Much of the pre-history of The Forge was in the discussions at Gaming Outpost.

It was there that Ron Edwards first introduced System Does Matter and the distinctions between gamism, narrativism, and simulationism, and there that arguments involving Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, Seth Ben-Ezra, and me raged regarding what these things were and how you could know them.

That was where Scarlet Jester first argued for Exploration as a core concept of role playing, which perhaps facilitated the growth from GNS theory to the Big Model.

There there was a Sorcerer forum on which many of these discussions continued, both in relation to the theory itself and specifically in application to Sorcerer. There also was the original Alyria forum, revealing the game in its earliest development.

Then there was a server instability, a software glitch that made the forums completely unreliable. The threads vanished. The management maintained that they were archived, and that they would be restored.

Two days ago, Gaming Outpost unveiled an off-site sample of its new forum software. All the old threads were restored in that sample.

Two hours ago, the site was shut down; now it is returning. It is expected that the forums will be up soon, with all the old data.

There are complications logging in; the old password files could not be transferred to the new software. I was unable to get the system to recognize my account e-mail address, and had to create a new account under the old name and address. However, I expect that before I return here on Sunday, Gaming Outpost will have restored that which was lost.

I thought those of you who were part of that history, and those of you who have wondered about those early threads, would want to know.

Perhaps I'll see some of you there.

--M. J. Young

Sweet. What's the current policy on access?

Mike

At the moment, anyone can read the forums; anyone who registers can post to the forums. There is still a paid membership level, which provides access to certain restricted articles (mine, and those by the core authors from almost three years ago) and certain restricted game contributions with which I am not familiar. I am not expecting that to change, but if it does it will probably become more lenient.

The transition is going more slowly than I thought. The threads are on the temporary site (there's a link on the site discussion forum), but my expectations of the installation appear to have been slightly premature. They announced about a week or so ago that they were waiting for a final form on a new forum software version, and that there was at least one bug that needed tweaking before it was going to be released (they aren't doing their own primary programming this time), so that may be the hold-up.

However, we have seen samples of the coming rebuild, and the old threads are in it, so there is every reason to believe these will soon be live.

--M. J. Young

As was mentioned on another thread in site discussion, another step forward has been made. The new forums are up and running, as they work out a few remaining bugs. All the old threads are in place, and new discussions are going on there (Mike Mearls showed up and started an interesting issue on Critical Hit). It remains to be moved to the Gaming Outpost domain and server, but is running in its temporary location at the moment while the work progresses on the rest of the site.

--M. J. Young