Hello,

I was wondering, for how long and in what form will the discussions on these forums be kept around for people to read?

Not to start my first post ever by sucking up to the audience - the Stardock/Elemental forums really are the most fun, troll-free and intelligent game community I've seen. The amount and imagination-level of ideas people are coming up with throughout the development and beta is amazing, where looking for good ideas in some other places is like panning for gold.

And I am looking for ideas. I've an ambition of designing games professionally one day, and spend a lot of time on game forums as well as playing games and making notes for the future. I can't count the number of times I saw someone putting forward a unique perspective or awesome suggestion which goes completely unnoticed and forgotten because it's buried in a thousand other threads and posts.

I've learned a lot from reading through archives of developer/community discussions even after the game development has finished, the game fades into obscurity and the company that made it is gone.  There's plenty of great stuff that I or other game enthusiasts can go through even ten or twenty years after and "draw inspiration from" or "plagiarize" if you prefer. That's basically my interest in preserving the Elemental beta forums, idea forums, developer journals and so on.

This isn't as silly as it might seem - lots of people would preserve and archive old letters, newspapers and so on rather than throw them away, so that a lot of libraries and museums maintain collections of this stuff that can be hundreds of years old, and historians, genealogists etc. thrive on these. Now places like http://www.archive.org/ are doing exactly the same for Internet media.

I'm sure some of you have seen a lot of game related sites and message boards shut down when the owners lost interest (or the company stopped supporting a game) and great content was lost to the world unless someone copied stuff into their hard drive (which I do a lot now for this reason). It would be great if people did something like making a compressed archive of their websites when they closed down, and sending them to a place like http://www.archive.org/ so interested people might still have access.

I might be a little too early, wondering what's going to happen to this game site years from now, even before the game's been published. But it would be awesome to know that the people running Stardock's community sites (to whom this post is mostly addressed) have some plan in mind for what to eventually do with them so they don't disappear.

Just a thought.