Connecting the Website and the Forums

[extherian]

My point in suggesting this on the Discord is that the Orion's Arm community isn't a fraction as active as it was in the early days of the project...

You know, I'm not sure that's true. There are numerous active contributors, and many new and amended articles being posted all the time. The Extended World Classification System, the Colonisation before the First Federation list and the Garden Planets list are all very large and complex contributions on a scale that we rarely attempted in the old days, and include details that require far-reaching amendments to multiple other articles at the same time. Not to mention the on-going Duxed, Macrystis, Archsaur Ring, Proxima, Kammerer, Stevocations, Jirayaka, Tohul, Kepler-9, Campbell Stations articles...

The active editors have rarely been so busy, and the site is being revised with a lot of new content that various contributors are providing. And the new front page is nearly ready. So something's going on, even if it isn't immediately apparent.

Not in terms of narrative development, though, which I should have specified. Most of the 'plot' of Orion's Arm, the rise and fall of its empires, and the whys and wherefores of the way things unfolded was written by Anders Sandberg. His assumptions about the setting are long obsolete, like the idea of modosophonts fighting in the Version War, or indeed that the Version War was even a significant event at all and not the Archai equivalent of farmers castrating one another's cattle.

On top of that, there are numerous peripheral empires like the Laughter Hegemony, Perseus Princes and the Arion Ascendancy which haven't been touched or built on since around 2005 or so. We have more planets and well-developed star systems than ever, but historical development has ground to a halt. This kind of outdated material was how I got many of my erroneous views on the setting from in the first place. For example, this article by Steven Inniss depicts high tech societies as still being managed by sentient AI rather than vots, and that such AI 'may have agendas of their own' and implies that this threatens the stability of such societies. With the use of vots, I doubt that this is an issue anymore. 

I've considered attempting to update some of this older material, but in some cases I'd have to update multiple articles simultaneously. For example, the Restored Ambi Limis isn't the only polity in the Perseus Rift; there's 1513, the Celerin Volume, the Ulysses Network, the Hyperionites, The Blackbody Cluster, and Sweetlight. How can I write about the relationship between the Restored Ambi Limis and its neighbours when I'd have to write these neighbours from scratch as well?

Perhaps this is unrelated to how many contributors we have. But the pulpy sci-fi vibe that M. Alan Kazlev used to depict the setting is considered non-canon by the community, and yet no one seems interested in replacing the many articles that he used to push this perspective.