Most readers of this site are probably familiar with the Q&A threads with Greg Farshtey on BZPower, the LEGO Message Boards, and the TTV forums, which have become extremely consequential for extended BIONICLE lore.

What if there were yet another major series of Q&A threads that had moldered in obscurity… until now?

It turns out that Mask of Destiny, like BZPower, had its own, lesser-known Q&A thread with Greg on its forums! Now, the third and final iteration of this thread, called the “Farshtey Forum,” has been fully integrated into the Official Greg Discussion Archive!

Here’s the longer story. Starting on April 1, 2005, the Mask of Destiny forums (called “Forum of Destiny”) had a sub-forum dedicated to sending questions to Greg called the “Farshtey Forum.” I got a chance to talk to a couple of old Mask of Destiny staff members, and although their memory of the early Farshtey Forum has faded, they believe its purpose was this: People would send in questions to Mark of MoD, who acted as a go-between with Greg. Mark would forward questions to Greg via email, Greg would send answers, and the answers would be posted. Judging from snapshots on the Wayback Machine, this early Farshtey Forum was lightly used, if at all. Maybe we’ll learn more about this another day.

Greg himself joined the Mask of Destiny forums in February 2006 under the username “Greg2660.” A Q&A thread called “‘Ask Greg’ topic” was started in the Farshtey Forum on February 26, 2006. Here, Greg responded directly to questions posted by users. Many pages of this topic still survive on the Wayback Machine. The thread amassed 40 pages of posts and ran until December 7, 2006, at which point the moderators decided to start a fresh thread. The second thread, also called “Ask Greg Topic,” ran from December 8, 2006 to late 2007. Many pages of this topic also survive on the Wayback Machine, although the final pages seem to have been lost. The last snapshot I’ve found is from October 19, 2007, when the topic had reached 38 pages.

The original Forum of Destiny was permanently taken offline in late 2007 because of technical issues. At this point, the staff started a new forum hosted on a site called ProBoards to replace the old. A third Q&A thread with Greg, called “Farshtey Forum,” was started here on December 23, 2007. Greg continued to answer questions here regularly throughout 2008. His last post was on September 7, 2008.

This third and final topic is what I’ve added to the Official Greg Discussion Archive. It is now easily searchable through the site’s search engine, and like the BZPower and LEGO Message Boards topics, it supports linking to individual lines. All of its images are now archived and hosted on the site as well.

I’ve added a couple other nice things in this update. I’ve added some more links to the Sources page, and I’ve added a large number of archived BZPower topics found by Dag. I also fixed a minor bug in the search engine that affected posts from the LEGO Message Boards.

So, my list of major future additions has become:

• Ask Greg from the TTV Message Boards
• the two “Ask Greg Topic” threads from the old Mask of Destiny forums

Also, happy belated 810NICLE Day! Enjoy.