Hello, all. I just signed up here at the Star Trek BBS a few days ago. But I know quite a few of you from back in the day at the old PsiPsi message board. Some of you I still see on Facebook and what not. I have a huge gap in my keeping up with the Star Trek lit community from whenever I drifted away from the boards “back then” to a few years back when I realized the old boards were gone and things had changed. I’m trying to remember if I was a member here back in those early years but the various message boards from back them are kind of blurry in my foggy memories (aside from PsiPhi, which I remember for it’s very distinctive look). I tried to search for my own name here and didn’t find any old posts. I did a search for “PsiPhi” here and found that someone has posted a link to a copy of part of the old site (an interview with Marco Palmieri about the then upcoming Deep Space Nine relaunch) at the Internet Archive website. That got me curious to see if any of the old Message Board is also saved there. All I could find was a few scattered copies of the page, the earliest from 2000. The links to the messages don’t work, so all you can see are the thread names and the names of those posting messages, but I have to say that it sure brings back memories looking over the names. (I found myself asking something about the Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar series which must have just been about to being since the first calendar was for 2001. Margaret Clark responded, but, again, I can’t read now what was said.) http://web.archive.org/web/20001208225300/http://psiphi.org/book-bbs/get/startrek.html Who all here goes back to those days? And does anyone know what became of the regulars who are not here? (I’m assuming that some have inevitably passed on. And that others simply moved on to other interests.) And can anyone fill me in on the history of the Trek lit message boards? It appears from looking through the older messages here that the start of this board overlapped with the last years of the PsiPhi one as there are messages here talking about stuff going on over there. When did David Henderson pull the plug on PsiPhi (and why, if reason was given at the time)? And wasn’t there another Star Trek lit message board back in the day that was around at the same time as PsiPhi? I seem to recall keeping up with two sites back then, PsiPhi and another one. I can’t remember if it was this one here or another now long defunct one. (Did there used to be one on America Online, perhaps?) Anyway, I’ve been reading Trek books again of late. Some I’ve read over the past year plus have been the first two Eugenics Wars novels, the Crucible trilogy, “From History’s Shadow”, “The Last Best Hope“, “Desperate Hours”, and “Drastic Measures“. I just started reading the third Discovery novel, “Fear Itself“. Star Trek nonfiction I’ve read over the same period have been the two “Fifty-Year Mission” books by Gross and Martin, “Leonard” by Shatner, “Star Trek: Lost Scenes” by Tilotta, “The Art of John Eaves”, “These Are the Voyages: Gene Roddenberry in the 1970s” volume one by Cushman, and reread “The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay” by Ellison. I look forward to catching up with you guys and talking some Star Trek books talk again after all these years of me being pretty much away from it. David Young Brandon, Florida
I am not sure whether David Henderson is still with us; I know he was struggling with serious health issues back in the mid-aughts, and that he wasn't able to keep up with the site as he once did. I have quite a few fond memories of lurking at PsiPhi as a teenager, but never got around to posting there. Did you post there as David Young? Did you ever post here before? Back then, I was (briefly) Max_Warp, then ShimmeringNebula from 2001 onward until changing my name to this a few years back. Not many of us are still around 20 years later... I envy you in your TrekLit catch-up. There's a lot of good stuff ahead for you! For what it's worth, I liked Fear Itself as an early-series novel, and absolutely love the Crucible series despite their somewhat uneven reputation here (and a clunker of an ending in The Fire and the Rose). Hope you're here to stay!
Maybe it was the one on the official Simon&Schuster website you are thinking about? That is where I started my Treklit message-boarding before moving here. Marco used to post there, as did some of the authors. I used to lurk on PsiPhi but don't think I ever got an account on that one.
David Henderson is still around. I don’t know if he still reads the books anymore, but he has a personal Facebook page that’s active. i don’t know exactly when Psi Phi formally went offline, but participation in the message board went way down in the second half of the 2000s; I remember my own visits declining just because no one was posting anymore.
Yes David Henderson is still around. He was quite active in the Star Trek Timeliners group during the first two seasons of Discovery, helping figure out all the chronological details we could glean.
I posted occasionally on PsiPhi, back in the day. As you can see from my signature, I'm still pretty active!
I was also pretty active (I used "SCMoll" as a handle then, I think, or maybe just my real name). Some participants I am facebook friends with, like Scavenger (I think), ATimson, Steve Roby. Many others are active on fb. I do wish we could read those old posts. It's a shame the Wayback Machine didn't capture them. I actually sent you a facebook friend request a few weeks ago, David, because I realized I now live in the same town as you! I don't know if you remember me though.
I used to post on PsiPhi back in the day too; I first started visiting the site back in early '95 (right around the time when Voyager was getting ready to launch and right after Star Trek: Generations had been released) back during my senior year of high school, so tons of fond memories of that site. I remember eagerly downloading (via searing-hot 56K dial-up modem speeds) all the latest DS9 and VOY episode-promos from Vidiot's site via PsiPhi (which sometimes took up to half an hour for one 30-second promo ), although a short while later my university's ethernet was way faster than when I did it at home. Ah...memories.
I miss some of those conversations, but I will never miss the formatting. Scrolling beats click-through any day for me. Welcome to the TrekBBS, David!
Psi Phi was where I mainly posted before joining TrekBBS. I was a regular poster over there from 1996 to 2000. Depending on when we're talking about, they were good times and interesting times on Psi Phi. It became a tight-knit community for a while. We did a lot of fan-fiction too at one point. I joined TrekBBS after the board was first mentioned over there in 1999.
I don’t know. As I said, I tried a search here for my name and also for youngtrek and nothing came up. So, if I ever did, those messages don’t seem to still be saved here. I think I read in a message here about a site crash/restart at some point years ago. Perhaps anything I posted here was prior to that. I’ve got a few of the old gang as Facebook friends (which is pretty much the way just about all of my online communication went after the birth of the modern social networking platforms. I used to be big into Yahoo groups, as well, but now am only actively involved in one or two. Hey! That reminds me, that was another big thing at the time I was most active on PsiPhi. There was a Star Trek books Yahoo group a lot of the same group were active on at the time, too, wasn’t there? I’m liking Fear Itself, so far, although I’m only a couple chapters into it. I liked Desperate Hours well enough but I’m sure that I would have liked it better if I’d read it when it first came out rather than after watching season two of the show which gave a very different portrayal of Captain Pike and also of Burnham and Spock’s prior relationship. I loved Drastic Measures! As seems to be the general case as far as I can tell via comments my feelings seem to mirror those for the most part regarding the Crucible trilogy. I loved the first two books (McCoy and Spock) and merely thought the third (Kirk) was okay. I honestly don’t recall off the top of my head what you must be referring to in regards to the Spock installment. Question: I’m posting this from my phone (Safari browser accessing the BBS website). I see a bunch of buttons above the little window that I’m writing this in. Are any of those buttons an easier way to quote the person’s prior text that in replying to and to break it up into smaller chunks rather than me having to do a lot of cutting and pasting of the “QUOTE=“ stuff?
Hi. I don’t know. I can’t recall using the Simon and Schuster message boards but it’s possible that I just don’t remember. Are they still online? If not, are copies of the old message board there archived at Internet Archive like a few of the PsiPhi ones?
Yes, David Henderson is one of my Facebook friends, as are Allyn Gibson, Alex Rosenzweig, Dave Galanter, Dayton Ward, Keith DeCandido, Rigel Ailur, Robert Greenberger, and Terri Osborne. I wonder if anyone knows the current status of Jackie Bundy, Jim McCain, and Baerbel Haddrell? Or Steve Roby (although I think I saw some posts of his here when I was searching for posts about the old PsiPhi board?
You dedicated a book to davidh, if I recall correctly. I loved psiphi and still correspond with David via facebook. Two Trek book releases a month, like clockwork. Those were the days. (I actually think I found it first through the Voyager news & rumors site)
Not really, but you can highlight any individual sentence or paragraph in a post and get a popup mini-menu letting you quote it or add it to multiquote. Though I'm not sure if it would be available in that particular device and browser.
I used to visit the site when the ds9 actors and Marco Palmieri and other Star trek book writers posted there when ds9 was still on tv .And lurking there to read about book news.
So, to see one’s signature, I have to click on his or her name, then click on Profile, then click on Information? (Seems like a lot of steps to have to take.)
Whoops! I must not have recognized your name. I just accepted it. I tend to be a bit more cautious with my Facebook friends because I do also post pics of my kids there sometimes. Plus, looking through my list of Facebook friends, it sometimes takes me awhile to remember which area of my life they fall into: family, childhood friends, high school friends, comic book shop from back in the day friends, comic book online lists/groups friends, Star Trek books online lists/groups friends, friends from various churches I’ve attended over the years, friends from job #1, friends from job #2, etc... :-)
PsiPhi (and the Star Trek books Yahoo Group) were how I ended up attending Shore Leave way back in 2003 (and getting to meet several of you at least once in actual person!) :-)