Last in the critically acclaimed three part Crazy Old Retrospective, we'll wonder how Mike ended up in a position where he locks "Episodes VII - IX" threads on a daily basis.

A beautiful tie-in to part one of the retrospective, the Star Wars e-mail newsletters. The Homing Beacon. Even now the delivery of the newsletter isn't completely flawless, but back in the day, you would miss out on quite a few of those things.

It was when I hadn't gotten several Beacons that I decided to look for a way to contact the people responsible for the e-mail. There wasn't really a place to do just that, so as many others I just went to the boards and posted a new topic straightaway.

It was in the Miscellaneous Forum, I can remember it as if it were yesterday, even if it has to be about three years ago. Naturally, I felt people weren't responding quick enough, but instead of bumping my thread, I decided to post the exact same thing with a slightly different title. If I can remember correctly, it was "something something, respond you must". Yeah, we're all rolling our eyes at this time. ;-D

I would link to both threads, but they were deleted, along with the rest of my first 1200 posts or so. Plus more recent posts, well time flies, so I'm talking about last year. But I was just redirecting stuff as always and literally minutes later, all my locking posts of that day were gone. it was then when I found out a lot more was missing than those posts. Yeah, not everyone likes mods or me, I'm not sure as I still don't know who did it and why...

Anyhoo, two Homing Beacon posts, the beginning. I may have posted a bit here or there after that, but I didn't really stick around until I ventured into the Collecting Forum. Why Collecting of all places? Well, read my previous blog entry.

Zentar, the Collecting Mod at that time had just left and the Forum was a bit of a mess really. But she had started a Star Wars Lego thread and that was all I needed. I just came to the boards to talk to some fellow collectors, no more no less. Eventually I also checked out other Forums. And eventually I also started helping out a bit.

Especially in the Collecting Forum, one of the first things I did there was get an FJA stamp of approval for the SW Lego thread, so others could be redirected there and there wouldn't be dozens of threads talking about the same thing.

My urge to clean up and keep things organized got the better of me on the boards too, so I didn't stop there. My next project was an FJA Master Replicas thread. There ware dozens of those too, so it only made to sense to get one of the oldest ones, slap a stamp on it, and lock and redirect others.

Those two "projects" helped restore some order in the Collecting Forum. Spewey, I looked up to her because of the what she did and how she did it, locked the redundant topics and edited in the FJA. She also helped with other stuff, such as upgrading the Collecting thread directory to a new version and just keeping an eye on things in there, locking stuff we (Jedi Bebop, Repoort Enolc and yours truly) redirected, etc...

I also posted some links to existing threads in some others forums and it went on for quite a while. It was in January 2003 when I said to myself, wouldn't it be nice if I could edit the thread directory myself instead of having to bother someone in Feedback. So I went ahead and posted an application and forgot about it. Except for being able to edit the collecting thread directory, there wasn't really anything else that made me want to be a mod, the mods were taking care of it all quite nicely.

But some developments would prompt Pabawan to think about getting some additional mods before the summer. Of course, I didn't know any of this at that time, but I was able to read it when I was modded. The summer of 2003 was principal photography time for ROTS and Hyperspace was just around the corner and Pablo was going to cover it Down Under, so he wouldn't be able to help out much on the boards, which were going to be busier as well.

So Pablo and the mods back then talked about possible candidates and eventually narrowed it down to four. Ellcrys, Moose, Tosche and myself. "Job offers" were mailed after a couple more weeks and the four of us arrived in the mod forum the day after that. The reverse order of the posts was very confusing!

Joining us after a couple of weeks was Bonnie, she would take over from Pablo on the boards and of course do a lot of other stuff too, for various Lucas Online sites. So, a new admin, new mods and some old mods. Sure, we're only human, so there's bound to be a little agitation sooner or later, but we pretty much got along fine and the same people have been working together as a good team for over two years now.

That's about it, methinks. It was fun when I came here to talk about Star Wars Lego and it's fun now when I lock another "Episodes VII - IX?!" thread. *Shrugs* It's a hobby, a weird one, I'll give you that, and we're all crazy for doing it, the locking and the abuse, but it's still a hobby and I enjoy it. Yes, even the abuse, well, some of it anyway, because it's just too funny. And anyone reading Feedback will agree with me on that.