As the other half of the original conversation, one point I was making was this:
There was a very, very compelling and thriving web community for Shadowrun once upon a time. Now there is... The forums. Which are, on the best of days, a pit of raucous contention. On the worst of days, well, the less said the better.
I think there's still a lot that gets created for Shadowrun. There's some good fiction, some good source material, and some good ideas and theories... The problem is, The forums (and to a lesser extent, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter) have supplanted the websites and even the old email lists. And Forums have one glaring flaw...
Forum posts are not forever.
Now, I don;t mean we go through and delete old posts. THey'll hang around for quite some time. But forums have notoriously bad search functions, there's no way to really sort the data, and the signal to noise ratio is hideous.
The culture of the internet has changed a great deal. And not to the better, IMO. We're a culture of idle chatter, of fire and forget. The words we speak don't have any permanence.
The forums are a place to gather up a little bit of community, to get quick responses to questions, and that's fine. But in the long run, the forums don't really add anything to the community, to the culture, to the presence of Shadowrun. They're more noise, more walls of text. And a lot more crap that needs to be filtered to find those minor slivers of gold.
There's a lot of reasons for the culture change over the years. Part of it is laziness. Forums are easy.
Part of it is that those of us who used to put forth the effort have moved on, for one reason or another. Families, responsibilities, jobs, a lack of active game, there are a ton of reasons why. I dropped out of the game and the freelance scene for a while and let my own site die off after a Dumpshock database crash. I've considered putting it back up quite often, and I still want to, but most of my material is badly out of date (3rd ed, and even some 2nd ed) and much of it's stuff taht has since seen inclusion in the game (Vampires, Wendigos, Windlings, Centaurs, etc). I like my version of the vampiric races better than the SR4 ones (Vampiric Abilities gained in a similar fashion to Adept abilities), and tehres still stuff that isn't or can't be put into the game officially (Highlander style Immortals and Disney's Gargoyles)... But it comes down to a matter of time, and the effort of completely redoing and updating my site. And I never seem to find that time.
<shrug>
It's not a matter of "Old vs New". A couple years back, I was pushing heavily to try and revamp the entire DUmpshock site and to open up the site for new Member Sites, because the lack of stuff like Geocities or Angelfire or what have you makes fan sites much harder to put up these days. There are some really creative people out here on the forums, with some great ideas and some good, solid fan-created material. But without a way to showcase it, it's simply an idea that's likely lost to the ether.
And while I think some of the stuff that FASA, FanPro, and CGL put out over the last decade has been fantastic... I tell you this. The fan community is a much different, and much weaker thing than it used to be. There's a reason that the majority of freelancer writers came from the Fan Community pool. You could look at someones website and the material there and gauge what they could do, and to a large degree it was a resume.
<shrug>
My 2 Nuyen.
Bull
