Before long, it became clear that the contributors to The Rostra were not only interested in discussing the game, but shared an deep interest in the ancient world. To facilitate greater community interaction and cohesion, AncientSites.com was launched, providing a suite of homegrown early social media features such as Grams (instant messages), Homesites, Groups, Friends Lists, Cities and Hoods and a Who'sOnline Panel. Even though the community grew quickly, AncientSites was shuttered during the dotcom crash in January 2001.
In autumn 2002, the 100,000 registrants of the community were invited to a reconstructed version of AncientSites called AncientWorlds.net, which continued the tradition of AncientSites and thrived until 2015, when it's flame was doused due to technical issues. In total, AncientWorlds received 57,236,013 page views from 16,538,996 unique visitors and 40,377 registered members during its tenure!
Although AncientWorlds has been offline for some time now, work has begun to relaunch the community in a fourth incarnation with state-of-the-art web application infrastructure. We are also investigating options for developing multi-user 3D environments for each world. [Updated: March 20, 2020]
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