My Spacebattles Velocity History

My Spacebattles Velocity History

Sometime in 2006, I typed in a Google search for “M2 Bradley” and began clicking through page after page of results. Little did I know that this IFV would end up changing history. I went to a page on Stardestroyer.net, a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” site. Then I saw references to a spacebattles.com, and signed up for that.

For most of my early time on Spacebattles (starting with my signing up in December 2006), I hung out in the Vs. Debates section. In hindsight a silly attempt to quantify the inherently arbitrary, it nevertheless appealed to me at the time-especially given the choices.

Then I sort of burned out and reverted to lurking, not posting very much. I was still active in viewing, just not in posting. At the time, I didn’t really see the huge change in the site. Now I can see it. Basically, by 2008-2009, the old sci-fi standbys of Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and even Warhammer 40,000 had started to run out of steam. In Stardestroyer.Net, this meant the site itself (though there were many other factors involved) began to just fade and drop in activity. But Spacebattles changed.

Huge amounts of roleplayers signed up, as did fanfiction writers. The center of the site shifted to the relevant subforums. Creative Writing, once a sleepy little board, became gigantic. Space Battles General was so overloaded by quests and RPs that a spinoff had to be made. And-then the server woes began.

Space Battles only remained in business because a programmer acquired it as a guinea pig board for vBulletin. Said owner was-to put it mildly-an absentee landlord. The latest server upgrade under him was done with the assumption that its growth would continue at the same mild rate-instead of increasing eightfold (!).

Naturally, the server became overloaded as the board grew. Changing board software to XenForo helped somewhat, but everything was only a temporary reprieve as the post swarms continued. Then in 2014, the slog became a breakout.

In April came the Athene Incident (named for the moderator’s name). Athene, a longstanding and loved moderator, was dismissed in the worst possible way. The board administrators tried to cover-up with a statement about “retiring”, but didn’t consult Athene on the coverup to see if she would agree to it (!). Page after page of flamewars and anger continued, and that’s when the split occured.

Several members of SB launched a spinoff board, named Sufficient Velocity. I stated at the time that I viewed the Athene Incident was a catalyst-it would have probably blown over had it not been for the server issues. (Also, there was a definite culture split-I think the incident was the ignition, the server issue the powder, and the shell was the different user culture).

I saw no problems with the creation of Sufficient Velocity. Although I spend far more time on Spacebattles, I have no problems with being a member of both boards.

On Spacebattles itself, things changed. The administrators apologized, there was a semi-coup with supermods becoming new admins and the older ones settling into technical roles, and (after a while), the site itself was taken under new ownership and upgraded. Now I primarily stay on the Creative and Spacebattles General boards, not going into Vs. Debates any more.
Quite the adventure.