The Official Star Wars Blog is now on temporary hiatus as the Lucas Online team continues to explore new directions for StarWars.com. New authors, new articles, and new points of view are in the works for the Blog that will cover the entire Star Wars experience. As with all changes undertaken on the website, we are closely examining feedback from past surveys and user actions on the site, and we want to hear from you. Feel free to let us know in the comments what you’d like to see the Official Star Wars Blog become.
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It would be desirable to see about arts, comics, books and games!
An online ‘Zine would be killer… have everything, fan art, fiction, photos, toys, reviews, news, & more!
I liked them the way they were. I also suggest bringing back the message boards.
More movie-related news, behind the scenes stuff, interviews, perhaps less nerdy stuff which we can see on thousands so-called geeks blogs
keep movin’ guys
I would like to see more original fiction and interviews with favorite authors.
I second news and behind the scenes things, things i can”t get anywhere else. By the time you’ve posted something cool you found on the net, i’ve seen it and so have most of your readerbase. And perhaps occasionally have fiction, short EU things? Which is more zine-y but a few elements of that would be cool. Fan things sent directly to you, like perhaps as part of a contest (with prizes!) would be cool.
As a general suggestion, I’d like to see balanced coverage of the entire Star Wars Saga, as opposed to coverage slanted towards the Original Trilogy. Celebrity half-fans/prequel-bashers have no place here, as their love of ANH and ESB is woefully overshadowed by the chronic hatred they direct at the Prequels. Not only does it seem like bizarre self-loathing to see an official Lucasfilm entity seemingly encouraging this sort of attitude, but it has been and is very destructive to the fandom. Thanks for listening!
more blog thats why i come here most of the time exept when i come to watch girly vader and the others
[...] Read the official announcement here. [...]
The Star Wars website just isn;t interesting anymore since the Hyperspace content was no longer available. You guys should just do a free website with no memberships and just add that content you used to. bantha tracks, a zine all of it.
I am not interested in the official SW Facebook or Twitter. it seems you guys think that is a good replacement for what Hyperspace was and it isn’t. I don’t even come here anymore, to see what? Pages about the CW and info pages on the movies? How many times can a fan read those before being bored to death.
You guys closed the blogs, stopped any interactions here at all from fans, left links to Facebook and twitter and washed your hands of everything. I joined in 2002 I think or somewhere there abouts and am rather disappointed in everything SW dot com has done since ending Hyperspace memberships. Again the Hyperspace memberships should be FREE, blogging should be free and anything for fans to do should be free here since there aren;t any behind the scenes sneak peeks to seel for movie releases.
Examine the art world more – Unique works in Illustration, Design, Sculpture etc pertaining to the genre.
I would like to see more readable things like comics and fun videos. quizzes would be a good challenge too.
I don’t come here often either anymore. Since cancelling the store and hyperspace I only check the blog’s rss-feed. Other than that I just don’t feel like it’s worth it.
Although this is the blog, it would be cool if you brought back the old games you had and the quizzes too.
i come here every day and the things i really look for are stuff on the vid games, novels, toys etc.
I’m with those other guys. I came all the time when there were message boards, lots of blogs, a community and all that. Nothing you get anymore really feels exclusive! You’ve got a cool look but lost all the cool content.
I’d like to see more coverage of collecting and nostalgia both on the Blog and the main site. There was a lot of great content that used to be located in the vault/collecting part of the website that is sadly gone.
I think I speak for a lot of fans that you should focus on the COMPLETE Star Wars universe and not just the movies. The EU is large and a lot of fans are into that. All 6 movies are HOLY, but the EU is not referenced enough on this site.
I would love to see new original fiction, source articles, and reprints of original fiction and source articles from ye olden days. Plus, whatever happened to the comic strips? I miss them all!!
The Blog was fine, but the latest official site is not quite that I’m looking for. I would like to see old news archives, with all articles. Kessel Mines were great, Hyperspace fiction was very interesting. I liked very much Question & Anwser section, and I miss it very much. I really wish to reestablish message board, but it will be difficult to rebuild that what it was.
I hope more behind the scenes come soon enough!
On hiatus on May the 4th?! We have so many Star Wars fans at our office we put together our own Star Wars day blog and we wanted to share, it’s a photo blog, with animals!
http://www.foundanimals.org/blog/star-wars-day-2012/
Happy Star Wars Day!
The starwars.com website has not been the same since the forums and hyperspace closed down the least few years. I rarely come here like I use to and it’s not a cool as it once was. Also the great clone wars episode guides that where once there are all gone. Now all the content and other stuff is re directed to Wookiepedia and fan sites. Not at all like it use to be. And all the old news articles are all gone. Everything is now on Facebook or Twitter or a few news articles on the website. Please give us back starwars.com the way it use to be. And please bring back hyperspace , the forums and the blogs.
Also I would like to see more behind the scenes articles , more clone wars stuff. And more short EU story’s and more artwortk and free stuff. And maybe a subscription service with additional content.
I used to enjoy browsing the history of star wars, and news about upcoming events. The site used to feel more like a place for fans to explore topics in the past. Today, I hardly ever visit. The store is gone (while. Overpriced, some items were unique), a great deal of the history is gone. News seems more current, and more personal to the fans on other sites. Bring back the archives, and continue to add to them. Create more content about what is being worked on today.
I gotta admit I’m not a fan of this new web direction at LFL. What bothers me the most is all the history that has been lost with the deletion of older content.
That and the deletion of several people from the payroll has made it a rather bland place to visit.
I would love to see more clone wars stuff. And maybe more stuff about Ahsoka would be awesome!!!
I really miss all the collectible and nostalgia stuff, that was the only reason I visited this site. While I was reading about collectibles I snapped up news about Clone Wars and other stuff I normaly wouldn’t be so interested in. So now I’m totally out of the loop regarding new SW news and I almost never visit this site anymore, wont take long before I stop visiting completely. At least not until more about Kenner and prop and poster articles are being published again.
I feel like the site is headed in the wrong direction. At one time, I used to check the site often. At this point, I rarely visit and when I do, I usually go straight to the Blog. I’d like to see more coverage of collecting and nostalgia both on the Blog and the main site. There was a lot of great content that used to be located in the Vault area of the site that is sadly gone. That content should be restored and expanded.
I have to echo Dustin’s comments. I have been coming to this site for over a decade and I feel the most recent changes have made it a terrible experience for the fan community. Though I love the soundboards much of the content that I came to this site for is now lost.
This site used to be touted as a place that allowed for a user interactive piece. Now it seems as if the site just wants to “push” content and very limited content at that.
I am also disappointed in some of the changes most recently in the talent department… Please bring back the fun experience that we expect from Star Wars. I understand the need to “keep it fresh” but to make it worse than it was before that should be unacceptable.
What about content in other languages than English? After all, the universe is too big for just one language;)
If you need help in portuguese, here I am;)
Anyway, thanks for bringing us Star Wars.com and May the Force be with you … always!
Goodbye Bonniegrrl!
What will follow?
I echo a lot of what has already been stated. It needs real and timely content. Behind the scenes, fun contests, balance between the original and prequel trilogy, staff interviews and profiles, forums. Hyperspace, bring it back in come capacity, so fans feel involved or proud to be a member again. Twitter is useless and Facebook is only a couple steps above that. Definitely keep an achive of older entries. The mass fanbase is being slowly lost and disenchanted with the direction the company has taken of recent years. Someone is completely out of touch with fan reality and listening too much to mumbo-jumbo yes men (people). You see this all the time and they still scratch thier heads when profit and interest falls. Pity.
I honestly haven’t visited StarWars.com since the forums closed. I’ve had no interest. The forums kept me checking in on the site, but since they’re gone, well.. I just don’t make it over here. The only thing that brought me to this blog post in the first place was hearing that Bonnie was no longer at Lucasfilm.
On-site fan interaction was key. Taking it off-site with Twitter and Facebook was well-intentioned, but ultimately boring. Twitter and Facebook are flooded with other content and Star Wars is just one voice in a million on third-party sites. Sure, it’s an essential element of the community, and it’s important…
But it’s kind of strange. Twitter and Facebook should be used as tools to draw people to the community on one’s own website, not the other way around. StarWars.com kicked everyone out of its own house and told us to find it in the pub down the street instead. It’s less personal and less fun. It was nice to have the community gathered in one place, without the other noise found on Facebook and Twitter. I haven’t interacted with StarWars.com even once on Facebook and Twitter — not as an act of faux defiance, but because it’s simply not appealing.
I hope that StarWars.com finds its voice and finds a way to earn back their online community. I understand the need to move forward. But I, for one, miss the way it was.
[...] currently have a message on the home page explaining the [...]
A re-vamp and reinstall of the message boards would be great. More community involvement and less restrictiveness that prevents discussion. Stick to the Ts & Cs rather than leaving it up to the interpretation of volunteers that may be irritated simply by reading the same stuff online too much.
Totally disagree with NerdRage42. Star Wars will always go on. We are here for Star Wars and our SW community, not corporate politics.
As a Star Wars fan and collector who maintained my Star Wars interest consistently throughout “the dark years” of the late 80s and early 90s up till the present, I understand the importance of keeping one’s Star Wars interest fresh. A key component of this is creating opportunities for community and allowing fans a forum to explore different aspects of the Star Wars universe, whether it be information about making the films or obscure product lines that collectors may not know about. I never come to starwars.com to read press releases or promo pieces for new projects. I like reading about people’s experiences with collecting, building cool Star Wars craft items, and getting an international perspective on the Star Wars phenomenon. There have been some great pieces on unreleased or very rare Star Wars products from the 70s and 80s, and I find myself coming back to look at those things again and again for research or just to get excited about what’s out there. If LFL wants to maintain Star Wars interest for the long term, it should nurture forums for fans to generate content, but it should also use its own staff to tap into source material about collecting and the making of the films to which the public does not have access.
Personally, I’m not sure what direction you guys are trying to take with the official Star Wars website anymore. Or anything else “officially” Star Wars, either. I’ve heard some interesting situations arise lately (as hinted in the comments above), and I’m still upset over changes that have been made over the last few years.
I don’t care for for the official Twitter and Facebook. It doesn’t promote interaction with fans, and it doesn’t do more than give me 150 character advertisements for things I don’t care about. I miss Bantha Tracks. I miss the Forums. I miss commenting on Blogs. I miss the people that really make this fandom what it is – a family.
Facebook and Twitter allow us to connect on the most basic and simplistic level of life – and there’s no depth to the content. Spread out your interests, listen to the fans, reach back to the things that worked before and improve upon those before you start going off into some new territory simply because everyone else is doing it.
By changing things, I doubt that you’re attracting more people than you’re turning away.
I agree with many of the comments here that the site should have a discussion board or similar interactive feature rather than directing fans to other social media websites. Lucas Films should use the fb and twitter accounts to attract fans back to the site.
A prime example of a successful site with an interactive experience would be Pottermore. That being said, it has been so successful that Sony was not and still is not prepared for the traffic and so it’s still unfinished. But Lucas Films can learn from that example and do it differently in a more manageable way.
Another suggestion would be to incorporate some of the features of social media sites that make them so popular. User accounts with customizable dashboards to pin articles, topics, etc. of interest. The ability to block other users so that the experience is self maintaining much like the ability to select friends on social media sites.
All in all, I think to get the website statistics and brand messaging Lucas Films is looking for, there has to be games, information like the database, unique and exclusive content, original merchandise only available at the official site and, most importantly, an interactive experience especially with authors, actors, and other contributors to the Star Wars universe.
My two cents.
Pelase make the videos on the site HTML5 so we can watch them on our iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod, etc.). Also, there should be more exclusive items/stories/content on the site, rather than so much linking to other sites.
Just thought I’d share this, which I came across recently. It’s an ikea-style manual for constructing a lightsaber, using manipulated figures from the ikea-manuals recreating Luke’s training with Yoda, getting his hand cut off, making a new lightsaber and getting the thumbs-up from force-ghost Ben and Yoda. Why it’s on webfail.at, I don’t know, because it’s all win:
http://de.webfail.at/image/bauanleitung-fuer-ein-lichtschwert-win-bild.html
I’d like to see something on the EU books written by authors for the upcoming books in the future.
George Lucas, I’m 37 years old and til this day Star Wars changed me and my brothers life when we had saw Return of the Jedi when we were kids. I don’t care what nobody say’s I pray to God that you will make some more Star Wars movies to add to the already greatest saga in the history of films. If I had 1 dying wish it would be to maybe see at least 3 more new Star Wars films.
My sad belief is that Lucasfilm isn’t willing to do what’s necessary to publish a decent blog… not from a content standpoint nor from a staffing standpoint. In order for a blog to be worth visiting, it’s got to be enjoyable. There has to be an edge to it. It must exist to inform and entertain. You can’t just put something out there to feed the money train. Prepackaged, lawyer-approved product advertisements won’t fly. Nobody’s going to read the thing if it’s all butterflies and rainbows, or links to the latest big-ticket collectibles. If your blogger is afraid to post compelling content because it might offend someone, or has to go through seven layers of approval, the content will be stale and unappealing. But that’s the level of control you guys likely want, which is why the blog is awful.
If it were me and I really wanted the official Star Wars blog to be a viable entity, I’d switch to a tumblr model. One or two photos. Quick synopsis. Links to expanded content. Encourage sharing. Tag posts from other providers. Given that you guys have access to limitless content and can break news at will, you could really build something special. Staffing-wise, I’d hire experts from multiple specialties. A jack-of-all-trades can’t generate anything but pedestrian content.
If you provide anything short of a cutting-edge, entertaining, bold product… then you’ll already be less interesting than dozens of other freely available resources Star Wars fans currently utilize. Fans in the wild already do it better. And if that’s the case, you shouldn’t bother at all.
Where to start? Well, to give it to you straight, this was the site I checked on a daily basis. Became a Hyperspace member soon after, Revenge of the Sith was released in theaters. Created my Blogger Account in 2006 and made my first post.
The Blogosphere became my escape from reality. This was something I really needed in my life at that point in time. Made so many friends, not just acquaintances, Real bonding relationships. If it wasn’t for this site (back then), we would have never met each other, met up at Conventions/Celebrations, and the ultimate gathering: The Bloggers Meet and Greet at CIV in California.
Let me also include, that if it wasn’t for Hyperspace/Blogging, I would have never had the privilege/honor to come into contact with such LFL artists as: Steve Anderson, Joe Corroney (just to name a few). Nor would I have had the chance/opportunity to meet a fantastically talented writer for LFL, Abel Pena`. To this very day I still have contact with Mr. Anderson. He has been a wonderful friend and mentor, if you will. Since CIV, he has bestowed on me a great honor by asking me to not only Title, but caption his Celebration pieces for Star Wars.
So, in closing…Please bring Hyperspace/Blogging back to the Fans! Thank You ~O~ VA2
More videos and commentaries. We like to know what’s up and coming from the ranch and the Lucas offices. Both from our favorite cast and crew behind the scenes!
Also, you guys really should keep your FB and youtube channel more updated. When there’s a new Clone Wars, let us know on FB. IF there’s a preview, put it on youtube. Etc.
Whatever new direction it takes, breaks in the action like this are so damaging and sub-par. It would seem like a transition could be handled without a giant hiatus like this. You really should have kept the blog going while figuring out your next move instead of shuttering things like this. It just drives people away and gets them used to never coming here. Even if you wanted to clean house and dump whoever was doing the blog, some interim staff should be retained to keep even minimal amounts of fresh material going until you are ready to unveil whatever new incarnation you build. Could you imagine a television network or radio station just putting up a test pattern for months while scratching their heads over a relaunch? The official Star Wars sites should be better than this.
I am a fan of the clone wars but I love the 1977,1980,1983,1997,2001,and 2005 starwars
I agree with Joe , George has grossed billions and billions of dollars. I myself have both the movies countless times. first it was the thx remastered. then it was the special edition. then the prequels came out. then the dvd box set. then the blu ray. not to mention all the clone wars dvds . and of course we’ve all seen the movies in theaters dozens of times. paying for a hyperspace account is greedy. btw , i have all the xbox games too. i mean how much money di i have to spend before i get rewarded? just wondering
I’m sorry to see this blog on hiatus, but wanted to share my (and my camera’s) experience at Star Wars Weekends at Disney’s Hollywood Studios this weekend. If you’re interested, you can read about that (and see some portraits of the characters I made while there) at: http://www.carnolddesigns.com/?p=2041
Thanks!