User:Alyeska/Sandbox

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**Spacebattles.com**
Image:Sbdotcom.jpg
Image:SpaceBattles.com forum.png
URL	http://spacebattles.com/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Sci-fi Fanfiction/Fanfilm archive & community
Registration	Optional
Owner	Kier
Created by	Johan Alm

Spacebattles.com (SB.com) refers to the website Spacebattles.com and the associated online science fiction community, which is focused primarily on the technical aspect of science fiction crossovers and debate.

The attached forum is unusually large and active, with topical sections on subjects ranging from politics to anime.

1 The Main Website
2 The Forums
3 History
- 3.1 2003
4 Criticism
5 Forum Statistics
6 User Groups
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] The Main Website

Spacebattles.com (aka Spacebattles, SB.com, or SB) is a science fiction website with an interest in crossovers of Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, and various other science fiction franchises.

The main website itself hosts fan films and fan fiction on the topics of Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5 among other notable sci-fi franchises, along with an art gallery and a joke list. Started by Johan Alm in 1996 to explore 3D animations and models, the website has grown enormously in the past decade.

The main attractions, however, are the attached forums and the cohesive community that frequents them.

[edit] The Forums

The forums most famously feature lively technically-oriented debates about the virtues and potency of various science fiction franchises. While primarily focusing on eternal imagined warfare between sci-fi franchises and the verbal warfare between their respective fanbases, the forums are not solely technical in nature. They also have sections dealing with current events, military issues past and present, as well as technical discussions regarding computers, computer games and the making of 3D animations and models.

This last topic was the first section of the forum - understandable, given the site's origins.

There have also been irregular themed forums dealing with a particular topical subject. For instance, the War on Terror subforum was set up to deal with the large amount of topics after the September 11th attacks. Since then, the subforum traffic declined, but it then changed to the 'War Forum', dealing with all matters military. Most subforums however, are temporary in nature, one for instance dealing with the 2006 Winter Olympics which has since been dissolved.

The forums also include a creative writing sections for members' fiction, and a section dedicated to "story debates" - a distinct type of online text-based role-playing game found in few (if any) other discussion and debate forums.

There is also a special section for discussion of anime. Due to the adult nature of certain anime-related subjects, membership for this sub-board is more strictly regulated.

As has become tradition for internet forums, most of the message board upkeep and moderation is handled by moderators selected from the general membership.

[edit] History

Since coming online in 1996 as a website dedicated to 3D modelling and animation, Spacebattles has grown into one of the most popular and pre-eminient sci-fi online repositories and communities. The forums have since changed from being merely another feature on a small website into a separate entity that has outgrown its parent website in popularity. Its message board, which has over 6,000 registered members and reached two million posts in May of 2005, is currently the largest science-fiction themed board on the Internet [1]. The site was founded by Johan Alm, but is now maintained by Kier, who also wrote the template coding for the well known and widely used vBulletin BBS system.

[edit] 2003

On February 5 the board's owner, Kier, upgraded the board software to version 3 of vBulletin. This was the last major board software upgrade.

[edit] Criticism

Due to the nature of moderated discussion forums, it has been argued that the results of some debates held on the SpaceBattles.com forums depend more on the board's internal politics than the virtues of the arguments presented.

[edit] Forum Statistics

As of 11-9-2006

Total posts: 2,782,636

As of 06-07-2005

Posts made by top 100: 1,188,688 (58.1%)
Posts made by top 150: 1,459,990 (71.4%)
Average posts/user for top 150: 9,733

As can be discerned from these figures, the vast majority of posts are made by a select number of regular members.

[edit] User Groups

A feature that had been available since the board's inception, but only recently (2005) was implemented by the administration, is the use of user groups. These allow various board members to form their own groups pending administration approval. For the most part, these groups serve as nothing more but as a personal identifier (formalizing some forum cliques), although certain groups allow exclusive membership and access to certain forums or special functions. For example, all moderators are members of the moderator group. Other groups exist to display special distinctions, such as identifying members who have been a part of the boards for nearly as long as the boards themselves.