Heritage
Why this name, and what obligation it carries.
Why this name, and what obligation it carries.
The forums came first
Before the vendor ran a community, practitioners ran their own. SAPfans.com was one of the places they ran it — a discussion board where consultants answered each other's questions, several years before SAP had anything comparable. SAP's own developer network was created in July 2003, and contemporaries are explicit that SAPfans predated it by a couple of years, at a time when a vendor-hosted community was, in the words of one SAP Community participant, a true foreign concept.
A parallel independent site, sapfans.org, was set up in January 2000 by Simon Underwood expressly so that SAP consultants could reach each other and find work. Different site, same instinct: practitioners organising themselves without asking permission.
The technical polish was lower than the platform the vendor would later build. That was never the point. The independence was total, and the answers came from people who had actually shipped the thing you were stuck on.
And then much of it was lost
A German directory of SAP user resources from the period describes SAPfans.com as a genuinely good source, and then adds a clause that should be read slowly by anyone building a community today: the old questions are in an archive, except the ones that were lost during the last server crashes because of missing backups.
Years of practitioner knowledge — the accumulated debugging of a generation, given away freely by people who had no obligation to give it — evaporated. Not because anyone acted in bad faith. Because it lived on one machine that belonged to someone else, and nobody held a copy.
The obligation
That is the inheritance this site is claiming, and it comes with one duty.
A community that does not hold its own record does not have one.
So everything published here is committed to a public repository, hash-stamped, and clonable in full by anyone who wants it. Not summarised — the whole thing, prose and templates and scripts alike. If sapfans.io goes dark tomorrow, every practitioner who ran git clone still holds the complete work and can stand it back up on any host in an afternoon.
That is the same argument this site makes to enterprises about their own operational record, applied to ourselves first. It would be incoherent to demand custody of a customer's data from a platform vendor while running a community that could be erased by one unpaid invoice.
What we owe the original
Three things.
Attribution. SAPfans.com and sapfans.org were other people's work. This site is not a continuation of them, does not claim their archive, and does not speak for anyone who wrote there. It takes the name in the sense of a lineage, not an acquisition.
The same posture. Practitioner-first, provider-neutral, useful before it is polished.
The correction of their one failure. They lost the record. We hold it, in the open, in a form anyone can take.
The lineage in one line
Independent forums (1990s) → vendor-hosted community (2003) → platform-hosted intelligence (2020s) → practitioner-held record (now).
Each step added something real. Only the last one gives the record back.