Tag: forums

Help ArchiveTeam.org Save Forums.StarWars.com

I blogged earlier this month that Lucasfilm/Lucasonline plans to shutter forums.starwars.com at the beginning of June 2011.

Today, a commenter asked for help with the Archive Team’s effort to preserve the site–something that they have already done with the Star Wars forums on Yahoo.com. The details are below:

An effort to preserve a public copy of forums.starwars.com is underway by the ArchiveTeam.org. If you are a Linux user (there’s a coordination script) w/ grep 2.6.2, bandwidth to spare and multiple GBs of free harddrive space to save thousands of 4k-12k .html files. Please stop by the irc. #archivestrikesback irc.efnet.org (or the main ArchiveTeam irc #archiveteam)
[or if you can wget, we’ll figure something out]

The ArchiveTeam.org in the past preserved starwars.yahoo.com before it’s demise, in addition to non-SW saves like Geocities and currently working on Friendster.

More details of the archiving effort are available on their mediawiki-enabled site here.

Forums.StarWars.com Going Offline on June 3, Loss of Nearly 10 Years of Star Wars Fan Conversations

Topher Kohan of CNN wrote an open letter to George Lucas regarding the shuttering of the StarWars.com fan forums: Mr. Lucas, the 4th is not to be trifled with – CNN.com.

Apparently, Lucasfilm recently decided to remove the forums on June 3, 2011. They have already placed the forums in read-only mode as of May 3.

Pabawan, a site admin, offered this anti-explanation explanation: “At StarWars.com, we are always evaluating the various features of the website in order to provide the best experience to our users. As we review new community-based interactive features for the future, we have decided that the Official Message Boards at forums.starwars.com will no longer be part of the site” [read the full announcement here while it is available].

Instead of hosting fan conversations on StarWars.com, Lucasfilm has opted for Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, Facebook and Twitter are very good at doing what they do, but they do not offer the same experience or conversation that an online forum provides. Forums allow people to write longer conversational pieces that are searchable and archived within a theme delimited hierarchy. Facebook allows for conversations, but they are not easily searched and may not be archived indefinitely. Twitter facilitates conversation, but you may only write 160 characters at a time including hashtags (for thematic or subject linking), user references, and links.

Online conversations need a rich ecosphere of different Internet facilitated modes of conversation rather than relying on those that seem the most popular at this time. I believe that it for this reason that the Taiwanese embrace multiple modes of communication including BBS servers, Plurk, and others in addition to Facebook and Twitter.

I realize that Star Wars fans will likely shift their conversations to fan-operated forums. It is unlucky however that the many conversations on the now defunct forums.starwars.com will be lost forever on Friday, June 3. Perhaps someone will write a script to archive the forums before that date, but I do not know if Lucasfilm’s servers will permit such an archiving to take place.