Sagan 4 Forum (partially found internet forum centred around creating "Sagan 4" internet media; 2007-2017)

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Status: Partially Found

The Sagan 4 forum (2007-2017) was an internet forum which was used to discuss and create content for Sagan 4, a collaborative speculative evolution worldbuilding project set on a hypothetical alien world. The original website was shut down in 2017, and while backups of the front page blog and the wiki were recovered, the forum was not. A backup of the forum was made by the site's original sysadmin, LadyM, and later posted publicly on the Speculative Evolution forum, but the download link for said backup has since been deleted and no copies are known to still exist.

Content

The forum contained numerous discussion threads and content submissions created by Sagan 4's members, including information on and decisions made about the anatomy and biology of various organisms, descriptions and artwork of cut and rejected species, and numerous contests and polls. It also contained the contents of a number of worldbuilding projects unrelated to Sagan 4, which were hosted on a dedicated worldbuilding subforum. Some of the forum's content was saved by forum members and reposted to the current Sagan 4 forum, which was created in 2020.

The "Forum Climate" subforum contained discussions and announcements about the forum itself. The closure of the Sagan 4 forum was also announced on this board.

The "Tidepool" subforum contained discussion about things not directly related to Sagan 4. It also contained an "Art" subforum where members would post their artwork and a "Worldbuilders" subforum which contained links to and the contents of numerous unrelated worldbuilding projects.

The "Forum Nucleus" was a hidden board only accessible to Sagan 4 staff, where testing, moderation, and future plans were discussed. It has one subforum, the "Extinction Area", which served as the forum's trash bin.

The "Sagan 4 General" subforum contained most discussion about Sagan 4 itself and Sagan 4 fan content. It also had two subforums: "Events", which contained announcements of contests, awards, and challenges both official and member-hosted, and "News", which contained announcements about Sagan 4 as a project, such as anniversaries, new staff, map updates, and extinction events.

The "Organism Submission" subforum was where Sagan 4's contributors would post new species to be added to the project so that they could be reviewed for quality and accuracy. It had a single subforum, the "Submission Graveyard", where the submission discussion threads would be moved to after they were either approved or rejected.

The "Sagan 4 Science" subforum was used to discuss Sagan 4 as a whole from a scientific perspective. It was often used to elaborate on the anatomy and biochemistry of organisms with lacking descriptions and to work on filling out biomes. It had three subforums: "Biome Adoption", which was used to discuss the process of "adopting" a biome with very few species native to it; "Food Webs", which was used for the creation and discussion of food webs and competition between species; and "Taxonomy", which was used to discuss the scientific classification of Sagan 4 organisms.

Another subforum is known to have existed which was home to the tribal game. Its exact name is lost, and it was hidden from public view when its contents were removed from canon. The tribal game itself is entirely lost apart from some of the artwork made for it (which was preserved on the Sagan 4 Wiki following its discovery).

Closure

On February 9th, 2017, it was announced that Sagan 4 would be moving to a new home and the website would be shutting down. Officially, this was said to be because LadyM was leaving the project, but unbeknownst to most of the Sagan 4 community at the time, the web hosting service that LadyM had been paying for was shutting down.

Preservation and Discoveries

A small portion of the sagan 4 forum can be viewed on the Wayback Machine, but the vast majority of content was never archived. Assuming that the backup which is known to have existed is found, much of the forum's content will remain lost, as roughly a year before the site shut down, thousands of threads discussing Sagan 4 submissions as they were made, including all traces of an unknown amount of rejected content, were deleted to save space.

In May 2024, it was discovered that some parts of the Sagan 4 forum, including numerous threads that were not archived on the Wayback Machine, were preserved by Common Crawl. An attempt to retrieve this data is still ongoing as of May 17th.

Additional Theories

LadyM has stated that she sent all the files she had to Hydromancerx, and the dropbox link was later posted publicly. It's still possible that at least one person downloaded the forum files and still has them, however thus far this has not panned out with anyone known to have downloaded other Sagan 4 backups from the time.

As the Sagan 4 forum shut down as a result of the closure of its web host, there is a slim chance that the data still exists on the physical drives that were used. Attempts to contact the owner of the company have failed thus far.