Hi everyone, hope you’re all hanging in there. Today I’m unveiling another major addition to the site! The Great Archives website is probably best known for hosting the Official Greg Discussion Archive, but one of its lesser-known features is its partially-complete encyclopedia and timeline, which aim to be a comprehensive guide to anything and everything about BIONICLE lore. Today I have an exciting announcement that hopefully will speed up their development: they can now be edited by anyone, including you!
Until now, the encyclopedia and timeline have been a solo project of mine, and I had not provided a way for other people to easily collaborate on it or make changes to it. I love BIONICLE lore, and for a long time I wanted to realize my vision of what an ideal BIONICLE reference site would look like, which is a bit different from existing sites like the BS01 wiki (more on that below). I first started working on it for fun on a private MediaWiki instance on my laptop in 2013, without any serious plans for making it public. But it slowly grew over time, to the point where I felt it made sense to share it online in 2019. Since then, I have been working on improving the look and feel of the website and making technical improvements behind the scenes. Now, I feel the time is right to open it up to editing by the public.
All you need to do to start contributing to the website is to join the new Great Archives wiki at wiki.thegreatarchives.com. This wiki will not replace the encyclopedia and timeline on the main site, but it will serve as a convenient staging area where everyone can collaborate on changes before they are published on the main website (up to now, the site has been generated from a private MediaWiki instance anyway). In other words, the wiki is like a rough draft for everything that appears in the encyclopedia and timeline on the main site.
So, you’re probably asking yourself, why bother with a new BIONICLE reference site when we already have BS01 and the BIONICLE Wiki on Fandom? To answer that question, I need to explain the philosophy behind what drove me to create this site in the first place.
The Purpose of the Great Archives
The telling of the 2001-2010 BIONICLE story was scattered through a variety of media, including comics, video games, websites, novels, guidebooks, four direct-to-video movies… as well as promotional booklets included in the BIONICLE sets from LEGO, long-defunct Flash games and animations, and obscure forum posts that were permanently deleted years ago. Intelligibly arranging these pieces of lore, some of which are canon, some of which are non-canon, and some of which occupy a dubious place somewhere in between, is so complex that it has spawned multipleprojects that attempt to organize them into a comprehensible reading order. Even then, they cannot cover everything, because miscellaneous tidbits from bionicle.com, guidebooks, forums, and so on do not fit neatly into a chronological retelling of the story.
The purpose of the Great Archives is “to document the BIONICLE saga,” both by preserving some of the media that has become the most difficult to access (such as the Official Greg Discussion forum threads), and organizing BIONICLE media and lore into a succinct (yet complete), easy-to-read website in the form of an encyclopedia and timeline. In fact, my main motivation for building the Official Greg Discussion Archive was to make it extremely easy for me to cite specific Greg answers on the Great Archives site, although to my delight it is being widely used in other places as well, including BS01, TTV, Reddit, and various Discord servers. This is especially useful now that canonization contests are running again on TTV, where design criteria often depend on old Greg quotes.
Citations for Everything
So, what makes the Great Archives different from any other BIONICLE wiki? One of the central goals of the Great Archives is to document everything with citations to original sources, since many important facts were made known through extremely obscure sources (for example, the term “Toa Mangai” was introduced in a BZPower forum post by Nuhrii the Metruan that seems to have been completely lost to time). Every statement made in the timeline and encyclopedia (with some specific exceptions) must have at least one citation attached to it.
Sources First
The content for the Great Archives is in the process of being written, and it is being constructed according to a special procedure which I have adhered to since I started the project by myself way back in 2013. Most wikis are written by choosing a list of things to make articles about (Toa, Kanohi, Tahu, Makuta, Mata Nui (Being), Mata Nui (Island), etc.) and then collecting information for each page from the source material. On the Great Archives, it works in reverse. We start by systematically going through each book, comic, web serial, forum post, etc. and organizing the information in them into the timeline and encyclopedia. Events and plot points in the BIONICLE story are sorted in chronological order in the timeline. All other information, such as descriptions of characters, powers, personalities, and other world building aspects, is sorted into the encyclopedia. The timeline can later be used as a reference for writing biographies and histories in the encyclopedia. This way, all information in the BIONICLE mythos will eventually be included on the Great Archives, with proper citations. It’s a long process, and you can find a full list of the sources being scanned on the Status page.
In order to make the task of organizing this information easier, for now, I have been simply dumping facts from sources into the timeline and encyclopedia without attempting to integrate them together and make them readable. It is much more efficient to save this for later, after most of the biggest sources are done. This is why the timelines and especially the encyclopedia read like a laundry list of trivia. Just know that eventually it will be improved.
Canonicity
I believe that the Great Archives should not be in the business of deciding what the one and only version of canon is (however, it does not contain any fanon content, unlike the Custom BIONICLE Wiki (nothing against that site – it’s great!)). On this site, we allow multiple interpretations to coexist in parallel. Whenever two sources disagree, we document both and explain if one is considered more canon than the other. Also, BIONICLE has multiple “design universes,” for lack of a better term, including the LEGO sets, the more organic-looking movie designs, and the video game designs, each of which is valid in its own way. For this reason, we include images of all designs in info boxes and make it easy for readers to make the site show different styles by default based on their preferences.
Image Quality
Visuals are an extremely important part of the BIONICLE experience, so it is essential to use attractive images in the encyclopedia. Unlike on BS01, images on the Great Archives should consistently default to the promotional artwork made by LEGO and Advance instead of comic book panels, with easy options for switching the visuals to movie style, video game style, comic book style, etc. for those who prefer those instead. Images should have aesthetically pleasing dimensions (roughly square for encyclopedia info boxes) and should be cropped to include a reasonable amount of background space around the subject matter, rather than being cropped to its edges without any padding.
Writing
The introductory text to encyclopedia articles should generally be written under the assumption that they are being read by someone who is relatively new to the BIONICLE story and is just trying to quickly get up to speed. This is a good way to generate interest in the BIONICLE story and invite new people into the community!
Content
The Great Archives should include anything and everything about the BIONICLE story, including out-of-universe information about sets, creative professionals, source material, and so on. It will only cover the 2001-2010 BIONICLE story. It will not host copies of full novels, comics, animations, etc., because there are already multiple projects that take care of that.
Not a Wiki
Although we use a wiki for collaborating on the Great Archives, the main, public-facing place for enjoying the Great Archives is on the main Great Archives website, not the wiki. Presenting the content on a separate, non-wiki website lets us curate content more carefully, style things more flexibly, and make the website faster and more efficient technologically speaking.
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Finally, the site will remain ad-free.
Tasks
So, what can you do to help on the wiki? I’ve made a page of tasks that need to be done, if you feel so inclined, including:
Write intro text to each article (for example, see the Tahu page)
Fill in info boxes for each article, including images, set numbers, and stats
Comb through parts of the OGD Archive for useful information to add
Add articles about books, comics, and other media
Add articles about BIONICLE sets
Acquire better scans of certain media, such as the Rahi and Dark Hunter guides
Another Update: Info Boxes
In addition to setting up the wiki, I stealthily added another cool feature to the site: info boxes on encyclopedia articles. Here’s an example from the Pohatu page:
As you can see, it gives you a quick visual breakdown of all the forms a character has taken, what their powers are, and so on. I hope to have these added to more and more articles very soon.
What’s Next?
If any of this interests you, make sure to create an account on the wiki and let us know your thoughts on Discord. And if not, don’t worry, there are lots of planned additions to the OGD Archive on the horizon.
In this major update, I have added the following features to the search page on the Official Greg Discussion Archive:
The search box now supports special syntax for exact matches and excluding keywords. Use “double quotes” to search for exact words or phrases, and use -minus -signs in front of words or phrases to exclude them.
You can now filter results by topic or source (BZPower topics, LEGO Message Boards, or Farshtey Feed).
You can also filter and sort results by date.
You can filter results by user name or choose to show only posts by Greg Farshtey.
The ranking of search results has been improved so that exact phrase matches have higher precedence.
The upper limit on search results, which used to be 10 pages, has been increased.
There is now an option to turn off keyword highlighting.
Give it a try here, and let us know what you think on Twitter and Discord!
We have a mostly-invisible but very important update to the OGD Archive today! This one has to do with the preservation of image files. As of now, all image files that are included in or linked to from the OGD Archive have been copied to the OGD Archive server and will be hosted there from now on. Why does this matter? For one, this guarantees that the images in the archive will outlive the sites where they were originally hosted. This is especially important for images hosted on Brickshelf, since Brickshelf is known to go offline without warning from time to time. As you can see from questions like this one, or posts like this, losing those images would lose a lot of important information!
This update also restores some images that were previously lost to time but were able to be recovered from web.archive.org. All images that were unavailable from their original sources were checked against web.archive.org and replaced if possible (this recovered 18 lost images in all). For example, instead of this post (which originally revealed the Blade Burrower map to be the Unity, Duty, Destiny symbol) showing a great big void, it shows the original image, providing crucial context.
That’s all for now, and don’t forget to join our Discord!
The Great Archives now has a Discord server! Feel free to join or invite others using this invite link. We ask that you please observe the rules posted in #rules. If you want to chat about deep Bionicle lore or leave feedback about this site or the Official Greg Discussion Archive, you should drop by. It’ll be fun.
Got a minor update for you today in the OGD Archive. Clicking a line number with the Ctrl key pressed allows you to select multiple ranges of lines. However, up until now, this feature has not worked on MacOS, because Ctrl + click opens up a context menu instead! You can now perform the equivalent operation on Macs by holding down the Option or Command key instead. Holding down the Alt key in Windows will also work.
Hello friends. It has been several months since the last blog update, and I feel that it is, in a sense, long overdue. Let me begin by saying that I hope you are all safe and healthy – and if you are not, I wish you the grace and fortitude to surpass the uniquely difficult times in which we now find ourselves. I know they have been difficult for me. A BIONICLE fan-site blog is perhaps not the most fitting place to discuss somber world events, but I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the tragic juxtaposition between the optimism displayed in my New Years Day post, and my now solemn greeting in June. I knew that 2020 would be a challenging year. But not in my wildest, most paranoid fantasies could I have predicted the surreal upheavals we have experienced within the span of five short – yet unbearably long – months. I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading this uniquely relatable tweet from March:
I’ve now been alive in six decades:
The 1980s The 1990s The 2000s The 2010s The 2020s March
But on to happier thoughts. I hope that this site, for those who have an interest in it, can serve as a welcome diversion as we wait for happier times. I can tell you that there has been a distinct increase in traffic to the Official Greg Discussion Archives since late March/early April. And boy, I’ve noticed that people have been getting a lot of mileage out of the line selection feature – that’s great! In the meantime, I have continued chipping away at some necessary upgrades to the main Great Archives site that I have had in mind for a long time.
First, the main site overall has a slightly updated look, one that I hope is more appealing, intuitive, and pleasant to read.
This comes with a number of small quality-of-life improvements. Hovering over a citation link now shows a popup with information about the cited material, no longer requiring you to jump to the bottom of the page to see it.
Many citations also have links to articles with more information about the cited media. The content in those articles needs more work, but the important thing is that, behind the scenes, we have more advanced citation machinery in place that will make doing fancy things much easier in the future. That said, there are a few new articles that you might find interesting, such as the list of LEGO Magazine issues, or the catalogs of text content from the official BIONICLE websites in 2001, 2002, and 2003.
Some pages also have hyperlinks to other articles, which was not available before.
You can also click on the icon next to any section heading in an article or timeline to get a hyperlink to that specific section.
There are more updates on the way. Adding more images to the site is high up on the list.
What do you think about these changes? Is there some feature in particular that you would like to see next? Let me know at @GreatArchives.
Happy new decade everyone! The year 2019 was certainly an eventful and productive year for the Great Archives. The site’s reference section was unveiled, the design of the OGD Archive was updated, the Farshtey Feed was added, and I finally got around to implementing the long-awaited line selection feature for the OGD topics.
Speaking of which, coming days after the line selection feature was added to the BZPower OGD topics, the same feature has now been added to the LEGO Message Boards’ Chat with Greg Farshtey topic as well.
One of the ideals I strive for on this site is to make BIONICLE lore accessible for new fans, so that they can enjoy the saga as we in the BIONICLE community did during BIONICLE’s heyday. Despite the fact that the original BIONICLE story ended nearly a decade ago, I have been pleasantly surprised by the continued vibrancy of the BIONICLE community. An example of this is that in the past few years, we have seen a surge of interest in compiling the various novels, comics, animations, etc. into a single, linear narrative through projects like Biological Chronicle and Wall of History. Compilations like these are a great way to introduce new fans to the old stories that captivated us all those years ago.
Another important aspect of the BIONICLE saga, however, has always been the tribal knowledge passed on from Greg Farshtey on forums like BZPower and the LEGO Message Boards. How do Matoran eat? How does the system of sky-domes in the Matoran universe work? What was the name of Lhikan’s Toa team? What power does the Rhotuka spinner on Zivon’s front-left claw have? All of this information originally came from there. This is why I am especially proud of the Official Greg Discussion Archive, which has restored and preserved the “official Greg topics” from BZPower and the LEGO Message Boards, all of which have been lost in their original forms. Since those topics altogether make up over 1,500 pages of forum posts, I have aimed to make it as easy as possible to find specific pieces of information and cite them, so reference sites like BS01 can easily back up facts with their original sources.
Being able to link to specific posts in the original sources has a gone a long way toward verifying information on BS01. To pick an example completely at random, I like that I can now go to a page like “Rhotuka Launching Shield,” read a statement like “When the Toa Hagah were transformed into Rahaga, their shields were transformed into mounted Rhotuka Launchers,” and see a link to the exact forum post from 2005 where this was stated. This is a lot better than “I don’t know where this fact came from but trust me I read it 15 years ago on a forum that no longer exists.”
There are eight other questions in that post that have nothing to do with that piece of information, though. You know what would be really cool? If you could link specifically to question #9.
That’s right! It is now possible to link to specific lines within a post. This is a feature I have been wanting to implement for a long time, as it can vastly improve citations to posts which happen to contain dozens of other questions. For now, I’ve only added this feature to the BZPower topics, but I plan to add it to the LEGO Message Boards topic in the future.
Here’s how it works. When you hover over a post, line numbers pop up to the left. Clicking a line number will highlight the line next to it, and the URL in the browser will be updated to reflect the selection. The updated URL can be used as a permanent link to that specific line.
It gets even better. You can also select ranges of lines and make multiple selections by holding down the Shift or Ctrl keys while clicking (Shift to extend the range, and Ctrl to add a new selection). You can also de-select lines by clicking them with Ctrl pressed. This selection mechanism should feel very familiar – it works in much the same way as a typical file browser or an Excel spreadsheet.
I had a lot of fun working on this feature. It came with a few unexpected and interesting technical challenges. For example, I ended up writing code to ensure that the line ranges encoded in the URL are always represented in the simplest possible form, in order to canonicalize the links. For instance, to link to lines 5-10 and 15-20 in post #42, the URL uses the fragment #post42-line5-10,15-20. On the other hand, a URL with something like #post42-line5-10,8-12,13-20 would be invalid, since the ranges overlap, and the ranges 8-12 and 13-20 are adjacent. Instead, it is automatically simplified to #post42-line5-20. Another fun challenge was figuring out how to chop up the contents of each post into separate line elements without messing up the styling, and then figuring out how to un-indent the line numbers to line up evenly on the left column.
I look forward to getting some good use out of this feature on the Great Archives’ own articles. Hopefully some of you folks out there will find it useful too.
Back in 2008, I decided to start a little project called the Farshtey Feed. At the time, I was already in the habit of reading the Official Greg Discussion topic on BZPower more or less daily to get the latest, cutting-edge BIONICLE news from Greg Farshtey. I had even gotten into the habit of writing interesting factoids in a little notebook, categorized by topic, which later evolved into a massive Microsoft OneNote file.
Hey, you never know when a great BIONICLE sphinx will descend from the sky and demand that you answer esoteric BIONICLE trivia questions.
But really, I think what I actually had in mind was to compile that information into a sort of hyper-detailed BIONICLE encyclopedia (much like the modern Great Archives site). Whatever my reasons were, I eventually figured that other people might appreciate reading my summaries of the OGD. After all, the topic was notorious for being bloated with spammy posts or irrelevant/redundant questions. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just skip past all that nonsense and get a concise summary of the actual information?
That was my vision for the Farshtey Feed, a weekly digest of the OGD topic that I started posting on my personal BZPower blog in September 2008. It started off slow, without much fanfare. But over time, as more and more people discovered it, it became a much-beloved alternative to reading the onerous OGD topic. Finally, keeping up-to-date with the OGD was both pleasant and fast.
The Feed also had an inadvertent but very crucial side-effect: it preserved six months’ worth of OGD information when BZPower suffered a dataclasm in March 2009. As far as I know, the Farshtey Feed is the only surviving record of any data from this time period.
Although the original Farshtey Feed is still available to this day on my BZPower blog, I had a few reasons for wanting to add it to the OGD Archive. First, BZPower is well-known to be plagued by technical issues, and there’s no particular guarantee that the original Farshtey Feed will survive into next week. I know I’m being harsh, but it’s true. Second, because BZPower has undergone so many forum upgrades over the years, the markup has been mangled quite a bit. For a long time, content wrapped inside of spoiler tags was simply unreadable (this actually appears to be fixed again after the most recent upgrade, so kudos for that). I also saw this as an opportunity to remove the now-defunct [source] links that pointed to the original OGD posts, which were lost long ago. Third, putting the Farshtey Feed on the OGD archive allowed me to integrate it into the site’s search engine.
Personally, though, I think one of the coolest new features I implemented was the ability to link to individual bullet points:
possibly my original scratch notes for the Farshtey Feed?
I actually don’t know where to find a copy of the 2004 Ask Greg. If anyone happens to have a copy of it, please do reach out to me on Twitter.
I’ve also taken the liberty of making a few minor improvements to the site. Any post that has been linked to directly is now highlighted, and it is no longer covered by the header bar. I also improved the performance of the auto-highlight feature in search results, although I’m aware that the quality of the highlighting is still somewhat wanting.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this round of updates. As always, feel free to send your feedback to me on Twitter. Until next time.
There have been some visual upgrades over at the Official Greg Discussion Archive. Not only is the search bar conveniently located at the top of every page, search terms are now automatically highlighted in search results. The site has also been slightly reorganized in preparation for the addition of more content (did someone say Farshtey Feed?). Don’t worry though, all of your old hyperlinks will still work.
