It just occurred to me

* Mehdi Cyaxeres

It just occurred to me

To keep the blogging out of the hoods.

June 12 , 2008

Service

Posted at 09:00 EST

Would you pay $178 a year for membership of a gym that was often closed when you wanted to use it and where the management just shrugged if you asked whether the showers would ever work? Me neither. I cancelled all three of my patronages a few weeks back because I was tired of the fact whole parts of the site (indeed, the whole site, all too often) simply didn't work, and was almost certainly never going to. I'll happily pay for a service I'm using and enjoying, but I hate to feel like I'm being taken along for a ride. Any realspace business that tried to operate with no communication or consultation with those paying to support it would soon go belly-up, after all!

The internet isn't like it used to be in the good old days of Ancient Sites - people have higher expectations, more on a level with what they expect from realspace. They're savvy consumers, often technologically aware, and they know how to use search engines and other resources. You can't attract and keep them by offering them a second-rate experience, because nowdays they have something very momentous that they didn't have 10 years ago - they have CHOICE, and you can't survive on people's nostalgia forever.

I've had to take an unanticipated and unrelated leave of absence since then anyway, but whether I pick up my subscriptions again, and how much activity I will feel like putting into the site, will probably depend on what I see happening - or not happening - around me now.

April 6 , 2008

This is not a dating site - honestly!

Posted at 20:00 EST

It seems an irony to me that while people are claiming at the discussion on cybering that AW is not a dating site, I keep getting THIS advert in my face on the Dailies page suggesting otherwise.... actually, check the Google ads that appear on your hood homes sometime - I've had girls of all nationalities under the sun offered to me there. Why don't they ever offer me men?

March 9 , 2008

Size DOES matter

Posted at 17:00 EST

One of the least convincing arguments as to why none of the dead dust that's clogging up the corners of AW can be swept away, ie no dead groups or - my particular pet peeve - no unwanted characters can be deleted, is to my mind the breezy assertion that the waste of server space is negligible.

Is it? Personally, I've never believed size doesn't matter. And I don't believe all those hundreds - thousands, more likely - of unwanted and abandoned personae don't clog up the databases, not to mention all the groups lying mouldering in dank corners like a bunch of corpses.

Massive, unwieldy databases must put more strain on a server, they are harder to back up and maintain properly, more prone to crashing, and harder to recover data from when they do crash. No wonder "unplanned outages" are such a frequent occurence. Sometimes it seems to me that structurally AW is teetering on the brink of implosion, and it's only a matter of time before it won't be recoverable after a crash.

In the meantime, I suppose all we can do is make sure we have backups of any images and writing that's important to us...

(The other argument against deleting unwanted personae, about how confusing it would be if someone took over the old persona name, is just as unconvincing in my plebian opinion. It's never been an issue or problem at any other community site I've frequented in the last 10 years, so I fail to see why AW might be different.)

February 26 , 2008

I might be ready for a change...

Posted at 11:00 EST

It's time I redecorated. Yes, I have caught spring-cleaning fever! I've barely made any changes to my Sarai since I won the Best Homes contest last year - I daren't in case they took the prize away! *laughs* - and now I'm tired of looking at it. Maybe I need a change from red. Emerald green, maybe? Or peacock blues? But I do love my red peacock feathers.... *sighs* I am so useless at making these kind of decisions!

I've learnt in the past that if I aim for a specific preconceived design, it looks terrible. It has to be 'accidental' *laughing* So I'm just going to have to tackle this illogically... make (or find) a background texture and colour I like and take it from there...

But don't hold your breath about this supposed redesign, please, as I won't be held responsible for the consequences -- there's a good chance my Sarai will still be looking exactly like this in February 2010.... and the first person who mentions the 'hood homes I still haven't decorated yet will be fed to my Egyptian friend's pet crocodile....

February 8 , 2008

My humble two darics on the knotty matter of festivals

Posted at 21:00 EST

It's interesting to me that one of the main arguments in defense of festivals/events/whatever this week's preferred term is, is that it increases participation. But I have to wonder, does it really?

The increased activity during fest times is generally the result of a very small number of regular party-goers posting their little socks off in the various taverns of AW - the same handful of names every time. Only upper-level patrons and scribes have the posting limits to participate in these pub crawls that rack up so much of the daily post count - the rest of us just suspend all normal activities for the duration of the festival, wade through the party posts on the daily index, and dutifully do the quizzes (not that I have anything at all against the quizzes, I enjoy them and have a journal devoted to proudly displaying my plaques). This merry band of regular party-goers always seem like they're having fun and I certainly don't grudge them that. The social aspect of AW is as important as the academic to some members, and there is nothing wrong with that, except.... well, I'm not really sure if 300+ daily drinking party posts by a small number of people is an accurate indicator of site participation? It seems to me it's just a few people posting "hic" a hell of a lot more times than usual, while many ordinary members stop participating altogether until its safe to come out on the daily index again.

So... whatever decision is taken on The Great Festival Question, I do hope participation is not used as a criterium, because I do believe that is a red herring...

January 30 , 2008

The plaque plague

Posted at 13:00 EST

I will be interested to see the outcome - if there is one - of the debate going on at the moment about possible ways to get award plaques (or 'plagues' as I often misspell it, and that's rather appropriate in this circumstance) placed somewhere other than one's homepage. It's always felt ironic to me that your award for building a pretty home is that you get something slapped in the most prominent place on your front page that not only looks ugly but screws up one's carefully constructed layout. It's bad enough when viewing the page in IE, but in Firefox the awards stack vertically and oh god, how terrible does that look! I have seen many beautiful homes completely ruined by the effect.

Yes, I know Bacchus Isocrates generously posted an article with a very clever solution for hiding the plaques, but alas it was too clever for me and I was lost halfway through the instructions. I got as far as removing the text under the graphics and that was it... *laughs*

Well, I'm not surprised to hear people are discouraged from entering contests with badge/sestercii awards - until something is done to place these awards someplace less intrusive I shall be avoiding them too. I mean - I am proud of the ones I have, but not to the extent I want any more wandering all over my home.

October 26 , 2007

Thoughts from the last few days

Posted at 13:00 EST

I would like to clear my conscience by confessing to various hood-related crimes, which include (but are not limited to):

Buying hood properties because I have bags of site currency and nothing else to spend it on.
Buying hood properties to 'affiliate' myself with a place I like.
Buying hood properties to be near friends.
Buying hood properties because...well, they are fun to decorate!
Selfishly treating my hood properties as if they were my own personal space to do as I wished with, instead of using them to re-create a historically-authentic monument for the benefit and education of all.
Trivialising my hood homes with evil interactive BLOG type threads instead of something worthy like a quiz or contest.

The fact I have repeated the offence with several personae only makes me more deeply ashamed and guilty. I am afraid the Hood Quality Taskforce will shortly arrive and arrest me for my offences against community building, and you may never see me again.

And on a totally unrelated note, I am sad that this year many of the scribes who will be swapping cities are depriving us of one of our simple annual pleasures, by being perfectly open about it *shakes head sadly*. I've never been sure who the Scribal Reshuffle was supposed to convince, since every village idiot knows scribes only really get retired when they rebel against The System or die of exhaustion and fresh blood has to be brought in to make up the shortfall of regulars, but half the fun in past years was running a betting pool to match up "incoming" scribes against "outgoing" scribes, and celebrating or commiserating with each other as the case may be: "Oh you poor, poor things, you've got Septicaemius Servilius... we had him last year as Bollux Brigantes *shakes head in sympathy*... we're lucky we got Angelus Superbus Antonius... yes, you do know him, Toucan-Amun Thutmose from Egypt, remember?" **

Now we will have to find a new outlet for simple-minded amusement!

** Any resemblance to personae, living or dead, is entirely coincidental or is intended purely as a satire, parody or spoof. Furthermore, any resemblance to the truth or actual events is also completely coincidental.