StarWars.com Forums

» see forums.starwars.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The boards opened on 9 October 2001, which puts them between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, at the exact moment the prequels gave the fandom something enormous to argue about. Lucas Online ran them. They sat on Jive forum software, which is why every address ended in jspa and why thread IDs and message IDs were separate sequences that nobody outside the site ever had a reason to understand.

About 193 boards hung under twenty categories. The Cantina was the general one and the biggest. The Expanded Universe board was where the novel readers lived, and that board mattered more than most official forums do, because Sue Rostoni of Lucas Licensing actually posted in it, taking questions about Del Rey's publishing schedule from people who had read every book in order. The site got a facelift in July 2010 with a handful of new features, which is the sort of thing a company does to a property it intends to keep.

The scale is readable off the board's own stats line in its last spring: roughly two million messages in 50,574 threads. The prequel board, Episodes I to III, held 477,570 of them on its own, with the Cantina just behind it at 444,520. Down at the other end sat Star Wars on Television with 17,088, a board that only existed at all because of The Clone Wars.

~ the record ~

~ read-only ~

In April 2011 Pablo Hidalgo of Lucasfilm announced that Lucas Online would close the forums in June and that no new posts would be accepted after the end of that month. An outage over the weekend of 22 to 24 April ate several days of the time people had been given, so the announcement was updated: the lock into read-only mode moved to Tuesday 3 May. A few weeks of reading your own archive, and then nothing.

The notice itself lived at forums.starwars.com/ann.jspa?annID=3, which means the announcement was hosted on the thing it was announcing and went off the air at the same moment. On 3 June 2011 at 10:10 in the morning Pacific time the forums stopped answering.

~ the scrape ~

Archive Team put a project together under the name ArchiveStrikesBack and worked out the shape of the site by walking the ID sequences. A quick scrape found message IDs running up to 17,965,717 and thread IDs up to 275,287. Profile IDs went as high as 9,782,310, with the early numbers belonging to the earliest accounts, so the user ID was a rough timestamp of when somebody had joined.

One volunteer's profile dump covered 4,145,442 profiles and came in at 822 MB compressed, which unpacked to 42 GB. Others filled in blocks of a hundred thousand IDs at a time and listed their archives on the wiki by hand. That page is still there: a table of zip filenames against volunteer handles, with a column for the file size and nothing else in it.

~ where i was arguing about star wars ~

I was at university through almost all of this, on TTNet broadband from about 2006, and I never had an account on an English-language official forum of any kind. Turkish fandom argument happened on Turkish forums. Donanimhaber and frmtr both had film sections, and the prequel fights there were the same fights, held in a different language on a board owned by nobody in particular.

That turned out to be the safer place to put them. A general-purpose Turkish forum from 2003 has no reason to delete its film section, because the film section is not a line item on anyone's budget. An official board run by the rights holder is always one reorganization away from being switched off, and on 3 June 2011 that is exactly what happened.

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