#sge fandom i have returned

[basil-isdead]

...the only way out is through a fairy tale.

please do not repost on other sites!!!

[queensparklekitten]

I found your web weave about last online 7 years ago and scp 1762 (And I Love It), and I noticed it said you can’t reblog unless you were from the SGE site. What is that exactly?

*looks up from my drink, in the corner of the bar*

So. You wanna know about the SGE site, huh? Well.

Once upon a time, there was an online community.

Fandom forum, though the Open Chat one (equivalent of a #general channel in a discord server) was by far the most used. You got a book you read when you were 12 that changed your life? SGE's the acronym for what was that book for me. You might've seen the movie adaptation on Netflix a couple years back. I really waited seven years for that... I'm getting off topic. Back to the website.

The userbase was in the 8-17 age range, 90% girls, many of us the kind of people who devoured books like it was nothing in our then-ongoing preteen years. The few moderators never even looked at us unless we reported a glitch, spammer, or bigot for them to deal with, so we had no adult supervision.

Open Chat was used for, among other things, the most chaotic unhinged roleplay you can imagine. We got really into it. Wild parties that lasted days, food fights that quickly escalated into the hunger games, everything to do with those living shadows, Bob the alien, the Potato Kingdom, many of us had pets or imaginary friends doing this alongside us, I'm barely scratching the surface here, if I were to try to explain it all we'd be here for weeks. Quoting the Bee Movie script or singing certain songs had a tendency to cause all hell to break loose paranormally, one time it opened a portal to the underworld. It was the most fun ever. There was a reason we'd greet newcomers with "try not to die".

Aside from the chaos, there was contests where we'd reply with images of dresses or cute animals or what else have you, lots of clubs based around various things, people would sing (post song lyrics, sometimes roleplaying whole flashy performances) and post fun questions for everyone to answer and stories and neat videos we found and really good poetry and so, so much more that we didn't archive because we just assumed it would always be there.

It's where I met a lot of my closest friends- hell, it was the only place where I regularly got invited to participate in anything. I don't think there's anyone on that site who didn't forge friendships there. It's also how I got into quite a lot of songs and books and shows, and how I learned HTML formatting. That site was my home. It was the best part of my life for years.

You know how online friends are, though. Sometimes they disappear without a trace, a warning, or an explanation. Or their parents forbid them from going on the site because they think online chat rooms are dangerous.

I joined at 12. By the time I was nearing age 15, most of my friends had disappeared without a trace, never to return. I was one of the very few users to join in 2016 who was still active. The site wasn't abandoned, there were new people everywhere, but...

I don't pretend to understand the why of it, but the magic just. Started fading, I suppose. The community was falling apart. The roleplay got more stale and repetitive and often died down before it went anywhere. It all slowly declined and decayed and became a shell of itself. A hollow mimicry of what we once had. It wasn't really fun anymore, and I found myself wondering what was left to stay for. Just got worse in this regards, up until the website's final days, even after the rest of the userbase started becoming aware of it.

Eventually one day, the Open Chat started glitching hard. It had done that before, many times, and always been fixed. That time, though, it went down for repairs and never came back up. They said they'd bring it back, and they never did. Here's the thing, though- our posts all disappeared. When other forums on that website got closed around then, we could still see the posts by going through our post histories, we just couldn't reply to them. Open Chat and every last record of what we did there just vanished entirely, like it never existed.

It never even got crawled by the Wayback Machine.

...Now that I mention it, tomorrow's actually the anniversary of when Open Chat went down... how the FUCK was that five years ago it does NOT feel like it's been anywhere near that long.

Anyways.

During this time, the very few (like, there was maybe 2 at most) moderators had begun responding to drama by banning offsite links, followed by, several months after we lost our Open Chat, banning off-topic (non-SGE-related) discussions entirely, which sparked riots and a petition and they knew what it meant to the userbase, even to newer people who'd only known the comparatively lifeless version, we told the admins as hard as we could, and they did nothing. Well, other users told them anyways. I knew the site was beyond saving and thus didn't do anything but listen to music and make "let me guess, your home?" memes.

We also lost the ability to make posts in our profiles that weren't in any forums but could be seen if you went through the user's post history.

The official end was the "revamp" of the website, that was just a shutdown. They deleted everything that was left of it and all the records of what we were, and made a completely new website that the old one's url now redirects to. Though at least this time they had the courtesy to announce it a month and a half in advance so we could load as much as we could of what remained into archive.org during those weeks. There's no forum feature on the new site, and user data wasn't transferred. I never made an account on the new site. Why would I?

You can probably guess by reading those lyrics and asofterworld screencaps that I, and at least some other users I'm still in contact with, never really got over the death of that community.

That last image in my webweave is a screenshot of the page that now comes up whenever you type in the url for a forum or an old site member's profile and hit enter.