Star Wars Epics

Star Wars Epics (also known as Epics), now in its 9th year, is primarily a play by post roleplaying site, with forums dedicated to Star Wars discussion as well as media, culture, entertainment, and current events. The site is an independently owned and operated, unofficial, not-for-profit, roleplaying-centered Star War website, with a blossoming, entirely flame-free fan community. The use of the word Epics is no attempt to exaggerate the quality of the site; rather it is an attempt to show an aspect of the site's roleplaying which is unique to the genre: each member, from the original founders circa 1999, and everyone that has joined since, can trace their original characters from their first "introductory post" through one continuing massive story, up to today.

History

TheSciFiVine

Epics was born as "Star Wars Tales" (known at the time as Tales) on a site originally called Scifisites, which shortly thereafter changed its name to TheScifiVine. Scifisites itself was founded in 1997 as can be seen from the archived page above, and was one of many similar sites with different themes (science fiction, television shows) under one main parent site, Cybersites, Inc. Information being spurious at best regarding the exact date of inception for Tales, a best estimate is given at some time within the year 1999.

TheScifiVine was a uniquely interactive site experience for its time: one was given a selection of popular science fiction or fantasy names (Solo, Evenstar, etc.) and registered a first name, becoming a part of that "House" or "Family" (House of Elf, Skywalker Family, etc.). Then one could participate in "family" discussions in a specific location created for those who share the same last name, create a personal "home site" within the "Family", join message boards devoted to discussion of a wide variety of science fiction and fantasy topics as well as real life events, send and receive private messages to other users via popup "telegrams" (called just "grams" by the members) or public messages via personal mailboxes, and roleplay in the various sub-genre groups (Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Star Trek, as well as Cyberpunk, Fantasy, or even settings of one's own devise in special "admission only" groups). Tales was one such group, part of the Star Wars discussion forums. The two main forums of Star Wars Tales were the roleplaying area and Cloud City Cantina, a more casual area. Both of the original founding members had long since vanished from the site by the time the current staff began appearing.

Although some moderators were installed in place of the departed founders, they were essentially unofficial, due to what was to come next: Cybersites, Inc. came to the conclusion that their programming language of choice (RAGE) was becoming outdated, harder to debug, and generally cumbersome to manage. Rather than support this format any longer, they decided to combine their disparate "Vines" and launch TheVines, which would bring together all the various genres to one sharper looking, all encompassing website. Now, with one name, one could navigate all the "Vines" from the Scifi subdomain to the new Movies subdomain without registering multiple times.

Their gamble failed miserably. Neither Cybersites nor TheVines exist today in any form except for the archived pages linked in this article. The members, unhappy with the new, improved interface, fled in droves, and when the original Scifivine finally closed (March 30, 2001), redirecting to the new Vines site, many had already set up shop on the then-fledgling ezboard network.

ezboard

Ezboard, unlike the more interactive ScifiVine, was simply a network of message boards, with none of the frills the members had previously grown accustomed to, yet this is where Tales members tended to congregate even before the ScifiVine's closing -- whenever it went down, which became quite often toward the end. Star Wars Tales established a forum in a much larger science fiction / fantasy crossover board called Multidimensional Space (known as MDS), and run by various other ex-Vine Tales members. Tales stories were kept separate from the rest of the site, unwilling to allow crossovers between genres. This forum proved to the board's most popular, and around September of 2001, Tales members realized the group had become too large to remain humbly ensconced inside such a small space as one forum on an otherwise low traffic board. The decision was made to make Star Wars Tales an independent ezboard. Unfortunately, due to a miscommunication, the entire Tales forum was deleted from MDS several months after parting ways.

Star Wars Tales remained on ezboard until May of 2005, growing slowly but steadily throughout the years, improving in form, vision, and function as the admins learned HTML, CSS stylesheets, and ezboard-specific coding, as well as what does and doesn't work on a Star Wars discussion and roleplaying forum in terms of diplomacy and community relations. During this time the member count soared to over 1,100, an excellent count for any ezboard.

Then came what colloquially became known as "The Great ezboard Disaster of 2005" (details have been removed from ezboard), during which the entire ezboard network was hacked, with many boards losing some or all of their data, never to be retrieved because of the network's negligent backup procedures. Tales was somewhat lucky; only half of the posts disappeared, along with more than half of the member list. However, ezboard's lack of concern for all the lost data, and their reluctance to refund anyone's money, soured many to ezboard's quality of service. This, in addition to the announcement that ezboard, similarly to TheScifiVine, had also decided to cease support of its old, buggy, programming language and database system (consisting of Smalltalk with flat files, which the staff admits was poor programming and patching on their part, not due to the language itself), in favor of creating a new, improved network from scratch, was not very encouraging to long-time Tales members who had already watched the same exact venture fail spectacularly once before.

New Home

So, after two months of deliberation, and a little math proving that ezboard had grown too expensive for the services it provided, the staff of Tales began the process to become a truly independent internet entity. Despite some misgivings that the site would lose ezboard's precious member base, Tales set off yet again in August of 2005, to its own domain and website, Star Wars Epics, renaming itself to prevent any legal issues that might arise from the Dark Horse Comic of the same name.

Sources

• Star Wars Epics Forums