Yahoo! World of Star Wars

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

~ the goodbye ~

Yahoo announced it as a beta in October 2007. The offer was an official Star Wars site with the real logo on it, where your Yahoo account bought you a user page and a forum to argue in. The welcome card read "We would be honored if you would join us", which is Vader's line at the Cloud City dinner table repurposed as a signup prompt.

It ran 26 months. In November 2009 Yahoo gave it thirty days. The fan site Club Jade had the news on 16 November and reported that the address would redirect to StarWars.com as of 15 December, which is exactly what happened. The Archive Team page dates that notice to December, which is a month later than the fans recorded it.

Club Jade's write-up is also the best surviving evidence of what the site meant to the audience it was built for. The writer admitted they were not sure what it had been founded to accomplish, and a reader in the comments put its useful life at about three minutes. It had an official license and an account system. Everything else on it was available elsewhere, in better company.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the distance ~

In 2007 I was finishing university on a TTNet line that had only been broadband for about a year. Star Wars in Turkey was something you watched and then discussed wherever you already were, which for me meant forums with Turkish in them. An English-language portal run by Yahoo was never going to be where that conversation moved. The site also died before it had been around long enough for word of it to travel this far.

~ the rescue ~

Archive Team was eight months old when this landed and had just come off the GeoCities grab. They went after starwars.yahoo.com and saved 99.9% of the user pages and the forums, on the reasoning that the movie trivia was duplicated on starwars.com anyway and the thing worth keeping was what the members had typed themselves.

Yahoo fought back in the dumb mechanical way a large site fights a crawler. After roughly thirty minutes of fetching from one IP address the server began returning error 999, Yahoo's rate-limit code. The crew got around it twice over: Tor driving httrack, slow as molasses in their own description, and a pile of IP addresses driving wget, fast but needing more resources than most volunteers had. Both results sit in the archive, a 228 MB tarball timestamped the day the site died and a 36 MB one finished five days later.

~ seven weeks after geocities ~

GeoCities closed on 26 October 2009. This closed on 15 December 2009. Both were Yahoo properties where ordinary people had put up pages, and both were deleted inside the same quarter. The difference was in the send-off: GeoCities got most of a year of warning and an international campaign to rescue it, while this got thirty days and one fan blog that happened to be paying attention.

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