trek and Wars have both changed their universes, and with it their dedicated fanbases. While neither were ever hard sci-fi by any means, the original universes of both were sufficiently consistent so as to reward further thought and even analysis in depth. That's not the case with the more recent eye-candy-and-nostalgia productions. They are simply too inconsistent, and the intended new fanbase is not typically going to be the type to geek out and crunch numbers. Even if they are, the current consumption-focused technologies might dissuade them from posting. Even if they decide to post, it might never occur to them to go to some website with a forum rather than Reddit or YouTube comments or some other ephemeral spot. Even if they actually do make it to a forum, search engines mean it would likely be a larger one still generally active with a broad array of topics rather than a more narrowly focused one . . . and even if they land here, they have to not be turned off by the damn spambots, a situation only likely to get worse on the entire internet thanks to associative token models ("AI").

Put simply, is there a market for a very specific niche forum like this? And, if so, is it worth all the effort to maintain a heavy database-driven phpBB3 forum with all of its infrastructure and attack vectors and moderation requirements?

Opinions can differ, but I think it's safe to say that those of us who might be most willing to invest the time in such a thing no longer have it, or if we do the return on investment of that time would be unfortunately low.

The forum era is in decline, sure. However, there are functional gun forums and other broad community forums, and larger niche forums that survive. As for other forums that cover this topic, StarDestroyer.Net probably endures mostly for its rumored porn forum and similar off-topic bits . . . certainly the Trek vs. Wars section is dead. Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity are extremely broad in scope so may attract folks interested in the latest Hollywood spectacle, but for Trek vs. Wars it's sparse as hell.

So, realistically, it makes the most sense for those who still have an interest to ensure that the information here is preserved.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Yeah, I have to say that while I never stopped enjoying the analysis side of it as an exercise... I simply had too many other things going on as time went on. Debate and discussion is an enormous amount of fun, though it could also be frustrating. I really enjoyed my structured Warhammer 40k / BattleTech debate, and I wish the community could have supported more of those. Unfortunately, there were never really any good neutral venues, and not many people are willing to either stick to the rules when they have the power to freely break them, or venture into a venue where the other side has moderator powers.

At first, I pushed myself away because I genuinely needed to spend less time posting on the internet to focus on my work, but I started to lose interest with Disney Star Wars (especially after the sequel trilogy concluded - I felt like I wanted to unwatch them out of existence) and the newer Star Trek installments. IMO, they were also a lot less amenable to technical analysis because the people writing them had less of a sense of technical grounding, or borrowed less of it from their inspirations.