StarBase 118 Staff Posted February 9 Posted February 9 Hello fellow community members! A little over 25 years ago, we introduced a new way for our members to meet others from around the fleet and argue about Star Trek: forums. While forums have been around since the 1970s, we didn’t have the finances or technological prowess among our staff to host our own server and run forum software (which was a lot more expensive and hard to manage in those days!), but a new, free service allowed us to jump in. It took a while to catch on, but once it did the forums became an important part of how we communicate and gather as a community. You can still see some of the posts from that previous version of the forums in our Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards archive, here: https://forums.starbase118.net/forum/62-utopia-planitia-fleet-yards In the years since then, we moved to our own self-hosted software (Invision Power Boards) which helped to cement the forums as a critical piece of infrastructure that allowed us to run contests, hold important discussions, and much more. It’s hard to imagine we’d be where we are without them! In recent years, as our experiment with Discord has grown into its own critical piece of infrastructure, it’s begun to replace our forum traffic and many of the areas that used to be thriving discussions on the forums are now much quieter. That’s why we believe it’s time to transition as much onto Discord as we can and simplify things a bit for everyone – no need to register in two places anymore when one will do just as well. Today we’re announcing that we’re in our final phase of moving public discussions from the forums to Discord. You’ll soon find these areas on the forums closed and new Discord forums & chat channels open for them: Graduation Hall Graphics Requests Appreciations Poll of the Month We’re also closing our “General Discussion” and “Trek Discussion” forums, but the Officers Lounge and Spoiler Room on Discord are already long-standing meeting places that fulfill a similar function. In the coming weeks and months we’ll be thinking through our plans to transition events – like the Writing Challenge and Award Ceremonies – onto Discord, and you’ll hear more about those things as we prepare for them. Once this transition is complete – in early March – there will still be limited access to the forums. Those people who currently have accounts will still be able to log in and review protected content. People who join our community in the future will be able to see some forums that are publicly available for archival purposes. But we’ll no longer allow registrations by new members at that point. We encourage you to add any questions, thoughts, feedback, and ideas – hold the complaints! – into the thread on Discord in the #officers-lounge so we can address any issues that might occur in the process and make this as smooth of a transition as possible. We look forward to hearing from you folks! View the full article
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