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Official Greg Discussion Archive


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tl;dr I put up a website where you can browse the original Official Greg Discussion topics at http://greg.thegreatarchives.com/. Please leave comments and suggestions for improvement!
 
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Gathered friends,
 
It's been a very long time. I'm sure that whoever is reading this will remember the official Greg discussion topics that ran for many years in the S&T forum. We collected literally thousands upon thousands of Q&A sessions with Greg Farshtey over the years, many of which were used to introduce new material into the canon. I actually used to run something called the "Farshtey Feed," a weekly digest that summarized the happenings in the OGD. Thanks to Greg's answers, we have a ton of interesting tidbits of lore floating around BS01, and even explanations for some otherwise very pesky inconsistencies in the story. People generally consider Greg's answers in these topics to be fully canon. Needless to say, a lot of people (like me!) would consider this information very valuable.

Unfortunately, all of it was permanently lost with the rest of the forums in 2013.
 
Well, almost.
 
Before the crash, a certain BZP member (a banned member, I believe, so I won't mention the name here) had actually saved the contents of the OGD topics in a series of text files. These are still available, by the way, through this topic.
 
Great! you say. They're not really gone! However, there are some shortcomings with the current format. These files are huge downloads which are very difficult to search and browse. The text is unformatted and intermixed with BBCode, which can make reading it a challenge, especially when dealing with quoted text. I know that the owner of the files would like to turn them into a searchable database at some indeterminate point in the future, but in the meantime, I think it would be nice to have a clean, browsable version of the original topics posted online. More importantly, I think there's a need for a safe, permanent place to put these topics back online, for two reasons: one, to give everyone easy access to the information, and two, so the editors on BS01 have a way to cite specific posts. I've noticed that the BS01 editors have not been able to link to specific OGD posts when citing facts -- sometimes they link to the Farshtey Feed (which I ran, and duplicated in my blog, which means that it was never deleted), and sometimes they give the date and time for a specific post. But there's never a way to click on a link and check the facts for yourself. Even worse, the editors have been very diligent about linking to specific posts in the newer "Chat with Greg Farshtey" topic (RIP), but now that Lego has ditched the Lego Message Boards, all of those links are completely broken.
 
Because of this, I recently developed an interest in restoring the OGD topics. The lost pages are extremely scanty at web.archive.org, so it's very lucky that we have the text backups.
 
So, I present:

Official Greg Discussion Archive
 
What I have done is put up a new website, greg.thegreatarchives.com, which contains all three of the OGD topics from BZPower. The formatting is NOT perfect right now (for example, spoiler tags simply show up as BBCode), but I plan on actively continuing to improve it. In the near future, I also plan to put up the entirety of the "Chat with Greg Farshtey" topic from the Lego Message Boards. Don't worry, I made a backup of my own.
 
Let me know what you think!
 
-Planetperson
 
EDIT Jun 22, 2017: The "Chat with Greg Farshtey" topic has been added to the site!
 
EDIT Jul 8, 2017: Fixed a lot of the BBCode markup issues in the BZPower topics. Quotes should not have gobbledygook around them anymore and should show up cleanly. Spoiler tags are now functional in both the BZPower topics and the LMB topic.

Edited by Planetperson
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Fantastic. We'll work on implementing this on BS01. Thank you so much!

 

 

This is great, thank you!

Did anyone bother saving his responses from the Lego.com message boards? I wish I had.   :embarrassed:

There are archive.org backups of the entire thread, but BS01 still needs to replace the old LEGO.com links with archive.org links.

Edited by Infrared
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Really great to have this resource, thanks so much!

 

Do you have any plans to implement a search feature? It'd help a lot with digging out specific quotes.

believe victims. its actually not that hard, and youd look kind of bad if you were to, say, side with an abuser because theyre your friend

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Thanks for the feedback everyone.  ^_^

 

This is great, thank you!

Did anyone bother saving his responses from the Lego.com message boards? I wish I had.  :embarrassed:

 

I downloaded the HTML pages back in March, but like Infrared said, I think the BS01 staff made sure that all of it was archived on web.archive.org.

 

Really great to have this resource, thanks so much!

 

Do you have any plans to implement a search feature? It'd help a lot with digging out specific quotes.

 

I will definitely think about it! I think the first items on my agenda are to get the LMB up, and then to fix the broken formatting in the BZP topics.

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Someone who wants to be really awesome should troll through the Lego Message Boards archives and make a 'Farshtey Feed'-esque compilation of all the good tidbits (God knows how many pages the actual LMB thread was). Then when it's all done you'll be rewarded by having people moan and whine about all the post-mortem canonizations and retcons they might have missed before.

Edited by TheSkeletonMan939
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Update: I've cleaned up a lot of the broken BBCode markup in the BZPower topics. Quote boxes in particular should look much cleaner now. I've also made spoiler tags functional in the BZPower and LMB topics. If anyone spots any other problematic BBCode, please let me know!

 

As suggested, I think I'll work on adding a search feature next.

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