After 15 years, I'm closing the doors and turning off the lights. Some of you are like "Starscape what?" or "you still exist?!" and yeah, I get it, but there was a time when we were a pretty active little board. People from TBBS, WF, TK, and other sites used to stop on by and join in the spam contests, and the arcade contests, and it was a lively little place. Then 3 server moves over 6 years fucked us up. I think WF gave us a little reprieve in the middle of one of those server moves (I still appreciate it), and Zetaboards decided they were selling off to Tapatalk, and I wasn't going to have any part of that because firstly, half of what we featured would have become paid only subscription, and two, their moderators would have taken over administration of the board, saying what we could and couldn't post about. No way in shit was I doing that, so we moved to a little host and I fired up an IPB based board. Well, in 14 months, we've had 228 posts. Honestly, after Larry died, I think the last real pillar of community spirit faded away. Larry had been there since the beginning, as had @MikeH92467. So many of you were also members there, and that was some fun stuff. I pretty much let people do and talk about whatever they wanted (as long as they weren't harassing people, obviously), but tiny forums like that are no match for social media like FB, Twitter, Instagram, and god knows what else. So on August 1st, I'm shutting it down. I think it was long past time, but I didn't want to let go. You can see the actual announcements here: http://starscapebbs.com/index.php?showtopic=510&st=0&#entry3870
A couple of days ago I logged in to a work-related message board for the first time in several years and it's a ghost town. It used to get tons of traffic and was a really great board for fun, work and, for me, the occasional troll. I'm not sure why the owner keeps it going.
But the hills that we climbed were just seasons out of time. Damn good song. Also, rather well chosen here, my friend. ♥ Which is why, after doing some thinking over the past few days and then talking to Mike, who shared my belief that the board had run its course, it was time to close things out. There's just no reason to keep it going when mostly all we do is say hello to each other, mention something about the weather, and pop off for 3 or 4 more days. It's less like a forum and more like a water cooler where there's only 3 employees in the whole building. I'm pretty sure it was the last server move, to the IPB board, that took out most of the membership. I was running Brony Kingdom, too, an MLP message board, and we had about 20 active members towards the end, but the host company selling to Tapatalk forced us to close it down for the same reasons I wasn't going to let them convert Starscape. In the end, though, it was long past due. WF exists because it has a small but loyal membership centered around pissing each other off and then laughing about it. TrekBBS is around because it has been a giant Star Trek message board mainstay for 20+ years. Starscape's people came from both places, and a few scattered parts unknown, and so it shutting down will be no real loss to any of them. Hell, if I closed it now, I don't think anyone would notice, but I'm waiting until August 1st, not that there's much for anyone to go back to, because when I moved to IPB, I lost the database. Zetaboards was a custom software forum, built mostly from scratch (with a little Invision thrown in), but they wouldn't let people download their database, because they were selling it all, lock stock and barrel to Tapatalk, which felt like the biggest fucking betrayal of all. We couldn't even save our own communities. So yeah, that should have been it, but I'm stubborn, and put the pieces back together as best as I could, cobbling it together from old records, and old posts, and got it up and running on a host that would let me download my database. Not that it matters now. My database is a whole 7 Mb. That's how little we've seen over the past 3 years. So yes, yes yes, it is time to move on.
I'm sorry to hear this. It's always said when once vibrant communities turn into ghost towns and dwindle away. How many "active" members does Wordforge have now? Like, how many people browse at least daily? How many people post at least daily? Nowhere near as many as once was, for sure. I suspect that even WF only has a few more years at the most left too. I know that it's been predicted before, but the downward trend is undeniable.
Exactly (responding to both of you). Social media lets you have an almost unlimited audience, monetize your feed if you want. It's like when the old dial up bulletin board systems with SysOps and door games were around, and then the internet was the new kid on the block. It was only a matter of time. Yeah, you can still connect to some old bulletin boards, but most of them are telnet and offer little functionality compared to the power the internet wields.
Yeah, he passed back in May of 2019. I had talked to him the day before on the phone. He had been in the hospital for some kind of infection they weren't quite sure what it was, and then I got a call the next day from his fiancée.
I went ahead and wiped it all tonight. All of the emails I sent out came back bounced, save for one, and she has me on Facebook now. There's no one left to tell, no one dropping in, and so I figured save some money on hosting costs, since it was coming up on the next payment anyway, and just do it. So it's done. The site URL now redirects to Feed The Children. I figure the remainder time on the domain name could go to something for the benefit of others.
I'm late to this party and somehow missed this because I'd had some friends looking for non-twitter options to discuss fandom and figured Starscape may be a good fit and...well
I'm sorry, yeah, it's just we had three people that posted regularly, about once or twice a day, a couple days a week. It's ultimately my fault, I take full responsibility for the emptiness. Mike was a great co-Admin and even brought in some new blood for a time, but after we lost Larry, who really was the joy and life of the place, there just wasn't anything left, really, that people couldn't find elsewhere.
Eh, as others have said, people have moved away from message boards that aren't Reddit for a lot of reasons. I personally like private communities over the chaos of social media but....
So did I. It was also nice to have a place to go where I could just say whatever I wanted with no rules to push back. I still prefer places like these. Forums just have something social media doesn't IMO: depth of conversation. You can *really* discuss things without losing the plot (in general). Most social media moves so fast and there's too much to keep track of, which I believe is on purpose. It's why our attention spans are 8 seconds.
Ugh, tell me about it. I am on social media solely because no other platform for fandom exists. If I ever became a big time creator, I'd be using my influence to make Pillowfort.social more well known. It's the closest thing to old school LiveJournal that exists, and all of Tumblr's reblogging but the ability to limit who can see the posts or interact with them. The only reason I don't use it more is because of a fandom thing that happened at the worst possible time, hardly anyone in my circle is willing to use it, but the technology itself is solid.
It was time for my semi annual check in to StarscapeBBS just to see how it was doing. What I've found is sad. I'll be having a drink in Starscape's honor. Then probably another drink in Larry's honor. It truly was a fun place. Just a nice little corner of the 'net, with some of the coolest people. Godspeed, StarscapeBBS.
Sorry, but Bo Burnham's "All Eyes on Me" (which actually was just released this year) is the most devastating song ever written. Change my mind.
Some Mastodon forks have a lot of what you mention here. The fediverse in general is pretty big on control of your own posts.
I thought a lot of those are most like Discord chat rooms where any Convo from 2 hrs ago is essentially lost in the void. I know some Tumblr folks moved to those after the porn ban, but I wish we had more old school stuff where you can look up old posts and stuff.
Not so much. I'll write something elsewhere so I don't derail this tribute thread. Totally agree about the value of being able to look things up.
Honestly? If Zeta hadn't sold itself to Tapatalk, and fucked around with everyone's message boards, I'd have left it open and just a free for all (sans spam ads and such), but because we had to move everything after they sold off the company, Starscape lost everything (Zeta didn't allow database backups). We had to start from scratch, and lost everything I wanted to save and couldn't.
Oh! No fucking way! I had my own board that like, 5 guys talked on off of my old Geoshitties page, and that was Network54, and they got bought out by Tapatalk, and they erased all my shit. They said I could save my stuff by logging in with my old password, but I used my old password, and it locked me out and acted like I was an imposter of myself. Fuckers. WTF is with Tapatalk buying up old MB platforms and then just killing them?
