Simple question; Is LucasForums dead in all but name?

[Miltiades]

As Lynk pointed out, being on the cusp of a new generation of Star Wars, with tons of projects in the works and new games being planned, is something that Lucasforums could profit from. I believe the new games might increase traffic around LF again, even in its old form, though it's true that this seems the perfect moment to revitalize the place, make it go with the times, honoring the old without being held back by it.

 

I wish I could offer my help, but I lack the skills necessary for such a project. And it needs to be instigated from higher up anyway for this to work. I hope they come around on this. This forums deserves that.

[Lynk Former]

I'll be blunt. I'm the ONLY higher up that actually tries to do anything these days, but I'm not enough. If this place is to be revitalised, it needs the higher ups to work as a team to make it happen, which is NOT happening because I seem to be the only one to really go far enough to do SOMETHING.

 

If you guys want to get this place back on track again, I suggest you AGGRESSIVELY bug the other admins about this in any way you can contact them.

 

Sitting back and being passive, waiting for something to happen isn't going to cut it any more.

 

I want to do something good for this place, but I can't do it as the only admin doing something.

[Prime]

What did you have in mind?

[Zoom Rabbit]

In the year 2115, there will be a wing of the holoband cyberreality grid called the 'Lucasforums Memorial Archives.' It will be populated by self aware AI web-bots programmed with the sum of our posted material that reproduce our behavior algorithms with a 95% plus accuracy; they will even think they are us. The postings will go on, long into the future.

 

All of this reflects the juggernaut which is Disney. We have been grafted onto a plant that will not die...

 

I'll sign on to your crusade, Lynkster, but I'm not really clear on what your vision is for change.

[Lynk Former]

To put it simply, the LucasArts Fan Network needs a reboot. We need to archive all of the old and build something new from the ground up. There are a few things preventing that from happening.

 

1. Lack of an available group of people who have the skills and/or time to accomplish this.

 

2. People holding onto nostalgia that value the old more than wanting to build something new.

 

3. Lack of leadership. To be perfectly blunt, that's not me, I'm the guy who can build you a thing, but I am no leader. I have a certain vision of things I'd like to be built, but it's pretty clear that I can't make them happen, at least not by myself.

 

4. Motivation. I've tried a few times to do something and each time has failed which has shut down a lot of my motivation. That's how it is for me, as for everyone else, I don't really know what their motivations are in relation to LFN. Are people content just to have an empty archive of the past? I'm sure there are many who do want to do something, but feel like they have no power to do anything about this situation.

 

 

 

As for my particular vision of the new LFN. As I said, I would like to archive all the old stuff, put them in a subdomain legacy.lfnetwork.com so that people still have their memories intact in an archive.

 

As for LucasForums, again, I would archive everything in a section of the forum that is closed to all further posting. Then I'd start a new set of forums that starts us on, basically, a blank slate. It's radical, it's risky, but it's a chance for a new beginning. Also, anything we have left of value, such as mod threads, etc, we would take with us to the newer version of the forum. We'd build that new forum to fit the needs of the people who still use this place, but most importantly... we get rid of the old system of segregating communities into domains of old long gone domains.

 

For example, the xwingalliance.net community... a great community... but LFN doesn't actually own the xwingalliance.net domain any more, the people in charge of renewing domains let it expire. The old communities are gone now, they're dead. It makes no sense to hold onto them any more as they are.

 

Of course, this is all hollow talk without the people needed to make it happen to begin with. We HAD a lot of staff members who were active and doing a lot of different things to maintain LFN... now we have no one, at least not enough.

 

Am I repeating stuff I've already said a million times? I am, aren't I.

 

 

 

ANYWAY (this post is longer than I intended it to be lol)

 

 

What I'm trying to say is that if you're not content with this place being... THIS, a passive archive of the late 90s, early 00s, then bug the admins. Contact them, PM them constantly, let them know that you want this place to come back to life. Online stalk them if you have to so that they pay attention.

 

If you're unhappy with LFN dying a slow death, it's up to you to let them know and tell them that you want them to do something about it.

[Alexrd]

To put it simply, the LucasArts Fan Network needs a reboot. We need to archive all of the old and build something new from the ground up.

 

Forum-wise, I don't think that would be good thing. The forums and sub-forums should definitely be reorganized, most of them merged, but the threads shouldn't be archived. There's many useful information for the older games and this forum is still the go-to place for many of them.

[Lynk Former]

Archived doesn't mean inaccessible.

 

Also, if there are any threads that are still active that would need to be transferred into the active forum, that can easily be done.

 

Overall, the idea is to create a forum structure that isn't a hundred little empty communities.

 

 

 

But yes, that's about the reaction I get all the time. People always seem to think I want to delete everything for some reason... the guy who has the highest post count in the entire forum.

 

[Alexrd]

Archived doesn't mean inaccessible.

 

I know, but it's "view only" (at least that's how I took it). Take Classic Gaming as an example.

 

The following sections could be archived since they're generic and not focused on a specific game (and this could be applied to every forum on the network):

 

1. The HuB

3. Community

4. General

 

However, section 2. Star Wars Gaming should be kept open and reorganized. There's an 'X-Wing Trilogy & X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter' sub-forum that's pointless when there's an whole forum focused on the X-Wing series, but the rest could be either moved/merged or be left as is.

 

Also, if there are any threads that are still active that would need to be transferred into the active forum, that can easily be done.

 

Overall, the idea is to create a forum structure that isn't a hundred little empty communities.

 

And I support that.

[Lynk Former]

I wouldn't move or merge any of the existing forums. I'd just straight up archive LF as it is and start fresh. And yes, views only... I understand your objection, which is the objection others had which is why this place will never change and nothing will happen.

 

People are too afraid of change to the point where they'd rather this place died a slow death in obscurity than try to take a chance for renewed life. That, and as I've been explaining over and over, there's no one who wants to take on the challenge to begin with.

[Alexrd]

I wouldn't move or merge any of the existing forums. I'd just straight up archive LF as it is and start fresh. And yes, views only... I understand your objection, which is the objection others had which is why this place will never change and nothing will happen.

 

Why does change requires losing the exclusive resources that we have? Would we be moving the forum to another platform like Xenforo? If not, where's the harm in keeping certain parts of it open to users?

[Lynk Former]

Okay, I think I know where the connection isn't meeting. When I say "new forum" I still mean THIS forum, LucasForums, using vBulletin.

 

All I'm saying is that we take the entire forum and move it like we did the SWGalaxies.net forum into an "Archived" section, make it viewable to everyone but closed for any further posting.

 

Then, as I said, any of the active and relevant threads can be moved into the new sections we create, like existing and important mod threads that are still valuable. This would be a process that everyone is welcome to be a part of since we want to keep all those resources alive. Same goes for the fan works stuff.

 

To make it clear, we won't be LOSING any resources, the links will all be the same, when you click a link on google, it'll still take you to the same thread, it'll just be, structurally, in a new place in the forum. We can also rig it that so if people want to post in that thread in the archived LF, they are given a message that tells them they can post about this topic in a corresponding active forum and can even link back to the thread that they found and want to talk about.

 

Also, if you search for threads, all those archived threads will still be searchable, it's the same forum, except the old has been put into an archived state so that a new foundation can be put down that streamlines the community into one unified community instead of lots of tiny ones.

[Alexrd]

Sorry, I said "losing" and that was the wrong word for what I meant. I just think certain threads and sub-forums should be left open instead of view-only (which according to you, can be done on a case by case basis).

 

What's the forum structure that you have in mind?

[Lynk Former]

I'm not trying to be a dick, Alex, but I've already been through this with people who actually have power to do things around here and got shot down for even thinking it, I don't particularly want to go through the blow-by-blow plans over again with people who can't really do much about it in the first place.

 

What I will say is that I do have a forum structure laid out, at least the initial drafts as well as the condition that we'd run it by the community first and get their word in on how they want things structured. In short, you wouldn't lose any of the important modding community stuff or the fan works stuff because those forums and threads can be copied and put into the newly structured forum as well. For example, all the kotor series modding stuff can be copied over to the modding forum in the consolidated forum, etc.

 

Also, you're seeing this from a LucasForums-only perspective and not the larger LucasArts Fan Network perspective. The plan I had in mind involved consolidating all of the individual fan sites, to which these communities are all based on, as a singular entity under single banner for all Star Wars games. The other side of the coin, the non-Star Wars LA games would be handled by Mojo, but that's another story/can of worms entirely.

 

In short, it's a job that's too big for one person and too scary for people to accept because they're afraid things will change too much to take the risk. However, I do make compromise after compromise and still people don't want things to change to the point where I just sit back and say, "you don't actually want anything to be done then cause we've compromised ourselves back to where we began."

 

Man, this is depressing.

 

I mean, come on, at least I've been throwing out ideas for the last decade or so.

 

How about you or someone else throw out ideas for once.

 

Throw out ideas and bug the other admins about them.

[Alexrd]

I didn't mention the fan sites because, well, none of them are accessible anymore. All the URLs are dead, including The Old Republic one which was the last one created. I agree that a single site would be the best solution, but I'd say reorganizing the forum should come first.

 

As for ideas, I think people need to know what exactly can be done right now. Who has access to the content of old sites? Who has admin access to the forum? Who needs to give approval for any mergers and archival to happen, for example?

[Lynk Former]

That's because the servers are down and no one has actually taken the time to fix them. I can't go into the details, but the troubling thing is that those sites can be brought back online but no one seems to care any more.

 

As for the single site, my last attempt was to have a consolidated Star Wars site and the project did go ahead with help from a few people who volunteered. That site was going to use the domain jediknight.net and I did create a thread about it in Ahto if you want to go look for it. We got pretty far in the project too, we actually did get all that information consolidated into the one site.

 

However, the problem was that we didn't have any long-term backing from the other staff on LFN and I had just finished uni and started teaching which meant my time had run out to be on the frontlines of this entire process. That meant the only active admin working on anything suddenly became too busy to deal with such a huge undertaking.

 

After all, what's the point of consolidating all that information if the site isn't going to be active with new articles and reviews and such being posted regularly? I had a few people who were prepared to help out in that regard, but there was still not enough people to actually make this work over a long period of time.

 

The foundations are set though, I set them up myself with the excellent help of the people who volunteered. Working out the site is a billion times more important than the forum because it's MUCH, MUCH harder to organise the people and the infrastructure to handle it on a long term basis than restructuring a forum. It's the glue that is going to make this entire thing work in the first place because it's the fansite(s) that actually drew all these people to these individual communities to snowball into LucasForums to begin with. All that information and articles and reviews and such.

 

If we reboot this place, we'd have to work our way back from obscurity the same way.

 

But I understand your point of view. You're looking at this from the view of preserving history and not building new and untested infrastructure. That's why LucasForums, for you, is the more important thing, but think of it this way... if you work on the forum first and then things fail, it's impossible to change it back and you've killed the forum. If you work on the site first and it fails, you don't end up killing the forum.

 

As for "what can be done right now"... absolutely nothing. But that's not what you should be worried about. I said to give ideas and to pressure those who are in charge to look at your ideas and to recognise that you want SOMETHING done.

 

Then, at the very least, they would be more willing to actually do something to begin with.

 

 

Right now we're talking as if our words will magically just happen, I say the forum is going to be restructured and I snap my fingers and it happens all of a sudden. Nope. That's a fairy tale.

 

The first step is to convince the people who have power that something should be done to begin with... and I feel giving out ideas along with the registration of interest would help go a long way to doing that.

 

 

 

 

 

Don't worry about how it's going to get done, just tell them what you WANT.

[Alexrd]

I remember your thread about the beta version of JediKnight.net. I believe I made a few posts in it myself.

 

But my perspective was not "just" about preserving history. I may be wrong about this but I can only speak for myself: I've joined this place because of the forums and their content. I rarely went to the fansites themselves, and when I did, it was more out of curiosity than anything else. I'd say that's the same for many people who joined and (the few that) still do.

 

I'm not saying the new site is not important, after all, it's what going to bring new traffic. But in my opinion, the forum is the core of this place.

 

Of course, I'm not asking to change it in one go, in fact, it may be better to make the changes gradually. Like archiving/merging certain forums that are nothing but graveyards only visited by spambots.

[Lynk Former]

And that's what I've been doing. Changing things gradually, it's been a very hard process to get all of this stuff done and it's been happening in waves. The first step was to consolidate all the fan sites into a single site and to find people who were interested to make that happen and to take it step by step. Once that phase was complete, the second step was to go through the forum, again, step by step, plan everything in advance, get everyone involved, etc, etc.

 

To put it bluntly, I knew what I was doing, I'm not an idiot.

 

However, I'll put this down since you see me as an Administrator and not as a regular member of the forum who can't see your side of the argument. I didn't start off as a staff member here, I was a regular member, and I joined for the same reasons you guys joined, the forums. I found roguesquadron.net and I wasn't so much interested in the content as I was the community. I too rarely went to the fansites, I only looked at the forum because that's where all the people were.

 

That doesn't mean that the fan sites aren't important, they were, because they attracted many other people to the forums. It's the sites that attracted people and they stayed for the forum. If we are to reboot LFN, this strategy is still sound. And again, I chose to work on the fansite stuff first because, if anything screws up, we won't have done irreversible damage, or at least, hard to fix damage since it's much harder to load a forum backup than anything else around here.

 

Furthermore, the fan sites are more important now than they were in the past simply because of the changing nature of the Internet, nowadays, people expect content, not just from the forums.

 

 

But the important thing you guys need to know is how I became a staff member.

 

I was brazen enough to TELL the staff to make me a staff member, saying that I wanted to do stuff with the site and forum.

 

And they let me.

 

If you guys have ideas about what you want to do with this place and want to become staff, go bug the admins like I did.

 

Alexrd, you sound like you have plans, why don't you become staff and enact them?

[Darth Avlectus]

Hi folks.

 

Funny, actually we just got a new member. Some guy asking me for help because he's playing that old 1996 relic of a Macintosh game, Odyssey: Legend of Nemesis.

http://www.paranoidproductions.com/odyssey/main.html

 

An archived LF page with a post I made about that game back in 2009 shows up as one of the top search results in search engines. Yeah sure, I'll help anyone who asks about it.

 

 

 

As to the looming question: Yes, it is. Hovering just above hospice care.

 

Partially it's because forum sites like this are relics of a bygone era. This is just one of many sites. It's entropy. Times are changing. Trends now are social media, mobile devices, and app games that resemble old arcade style games. Desktops and forums are dying for the most part. It's all over the internet.

 

People are changing and life goes on. This one requires no elaboration.

 

A lot of these games are 10+ years old now. Crap, I play games that are between 20-30 years old. Some of you play games even older than that.

 

Then there is degradation of internet culture: 4chan is now more spamming and $*** posting than ever. No engagement, just the same crap repeating over, and over again. Trolls used to be funny enough to make you step back a moment and then laugh at yourself, now it's people with absolutely no imagination. Even pr0n people are reaching their limits because things are reaching a point of dehumanization, and really creepy fetishes becoming the norm. Doug Stanhope even predicted F****** like rabbits will eventually stop being hip.

 

 

 

I digress...

 

As to nostalgia-acs being the bane of this site? Ok, not going to deny it, I stand guilty as charged--I only speak for myself, though. It isn't out of malice, I simply can't follow the new stuff because I've lost the will to go on with it anymore as a whole. I'll always be a SW fan but I can see how the elder generation of SW fans who became apathetic at ROTJ likens itself to my generation of 'legend' hermits.

 

There's a reason Disney has kept Legnds: I think down the road once this new canon has run its course, like in star trek, the new owners will revive legends and I think even pull a marvel esque "multi universe" scheme (afterall Disney owns marvel now as well).

 

For what it's worth to any of you, I don't begrudge any of you for going with the new stuff. Have fun. I understand reinvention to keep relevant.

 

And honestly, if a simple single small haven for the old stuff were all you had, you'd still get bites by the old fish. As it pertains to this site: What I have most interest in are KOTOR forums (the modding area) and fwiw the same of Jedi Knight. I also have an interest in the SWTOR forums. If these were consolidated along with whatever else under Legends, and we just have one social area for it all, I'd be fine with that. Archives for modding resources at easy access, a tech help/modding forum. Guilds and gameplay. etc.

 

I loved the forum games and tech discussion in the general discussion area, but the main area is so filled with one $*** post thread after another by spambots I have given up on it. Alk sometimes responds in the games and Q occasionally replies in tech discussion.

 

At most I come on here 2-3 times a week. I've largely moved on to 3D modeling as a hobby now. However I do have some fond memories of this place. As I've spent this past decade plus learning "how to internet" this forum has been a big part of it. Here I learned sarcasm, where I failed in person-yet it translates most poorly over text, go figure.

 

I look back and see a lot of my posts were because 'I had something to say', and a lot were because 'I had to say something'. Now I know the difference between the two. Even now I am facepalming even some of my more recent posts because I'm always learning. Here I learned having a sense of humor and actually being funny and witty are two different things.

 

 

 

Enough rambling.

 

Someone talk to me here: what does it take to own a server and be an admin? What are admin duties and what is the financial stakes in it?

 

Not talking just for myself, but anyone who is interested.

[igyman]

I have to agree with Darth about the degradation of internet culture. There are a few forums that I lurk without an account and in all of them, or rather their members, I've noticed this trend of posting only to hate on something or to hate on the hater. A lot of the posts are rude and, to put it plainly, idiotic. I especially love laughing at the argument that if you don't put "In my opinion" in your sentence, you are automatically claiming that your opinion is fact. In general, I feel most people have forgotten how to communicate to others, which is evident in the lack of effort in most posts I saw on those other places. People seem to have taken the "I don't have time for this" mentality to the extreme and it is becoming painfully evident in their posts - from the content to the structure of the post (stuff like quote trees are still beyond me - are you so lazy that you can't spare a few seconds to clean up the extra quotes and only leave the last one??).

 

But I'm starting to ramble and you must be wondering - what does all this have to do with these forums? The answer is the reason I joined and stuck around this place for so long, even if I'm not that active anymore.

 

I came upon this place when KoTOR was still a new game and I was looking for a place to discuss my then-favorite game and a universe I enjoy with others. This was the first forum I joined (ever!) and became active in and the only one I kept visiting regularly all these years. The reason for that is the people - once I joined, posted in a few threads and started a few of my own, I saw that this place was frequented by people who I can have a normal conversation with - first about the game and later, as other subforums popped up, about other non-gaming things as well.

 

Sometimes we disagreed, especially in the more serious topics at Kavar's, but we always had the decency not to insult one another to the point of no return and stop to chill out, if we think we might take things too far. This applied to all members - regular and staff - and I haven't been able to find another place with this kind of mentality and general friendly atmosphere anywhere else.

 

It's why I volunteered to help out with the new fansite and I'm still a bit bummed out that it suffered the fate of a lot of fan projects - after a great start it got caught in development hell, because life caught up to us and there was (probably, I could be wrong) a lack of motivation to spend valuable free time on something that's purely a guilty pleasure. We did get quite a bit of old content migrated, so there's a good base for further development.

 

I'm still willing to help out, if the work on the new fansite is ever resumed, because I want this place to live on. Even if its new form is only a fansite, or a fansite with a smaller forum, I think there should be a place for Star Wars fans (and others) that has a general friendly and helpful atmosphere of LF.

[Lynk Former]

@ igyman: The big reason jknet failed to take off was because my free time got cut down drastically once I reached the final year of uni. It's no better now that I'm a teacher.

 

The entire problem is that I was the only admin on the project and with my free time gone, suddenly there were 0 admins on the project because the others weren't interested in helping out.

 

I too want this place to live on, but realistically, if we're to work on any project to get things running, we need a lot more support than what we had, which was just me trying to support a group of people by myself.

 

The task is way too big for such small numbers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be even more blunt here. I don't think there's any hope of LFN left simply because people aren't willing to do anything about it. Everyone is waiting for someone else to take a stand and do something... which ends up with everyone at a standstill, doing nothing.

[igyman]

@Lynk: I see where you're coming from - the same thing happened to me when I finished studies and got my Master's degree, a little over three years ago. I started working right away and suddenly my remaining free time became a lot more precious.

 

While I agree that having only one admin/staff member on the project is definitely a problem, it's not the sole issue. As you say, the project would need a lot more support, but also the team would need to be better organized.

 

With content migration that we did a year or so ago, I think all of us got so pumped up about it, started doing stuff on a daily basis and as a result we reached the burn-out point in around a month. After that, things just stopped in their tracks. I don't think any one single individual is to blame - I or anyone else from that team could have been more vocal and asked you "What's going on?" more, or you could have bugged us more, but none of us did that. We just stopped doing things and stopped talking about doing things and that was it.

 

If anyone decides to start things up again, I think they (or us, or whoever) need to start with organizing the work better and agreeing on what's expected of each member of the team.

 

My suggestion, as this was, is and would be a fan project is to be a bit less pumped up about it, as counter-productive as that sounds. My reasoning is that by being more relaxed about it and saying right from the start something along the lines of "no one expects the team to dedicate most of their free time to this project, but if you want to participate, you have to contribute at least a little (i.e. an hour or two) on a weekly basis".

 

Whoever has circumstances that prevent them from helping out in a certain period should just let the rest of the team know via whichever communication channels were agreed on. What I hope something like this would do is reduce the chance of a quick burn-out and help each person realize whether or not they really want to help out with a project like this one.

 

I could be wrong, but I'm just thinking out loud here.

[Lynk Former]

What we accomplished with the new jknet can still be used. I hope the people involved don't feel like it was a waste, because it can still be salvaged.

 

While you feel that we were too pumped on the whole thing, I did plan everything out well in advance of coming for help with that thread I made. We're talking the span of a year here, I didn't just start the thread on a whim.

 

But yes, organisation is the main factor and is relating to what I was talking about. 0 admins means 0 people who have the necessary access to the various things in LFN meant that nothing further could be organised in the process that I had set out.

 

Even if the people who I had gathered together had been able to organise themselves somehow, they still would have lacked the necessary access to get things done. That requires higher level access from existing staff. The innards of LFN are a lot more complicated than they seem, unfortunately.

 

 

So here are the problems we face right now.

 

1. The current staff are made up of people who either don't have the time, don't have the motivation, or don't have the skill to do anything about this.

2. People are too afraid of change, the mention of such change makes people think of the worst case scenario.

3. There are no new staff who can take the place of the old staff. I think that if enough people step up, those new people have a MUCH better chance of doing something great with this place than us older staff.

 

 

 

 

That last point is where it's all at, at least, that's what I believe. The old staff don't do anything. Of course, mim does come around every so often to clear out the spam bots, but that's not what I mean.

 

What I mean is that we once had a very active staff presence on LFN who did a range of different things throughout the network, now all the people on that staff page list are all pretty much inactive. At most, they come in and check things out around the forum every now and then.

 

LFN needs to fall to a new generation of people who do have the time, the motivation and the skills to run this place if it wants to become relevant again.

 

And just to point this out again since people tend to be LucasForum-centric in their ideas of what LFN is, this is about more than just the forums.

[Marius Fett]

I'm still more than happy to help out with the new JKNet site as I was before the project stalled.

 

The reason I stopped working on it before was much the same as yours Lynk, I started a new job and free time just dried up as I was getting settled into it. That and starting a new relationship just kinda dominated my free time.

 

Things have calmed down a lot since and I have a lot more free time now, so if there's any plan to try again with the new site, I'm definitely on board.

 

Same goes for helping out on the forum this time too, if need be.

[Alexrd]

However, I'll put this down since you see me as an Administrator and not as a regular member of the forum who can't see your side of the argument.

 

Wait, I'm not saying that you can't see it, I was just explaining my side of the argument. We're on the same side here.

 

As for me becoming an admin, I don't have much free time since my work schedule doesn't allow it. However, I'm willing to spend some time helping reorganizing the forum, since I've worked with vBulletin before. As for the site, while I have knowledge of CMS's and web design languages (HTML5, CSS3, JS), I don't think I'm confortable committing myself with such tasks for now.

[Pho3nix]

I'm still around, probably will be until the "end" - if something like that exists on the inter-webs.

 

Reading through the posts I have to agree with Lynk, nostalgia goggles off, archive the old **** and start fresh. And since smartphones have pretty much taken over the biggest change the forum needs is a mobile friendly design. The Web 3.0 thingies. Sadly I'm not a programmer nor a designer, otherwise I'd gladly help out. I'm always available though for beta testing and whatnot.

 

Our biggest resource are the new Star Wars fans coming in from Episode 7, which does make me feel like an old bat.