Two announcements, folks, and these are big ones. One is from last week, and the other is actually from last year.
Last year I finally started working on a project to catalog every post on the forum ever made. For context, if you dig around Wookieepedia enough, you'll know that the wiki also has other forums—such as the Consensus track, where site policy amendments are voted on by editors. All of these forums have their own dedicated archive pages for closed threads, and if you look around on the Consensus track archive, you'll find this vote that passed several months ago.
There you'll see a motion I wrote to create an archive for the Discussions forum, because before that point, no such archive existed. It's a misconception that threads here are closed after some period of time. You can continue conversations for as long as they're on-topic, and that's especially true for our news and spoiler discussions, but with the way this forum is structured, older threads get harder to find and maintain. Now we can put them on the Discussions index.
Think of this index as a successor to the monumental ThreadHub project that @Givinname started a few years ago. Everything in that mission statement still applies today, and now it has the support of a much more stable infrastructure.
We can use this thread here to gather links to projects and other permanent threads that should be given pinned spots on the index. Already complete is the Discussions index archive, which indeed links to every post ever made on the forum. It also includes a link to the program I wrote to actually compile the post data, so future mods don't have to resurrect any of us to figure it out.
Oh yeah, future mods. That's the other thing.
Last week we saw another vote clear the Consensus track, this time for a motion I wrote about an official procedure for appointing future moderators.
The practice has always been for the current mod team to handpick new mods, and now we just have it written down as official site policy.
If you remember when we announced that active forum users could vote in forum-related site policy changes, this was the end goal. Just like any other wiki role that comes with special permissions, a new mod appointee would undergo a confirmation vote.
With that in mind, it's safe to say now that @Joupena and I are looking into bringing some new folks on board as moderators for the forum. When the time is right, you'll see us file their usernames under requests for user rights so that the community can vote to confirm them.
Hopefully this all sounds exciting to you. I held off on announcing the forum index for so long because it had to be split up across several pages for size, which took a bit of extra work that I had pushed back until I started writing the mod policy too.
Also, I really feel like I've done everything I ever set out to accomplish as a mod. The very first forum project I started on the job was a list of important threads that people could bookmark for easy access—and nearly five years later, that list is as good as complete alongside plans for when the next mods come along.
I'm not quitting or anything, but man, it's nice to finally have this complete, and I hope the forum index will be useful for anyone looking to keep the best of this place's history still going strong.
