HHolodeck 3 was originally created by Rob Chen in 1995. It quickly became popular in the Star Trek fansite community because it was one of the first fansites created in an LCARS style. The site was focused on multimedia, with just lists of Star Trek pictures, sounds, videos, fonts, screen savers, and Chen's own journaling software called Holonote written in Visual Basic 4.
By 1997, Holodeck 3 had grown to include biographies of the main characters of each series and some very impressive animatics of the ship schematics of the Enterprise D.
He continued updating it himself until late 1997/early 1998 and it was an impressive website containing 150 megabytes (that was a lot back then) of audio/video Star Trek content. We are in the process of creating historic simulations of the site in its past formats and we have a mostly restored (there are still a lot of broken images and pages) version of the site circa early 1998. You can find it here.
By late 1998, the load the site had placed on the servers of Starbase 21 (the web hosting service the site was hosted on at the time) and at least as early as February 9, 1999 (though likely earlier), to deal with issues coming from heavy abuse of the site, Chen made the decision to lock the site behind a registration gate.
The site continued to operate like this, with almost no updates from Chen throughout 1999 and into 2000 until Chen made the decision to put the domain up for auction on eBay on August 23, 2000.
Nicholas Moline purchased the domain from Rob Chen which included a CD containing a copy of the last version of the website from 1998 before the site was put behind a login wall. Nick restored that version to start with and put it online in October, 2000. Like with the 1998 version, a historical simulation of this version is online and you can find it here.
This restored version was only temporary however, Nick had plans to do much more than simply restore the old site, so in May, 2001 the site was relaunched with an (at the time) modern content management system known as Metadot. Registration did return, but only for the purposes of communicating in the forums that were a part of the site at the time.
Holodeck3 continued on metadot for a few years until 2007. During the years that Star Trek: Enterprise was on the air, Nick wrote some reviews of a number of key episodes. Also during this era, Holodeck3 was expanded into the SubspaceLink site network, consisting of Subspace Link, Holodeck 3, Starbase 49, and The Star Trek Wormhole.
We have not yet restored a version of the site from the metadot days, but we are planning on creating a historical simulation of as much of it as we can.
In 2008, the SubspaceLink and Holodeck 3 websites were ported to the Drupal content management system, By 2009, it had a brand new LCARS layout created by Roy Veldman that harkened back to the original Holodeck 3 website, but with a more modern feel. The site was maintained by Nick sporadically until 2013 when the Drupal site was hacked and taken offline.
In the years since, Nick has occasionally attempted to revive the site using different Content Management Systems (Wordpress, Drupal again, back to Wordpress) but to no avail, and with no new Star Trek content to write about, the motivations to revive the site were few and far between.
We have not yet restored a version of the site from the drupal days, but we are planning on creating a static historical simulation of as much of it as we can.
When the Drupal Site was hacked in 2013, Nick responded by taking it offline and putting up a new site based on Wordpress. Unfortunately this version of the site never had anything but a single post about the site being "temporarily" offline.
As this version of the site was just a blank placeholder, we will not be restoring a static historical simulation of it.
When moving the site to a new server, Nick setup a new Drupal installation and restored the content of the 2008 - 2013 Drupal version of the site.
While more of the Holodeck3 content was online during this era, there was no template for the site at this time.
As the content was the same as the 2013 version of the site, we won't be restoring a historic simulation of this version either.
Welcome to the new version of Holodeck3.com, put online in July, 2023. This new version is based on Statamic, a PHP Based Content Management System (CMS) built upon the Laravel framework.
Our main efforts at the current time is building up the new website, but the historic simulations of older versions of the site are still on our agenda.