ST Whatever Happened to Your Esteemed Rivals' Sites?

Aldera.net was my go to site but the boards were definitely a little mean spirited from what I remember (maybe it's because I was quite naive at the time having just migrated from the official Starwars.com board which was like wading in blissful ignorance and not so steeped in spoiler politics)

That site just vanished suddenly sometime after AOTC release from what I remember. I vaguely recall a lot of people saying it was a cease and desist but I've heard otherwise since.

 

Some of us remember the Princess only too well.

 

Nah I just meant that a lot of the people from those forums ran away from there and doing better things now.

 

Maybe for the next Celebration (or maybe it should have been for this one) there should be a panel that's essentially "Class of 99 reunion" and it's a panel with all those old webmasters and forum moderators and community members from when this thing was new.

Although it'd probably just be a big fat awkward mess that would play out a lot like the reunion shows for old seasons of The Real World.

 

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy"

 

I used to know T-Bone decently well from chatting back and forth with him online. Very nice dude and down to earth and always willing to answer questions.

I recall him telling me once he had kids which was why he didn't watch the SW movies as much as he used to, but that was like 10-15 years ago now. But that may partially explain why he isn't as active anymore too.

I recall him having SOME prequel spoilers, but TFN and AICN seemed to be the biggest sites for the accurate spoilers. I also recall sites like jedinet.com and Dark Horizons having alot of SW scoops. Dark Horizons scooped the teaser trailer description for the now legendary TPM teaser trailer that was released in November 1998.

TFN has always been my go to message boards to frequent ever since I figured how the Star Wars online community worked back in the mid to late 1990s.

Anyone remember countingdown.com (or something like that)? They dedicated pages to counting down with clocks and all to a number of big movies. Those guys I believe were some of the guys who made national headlines for camping out for TPM 3 months in advance.

 

Ahhh yes... I definitely remember that site.

The whole camping thing for TPM was something I prefer not to remember though.

 

How about Supershhhh..... eemmm... forget it.

 

I was just starting to follow the SW spoilers back then circa 2003 so T-Bone's site was the main one I lurked on. I might have gone to jedinet.com but I never visited Dark Horizons back in those days.

 

I forgot to mention before that one of the worst flame wars in the online science fiction community apparently involved The Prisoner fanclub. Although I am a huge fan of The Prisoner, I have never been involved in the community, so I didn't witness any of it but apparently the fan club, called "Six of One", ripped itself apart and there remain rifts in that community to this very day. Not bad for a television show that was largely about individualism and freedom of speech for dissenting voices.

They say Outpost Gallifrey (a Dr Who forum) can be fairly bad too. I have never joined and you can't view it unless you are a member so I don't know how toxic it really gets.

I have to say this is one of the better forums I have been on. I hope it doesn't get too ugly when we are deluged with newcomers in the last part of this year. I haven't had much to do with them but, from lurking on their threads, the Space: 1999 online community by and large seem like a pleasant, articulate group of people as well.

 

There used to be a very minor/not overly well known Star Wars fan site that only existed for a few years in the lead up to TPM. It may have even made it to almost when AOTC came out. By the time ROTS was in production, the site no longer existed. It was called swdatabase.com. Anyone remember that site?

A guy named Ryan Fogle used to run it. They never had exclusive scoops or exclusive spoilers on their own. They used to just relay news and scoops from other sites and link to them on their main news page.

They had a section of the site the called "Dark Side Rumors", which was run by a guy named Sameer. Readers would write in with questions and ideas about the movies and Sameer would post them and then also post his own response to each. I used to know those guys, in fact I filled in here and there running the site and Dark Side Rumors when Ryan and Sameer were gone for a day or two from time to time.

Ryan told me once that they used to have a working relationship somehow with Supershadow, and he stole the idea for the Dark Side Rumors from them. If you went to his site, he had a section that was clearly a rip off of it, where he posted "questions" from fans who wrote in and would reveal "spoilers" to the movies as he responses to those questions He even used the same page design and font.

Anyone remember swdatabase.com? That was their connection to Supershadow. LOL

 

I actually do know T-Bone. He has been quite busy as a musician these days, however, he was recently invited to write some kind of essays on The Empire Strikes Back and Shadows of the Empire. He has some Planet of the Apes material coming out this summer as well.

 

... Then again, maybe he is the smart one, given there has been virtually no real news so far. He might be timing things perfectly for when the force Disney marketing machine awakes.

 

Cool. I hope he gears up for the ST and starts producing some spoilers again at some point. It would be nice if his forum came back to full life as it was quite a good one in its heyday. (TF.NET is fine too, I hasten to add!)

 

At Star Wars Celebration I in Denver, I ran into T'Bone and "Jar Jar" from Jedinet. It was really early before the first day of the convention. We talked spoilers for about a half hour. Later on when the midnight madness thing happened at Toys R Us in Denver, we went with them and got all the toys. On the way back to the airport, they thought my Podracer was a bomb and detained me. True story.

 

Since we're reminiscing about the past, let's all pay our respects to Star Wars Kid.

 

I'm having a hard time processing episode 7. Let alone the fact that Rogue one will film soon, and Episode 8 shortly after that!

I'm freaking out!

 

I've never posted anywhere but here because I like the strong and consistent moderator control. There are rules, they are enforced, and people follow them because they are enforced. Other message boards and very inconsistent with their enforcement and indeed many mods allow anything-so long as they are in agreement with it. But here, people are made to behave and it forces the conversation to be more cordial.

I used to lurk at MF.com but I don't think I ever made an account.

 

The less said about the EU Defense Force the better eh?

LOL I have some fairly ridiculous PM's which I should share...these people are probably long gone now...

I love the idea that the EUDF are dead, their EU in tatters.

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I remember hyperspace and the Episode III webcam fondly. I even drew up a floor plan for Padme's veranda set after watching the webcam for hours and hours on in. I sent it in to the main page and later robo_obi made a 3d rendered model. I can't believe that was 12 years ago.

The articles are still up.
http://www.theforce.net/episode3/story/EP3_Palace_Set_Floor_Plan_62024.asp
http://www.theforce.net/episode3/story/ep3_more_palace_set_floor_plans_61972.asp

 

JohYowza.net doesn't seem very active any more either. Used to be huge.

 

I too have fond memories of Hyperspace and watching Pablo's webcam and discussing it here for hours on end. The crazy theories and arguments about what was being filmed in the large pool were some of my favorite moments, made even more funny when the movie finally came out and all of that stuff had been cut from the film!

Of course there was a lot of drama too. I remember one group of members who went by the initials AOE and were "led" by a dude called AgonyEngine. They fancied themselves "cooler" than everybody else(which is really funny on an internet forum about a sci fi movie franchise!) and they all eventually left this site and started their own where they ragged on members of TFN. They screened the registrants for their site and let in more of the "cool" kids and shared spoilers lifted from other sites.
Ahhh, the good ol' days!

 

DARTH CRANE!

 

Anyone remember SidiousNews? They had some great content between TPM and AOTC. https://web.archive.org/web/20010201152300/http://www.sidiousnews.co.uk/

 

AOE/Phatooine were mostly d-bags. It was that whole post 9-11 America Over Europe crap which was rooted in the 2SA social thread. What a bunch of jag offs.