FX-Sabers.com – Forums, AI, and a Guy Named Novastar
This post covers the custom lightsaber-building world, specifically back around 2009, and how it makes me feel about knowledge, learning, and community today.
Rewind to 2009
It was 2009 and near the start of my freshman year of high school. Twilight was in theaters and Guitar Hero was still huge. Coming back from summer I had a lot on my mind. Mainly my cousin Zach's Master Replicas Darth Vader lightsaber that he'd showed off all summer. I couldn't get over it. Here we were, 30 years after Star Wars' release. It was the future, lightsabers existed. Zach had one, I did not.
My dad had this system where if we really wanted to purchase something, we'd have to research it and put together a pitch to present. By the time school started, I was deep in the research phase. It was during this time that me and my Dell OptiPlex GX50 found our way onto FX-Sabers.com.
Started in 2005, FX-Sabers was, and still is, a site where lightsaber enthusiasts and hobbyists get together. It was built around Force FX lightsabers, the light-up replicas like the one my cousin had. Over time, it grew into a hub for the wider custom saber scene. Many of the lightsabers themselves were built out of PVC pipe and a bunch of electrical switches.
I remember this being an early interaction with an online forum for me. The peaks of Bebo and MySpace had come and gone, Facebook was making its way onto the scene, but a space to chat with total strangers? That was still foreign. People with cool names like Novastar and Jango Fett had racked up the most posts. Intimidated, but undeterred, I signed up. I was going to build a lightsaber.
Finding Community Online
Finding FX-Sabers was a huge discovery. The site's forum had subtopics for everything you could imagine. From galleries of other people's custom builds to open source repositories for sound effects and electrical chip configurations. I started with what was called the Jedi Temple, in the Padawan's Training Room. Here, I found a lot of useful information to get started. I was also introduced to some of the main people holding it down for custom saber making, like Novastar. I asked them questions, lots of questions.
I got to learning the important fundamentals of lightsabers: hilt design, blade electronics, sound boards, power supplies – not to mention crucial features like flash-on-clash, blade flicker, ignition, and color. This was also my introduction to the idea of Greebles. I cannot overstate the magic of what it felt like to find this world. People comparing the aesthetics of an Obi-Wan Episode II blue vs. an Obi-Wan Episode IV blue – and having the technology and know-how to replicate either. I had stumbled upon a great community and I wanted to be part of it.
Building a Custom Saber
I used Custom Saber Shop's MHS (Modular Hilt System), a program built to let you design a hilt using a bunch of different components. You could select switch types, speakers, pommels and sound boards, all within their application. Check out this video tutorial – it's the most 2000s thing I've seen in a while.
Once I landed on a design, I ordered the parts. Here's what it looked like when they arrived:
I learned to solder in shop class, and was excited to apply that here.
Video: Lightsaber show and tell.
Public Forums in Trouble
I've been thinking about this experience with FX-Sabers for a while now. I think because I've watched the process of research become more lonely, and I think something important is being lost in today's AI era. Look no further than the rise and fall of Stack Overflow to realize there's been a dramatic shift in how knowledge and advice is sought and acquired. I am not the best person to articulate this change, but I have experienced it first hand. When I think about people like Novastar that were out there, actually doing this stuff and writing about it, what that did for my motivation, curiosity, and dedication, I'm disheartened to think how things might change.
I made my lightsaber for me, don't get me wrong, but I shared my experience back with the internet because I wanted to impress Novastar. That's the mechanism. That's where we're trespassing. Beyond the complaint that today's a more solitary vibe, there's a slow burn degradation of knowledge generating ecosystems happening. The important thing I'd argue: is that forums don't just host knowledge, they generate it – in that fertile interaction between novices asking questions and experts debating the answers. When you create an avenue with less friction than asking questions on the internet, you remove those novice interactions, and then you remove the human part at work generating more knowledge, and you do yourself and the world a disservice.
Consider for a moment the open-source sound repositories from FX-Sabers, people using the forum as a commons, where they gave away hard-won knowledge for free to strangers. Who's making that stuff if no one uses the platforms anymore? How does it feel to know the public commons is being hoovered up and recycled for a price by AI? It's a problem open source has been grappling with for some time, but in the case of forums, at a certain point, the replacement was trained on the thing it’s replacing, so when the original goes down, so does the replacement. How can that be a sustainable business model?
Lastly, it was my experience with FX-Sabers, and it's been my experience since, that these communities are a place where taste is created. Not all answers were simple facts. The Episode II blue vs Episode IV blue argument was won by votes, and it drove which LEDs were produced more that year. Again, it's super important that we protect this relationship between learners, experts, and debate.
This has all been discussed a lot. See: Sherry Turkle of MIT, Maggie Appleton of her blog, James Vincent of The Verge, or Cory Doctorow of Enshitification. Or if you want to get more academic: Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms. Many point to the problem, and some provide some solutions. So let's look at how to help.
Lessons to Apply (How to Use AI, Without Destroying Forums)
To be transparent, I use AI a ton, and it's been clear to me for the most part that the positives of this technology outweigh the negatives. But I think it's important, as it is with any technology to flag issues as we go, and try to prevent them where we can. So as we progress into this AI age, here are some ideas for how to keep forums healthy.
Learn from your LLM, but confirm with experts. – I'm a contributor to work with the Academy Software Foundation, and I do a fair amount of extracurricular learning with AI models to get me to a point where I can ask a good question. It's important in that context to gain the trust of colleagues by letting them know you trust them as well. Deference to a real human, who's been doing the work for a long time, is not only wise, but crucial to the functioning of that community.
If AI helped you solve something, take the time to write it up where someone else can find it. – This is like leaving a review for someone else to find, you're giving back to a community you rely on.
Make absolutely sure you're taking questions of taste to real humans. – Call me bearish, but I can't help feel that deferring questions of aesthetics, ethics and gray area judgments to AI is the beginning of the end.
If you can be anyone, be Novastar. – There's a natural point where you stop being the one with questions and start being the one with answers. When that happens, it's better for you and the world if you go around answering patiently, in public, with as many resources as you're willing to commit. Forums that are kind to newcomers are the ones that stay healthy, be a reason someone signs up.
Connect with other experts. – Build institutions, allegiances, councils, boards, anything that continues to hold up the area of expertise you're focused on with integrity, precision, and longevity in mind. Discord channels and Slack channels are emerging as an alternative to forums, there's hope for community there! But this is how we'll beat the clankers at their own game in the war of 2029; by keeping what was so good about Forums, and by starting now. Thanks for reading.
Why knowledge is created is as important as how we consume it.