SoapAnon

I've watched all of 1998 and most of 1999 so far. Michelle and Blake are easily the two least likeable characters, at least for non-villains. Michelle was not nice to Jesse at all and it's hard to feel bad for her with Danny because she knew what she was getting into. Blake just always makes trouble. She ruined poor Ross and unlike Dinah and Annie, she just does bad stuff just to do it.

I thought this might be a fun trivia question. Which soap had the most recurring characters?

32 minutes ago, BoldRestless said:

That was all retconned. She went off the cliff, appeared a couple of times as a ghost when Josh started dating Annie, then was discovered in Amishtown with amnesia. The San Cristobel story was invented later. 

Thanks

When Reva went off in the car and got amnesia in San Cristobel, did they write her off the show or did they show her escapades down there? I'm watching Guiding Light 1999 now so I'm curious if this stuff with her having a kid with the prince happened or if it was just written after the fact.

I'm a new soap fan and I'm decades late to the party.  I didn't get to see the glory years of soaps and it sounds like I really missed out.

What was it like to be around during the glory days of soaps (or prior to the 2000's)? How many of the soaps did you watch? How did you choose between them? How did you manage working and stuff around their daytime schedule?

I'm kind of a new fan of soaps, but what do people think has made Y&R the top soap for the last 30 years? What did they do so right that other shows couldn't?

Is there a fansite with a history of the show and its stories?

If you type in the phrase "soap operas" on Ebay, there's a bunch of people selling vhs tapes with soaps on them. There's no dates or really any information at all on some of these and they are very expensive for the price, but there may be some eps that aren't out there on them.

1 hour ago, BoldRestless said:

Thanks, this is good information. I wasn't aware of some of these options like the decoders. I usually do unlisted YouTube playlists  which are great, unless YouTube has an automatic content block that catches the upload.

 

I've wanted to register at VK but felt hesitant about giving my phone number. Are there American soap groups there? I've also seen people sharing on other Russian sites like ok.ru, yandex, and rutube.

 

What I think is so unique about the Vault is the collaborative effort. With YouTube or MegaUpload, as far as I know it's just one person putting up their collection and then others can share that link. The Vault is great because anybody could upload to it and don't even have to register. I have a registered account there and sometimes people would see my email address and email me. I got to know some very nice people that way, and even convinced them to upload things there since it's so easy to do. And it's all in one place organized into folders with huge storage capacity instead of having multiple links to different playlists, etc. Such an innovative idea from @ChickenNuggetz92!

I haven't had any issues with VK. There doesn't seem to be much soap opera stuff here, but I think there is 0 chance it ever gets removed.  ok.ru is also good.

VK has community groups where you could invite people in and everyone could share videos on the wall, then someone could organize them into a playlist. I would also  suggest having people upload stuff then have them paste the link onto a google sheets document since multiple people can edit it but as always, the more open the access is, the more likely it is that people start sharing it and then CBS/ABC/NBC become aware of it and try to get it removed.

Facebook shockingly has a ton of soap opera groups.

I've been in the downloading world for a very longtime.

So the best way to upload footage right now is to use VK.com (russian) or youku.com (chinese). They are both free. Neither are US based, so they don't have to abide by DMCA takedowns, neither are popular sites in the US and neither can be easily found through search engines. You additionally have to make an account just to even get to VK, so it is very secure. Neither have storage limits either.

Other ways to do this are:

- Torrents, which are a great way to just upload a pile of shows at once and keep them online forever

- Privately listed youtube videos which cannot be found unless you have the link. The link can also be encrypted, making it harder to find.

- Megaupload where you can upload a whole folder of shows and people can't access it unless they have the link

I would also strongly suggest to use a 64 decoder to encrypt video links. Then you can post links to episodes right in the open and it'll look like gibberish to outsiders. Let's say I want to encode www.google.com. If you go to this website https://www.base64decode.org/ and type in d3d3Lmdvb2dsZS5jb20= then press decode, it will give you www.google.com.

1 hour ago, Noel said:

Welcome to the SON board, @SoapAnon and @FancyShoes! I wanted to give a shoutout. 

Thanks, nice to meet you

I don't like the move to Peacock. It's better than getting cancelled of course and VOD/streaming services really do seem like a great platform for soaps, but it's a major downgrade. The main problem is that people who don't have Peacock won't get to see it (while you didn't even need cable to see it on NBC) and there's no guarantee that people who do have Peacock will ever check it out.

I hope Days works out. If it's a success, it could lead to the return of other soaps or new soaps, but that feels like the underdog bet.