New Mars Forums

Hi all,

I am so glad these forums are going strong since I helped to restore them back in 2011.  Thank you all for your participation and making this a great destination for folks to "talk shop" about Mars exploration and settlement.  As Dr. Zubrin said to me back in 2011, "New Mars was once a great forum, and can be so again!".  We have definately proven him correct.

I have been working quietly for the last couple years on a couple of ideas to restore the main website NEWMARS.COM to... "something".  Would love to get your ideas as well.  It could be a place to host interesting articles, or have some type of "news index".  What do you think we could do with it?

Just to give you some background/context:
The Mars Society was founded in 1998.  Back then, NewMars.com was launched as the official magazine of the Mars Society.  You can see what it looked like here, which featured an article ("Teacher, Teacher") that I wrote about the Seattle chapter's efforts to get the word out at a local science teacher convention.
https://web-beta.archive.org/web/199812 … ewmars.com

At the time the site "New Mars Journal" was maintained by Richard Wagner, an author and friend of Dr. Zubrin's.  It was kept up to date for the first couple, formative years of the Mars Society, but the last update to this incarnation of the site was done on 01/19/2000. 

Sadly, the site was dormant (& stale) for over a year until it was resurrected by Adrian Hon, who was an active member of the "Youth" chapter and based in the UK.  He reorganized the site from the "field journal" format into a more modern web discussion forum plus articles on the main page.  You can see the first snapshot of this site that the Wayback Machine saved here: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/200201 … ewmars.com

This version of NewMars continued for approximately six years until 2007.  Towards the end, there was no recent content so the site had a lot of whitespace, but the forums were still going strong.  Last snapshot here: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/200712 … ewmars.com

The website was revamped on 01/05/2008 with a simple "blog-style" homepage, but continuing the forums, and adding a "wiki".  This revision was underwhelming, as reviewed by longtime contibutor SpaceNut: "Nice to see a new front page, but what will it bring to the forum or cause that New Mars is all about?  MarsDrive has also done the same and while the numbers of people are slowly finding the site are increasing the needed support for the cause has not gone as well.  This new front page reminds me also of the spacepolitics site. It combines the news with those that are willing to comment on it rather than the old topic forum concept. Both ways have there pros and cons as I have sen from visiting both styles."

The homepage was not updated until 09/06/2008 with a post about a new Mars Society project headed by Tom Hills called Tempo^3.  You can read the details here: https://web-beta.archive.org/web/200902 … rs.com:80/ 

This was the last update before "The Great Crash".  In early 2011, the server that hosted the Mars Society website as well as the New Mars website & forums suffered a major server crash which brought everything offline for a period of months. 

I rejoined the Mars Society in July 2011 as Webmaster & IT Director and I immediately set about to improve the overall technical situation.  A previous volunteer had moved the Mars Society infrastructure to Google Apps, which I expanded and streamlined.  I worked with a great company called Dreamhost who donated free web space & infrastructure to the Mars Society.  Utilizing their help, I rearchitected all of the DNS/nameservices under the Mars Society domains including NewMars.com.  I also began helping the various Mars Society chapters, task forces, and projects to revise their websites.

Around this time, Dr. Zubrin uttered the quote mentioned above, and I got in contact with Josh Cryer, who had been the forums admin for several years (and continues to volunteer in this capacity to this day).  We setup & restored the data for the forums that you are using today.

Since that time in late 2011, Josh Cryer and other volunteers JoshNH4H and SpaceNut, as well as myself, have kept the dream alive and the forums going strong.  We are at almost two entire decades now of having a Mars Society presence on the web using this domain.  What will the next decades bring for NewMars.com?  We'd love to hear your input...

Hi all,

Due to a large number of spam accounts that have been created recently, we have purged the database of all users who registered but have never posted.  I also elevated several accounts that seemed like real people.

I have removed the requirement to be approved prior to posting.  New users should be able to post but we will monitor these entries to ensure there is no spam.

If you had a user account before, and have never posted to the forums, it is possible that your user account was deleted in this activity.  Please go ahead and re-register for a new account.  Let us know if you have any problems. - webmaster@marssociety.org

Thanks,