The Japanese version of the page still is online, and at some point they had even made an English version. I'm not sure what exactly happened to the latter; going to the URL today redirects you to Jast's... online classic emulator, which is actually pretty cool in it's own right. But I wonder why exactly it was closed in the first place? There's no way such a laughably simple website would cost a significant amount of bandwidth to host. C'mon Jast!
But yeah, that last bit leads me into my next point; this is a very simple website to make. So you can imagine my horror when I spent a decent amount of time digging, and couldn't find any English-speaking replicas! WTF GUYS?! I looked through Neocities urls by using the title, and I did actually find one attempt at it but it was updated once and then abandoned. Many such cases. There is also a direct copy of the official English site available at this Github page, but it's done in JS (ew) and is 1:1 with the former MAGES one.
Looking through the English version, the translation is quite rough; which I guess makes sense considering that they admit they used a machine translator on the front page. I'm also pretty sure that the Phenix BBS never worked. All of the comments on the English version type in the same Engrish as the rest, and trying to insert a post over on the still-online Japanese version wouldn't work for me. A quick peak into the code confirmed my suspisicions. So it seems like it's a static page designed to look like a functioning message board.
Furthermore viewing the tab for the lab members only has Hououin Kyouma, Mayushii and Daru listed. I assume this is true to when the site appeared in the VN, but wouldn't it be cool if we had a version that had been updated after Operation Skuld and listed all of the members and gadgets?
With that said, in spite of all the limitations it's really nice to have an official version because in the VN we just got that one screenshot and nothing else. This sort of tells us what the intent behind the website was in a lot of subtle ways, including but not limited to;
-The general page structure & what they contain
-The 3 lab members all use psuedonyms instead of their real names, which makes sense given the 2ch ties.
-The official MAGES team took a few liberties from the CG that improve how it looks visually, such as adding the little planet png to the front page which I like.
-There are rough sketches for all of the future gadgets on the correpsonding page on the JP version, which is a nice touch. These were not in the English version I assume because they couldn't machine translate the Japanese text alongside them.
It seems entirely possible for a dedicated to take this and make a fansite out of it that surpasses the official version. SciADV sadly lacks fansites like this due to the fact that the series only got big in the West after much of the fun things about internet culture had already mostly died off. I can't imagine how much good stuff there must be pertaining to the series on the Japanese internet lol.
If it's not obvious by now, I do plan on making a version of this myself and it won't use iframes because I hate them, sorry. But it may be a little bit before I get around to it, so for now I thought an informative post drawing some attention to this niche little easter egg would be a nice thing to write.
