2014-09-15

STrek-v-SWars.Net Forums, Pt. 1

So far as I know, nobody's found this before.

It is possible to sorta kinda peruse the old forums from the looooong-defunct STrek-v-SWars.Net site (the one inspired by ST-v-SW.Net) via Wayback Machine kung-fu.  You'll find among StarfleetJedi.Net forum denizens that the STrek-v-SWars forums are looked back upon quite fondly and even with reverence for being a place where topical discussions and great research-laden posts occurred.  By that time, after all, SDN was basically a haven of angry groupthink where no open discussion could occur, Spacebattles was, well, Spacebattles (and similar to SDN inasmuch as no open discussion on Trek vs. Wars given the moderating staff), and of course alt.startrek.vs.starwars was not worth the bother of Usenet access.

Indeed, many early posts at SFJ featured laments about lost info from STrek . . . some posts were basically attempts to reconstruct the old data.   

Anyway, the forum main page looked like this:


And if you scroll down on this page to the URLs that have "viewtopic" in them, you can find some goodies:


I will thus comment on things I find interesting as I go, and please excuse the lack of good formatting or deep thoughts.   I'm considering this sort of like live-blogging but with a tape delay or something.   Also, with apologies to fanfic fans, I'm not big on those and while I keep bumping into them, I am not listing them here.  So if you had one and lost it there, sorry . . . gotta go look yourself.   Anyway:


"well, if there is one thing that warsies and trekkies can agree on, it is that both universes can kick the s*** out of Babylon 5."  - "Col. Crackpot" 

That made me giggle.


Alyeska's scaling of Utopia Planitia shipyard starbases.  I remember hearing about this but didn't realize it was heavily based on Star Trek non-canon stuff . . . a pity.   In any case, it was referenced at least once here:  http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22&start=45


Alyeska notes having missed VOY and ENT, which struck me funny reading it in 2014.  For the briefest instant I was all like "what a butthole, claiming to be a Trekspert", but then I realized I have no idea how much I'd seen at the time, either.  I know I missed out on DS9 and Voyager, save for some of the major episodes, until very late in the game, though I couldn't tell you exactly when.   I think (pulling this from my butt) that I'd seen them all by the time Enterprise came on in like 2001 or so, but I can't guarantee that.

You kids these days have no idea how spoiled you are . . . you just pull it up in Netflix or watch episodes on StarTrek.com or some strange website that is streaming them on-demand or even catch them on Youtube or download the torrents in like six minutes.   Not to go all old-man, but in my day you either bought the VHS sets or you downloaded hideously crappy .avi files that were so poorly compressed compared to what you have now that you could barely make anything out ,and the files were so huge . . . often like 70 whole entire megabytes . . . that it took ages to pull them down.

Point being, a "what have you seen" thread was a valid thing at the time.   Now, one would almost be justified in responding with something like "what are you waiting for, go watch and get back to me, slacker".


This is the announcement where they declare the main pages off-limits to attack.   I haven't exactly done this with my main site pages, but since I've got someone rolling in literally a dozen years late trying to hit them with all he's got (and still not doing a good job), I understand the impetus.   Of course, these guys' pages were like a year old at the time, but of the team one guy was content and the other more into the coding side, so it was sort of a messy arrangement in that regard.

As for hitting old pages, there's a certain intellectual shame that some have and others don't.  Ten years ago it might've been worthwhile to smack around the SDN main site pages directly, for instance, but now I'd feel like an ass.   Some of the pages are just begging for it, yeah, but some of them are also like 15 years old.  Sure, in the modern era, low-life good-for-nothing thugs sometimes go after retirees, but that's because they're low-life good-for-nothing thugs. 

It's best to just present a different point of view and roll on.   


Cpl. Kendall makes a good point here about how the devil Voyager's crew knew anything about the Romulan guy from the "Eye of the Needle" episode.


Oh, there I am.   I was wondering where I was.  Took several, several pages to find myself, which is odd because I had the second highest user post count in the thread.   But, then, that's how I roll . . . extensive engagement, but only in select threads I find interesting.


Inside baseball stuff, but perhaps this might explain some of the archive.org difficulty with the site?   Just guessing.

8.  There's a damnably large number of "the topic does not exist" pages.   I'm guessing it was spam and such, but dammit.


Huzzah, something meaty.   BHMM (I liked that guy, where'd he go?) does an analysis of the number and types of Federation Starbases.  Vympel the Pimple (I never liked that little zit) trolls him, as was his custom.  I haven't read through this one all the way . . . I'll save that for later, since it has depth and deserves deeper consideration.


The above is a primitive wannabe version of 359's amazeballs SFJ thread documenting warp speeds here:  http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6329


My god.  Is leetspeak even a thing now?


 . . . holy crap.   And why does this make me think of the weird guy JasonB on all the forums now who types like language isn't his first language?


Alderaan shield fight!  w00t!    

Oh crap, now I'm infected, too.


Wait, why are there two different ones?   And anyway, dammit that the other pages don't work.


And here's #3.  What the crap?   Either this has to do with the repagination thing several points above, or else seeing Alderaan Shield Nerdfight #6237 broke the Wayback Machine crawler.

12C et al.  








Maybe Wayback has decided my IP doesn't need to see any more today?:  http://web.archive.org/web/20050821112146/http://www.strek-v-swars.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=4698&amp

That's probably a good idea.

So ends Part 1.   

I'm still hoping to find the old Star Wars scaling stuff, but I'm worried that almost all the rest of the threads are going to be the same freaky repeat of the Alderaan shield argument first page.


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