The Wiki and Me

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Yesterday (Friday, Aug 28), I managed to wipe out over half the Anvilwerks.com website. I backup every website I run except my own, apparently.

I've been contemplating a new website for several weeks: a new site that would allow anyone to contribute their new rules for my games, their stories of play, or anything else. This is to go with my new face as a company: I'm moving much more towards releasing the majority of my games for free and selling only bound copies of them. (Paul Czege and his notion of indie objects has been pretty influential on me.

Well, the site wipe forced me to move quickly on all my plans. Anvilwerks.com is back after a day of being down, and uses a Wiki as its backend. For now, it seems much the same, minus some pages I haven't gotten back up. The Wiki will, very soon, allow anyone to add to the site with new rules and whatnot. I also plan to have a section where you can post your logs of play. Ron's always been interested in doing something like this for the Trollbabe website, and I'll be talking to him about hosting that. (Even if it's not official, the GameLog section of my site is not just for Anvilwerks games - it's a place to post about any game you're running.)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new Anvilwerks. As I say on the site, don't think of it as an RPG company - it's now an RPG laboratory run by me, but that anyone can work in, and even pick up a few souvenirs at the gift shop.

[ethan_greer]

I've been keeping an eye on things for the past couple days, and I thought I'd weigh in here to say that your new site has earned my approval.  For whatever that's worth.  :) It looks nice, is fairly easy to navigate, and I like the idea behind what you're trying to accomplish.

Rock on.

[John Harper]

This is another RIGHT ON! post. I haven't been checking in on Anvilwerks in a while (obviously) but now that I have, I'm impressed. I'm really digging what you're doing, Clinton.

Now I have to go bug Matt about finishing up that Donjon Pak.

[Hugin]

Maybe it's me being slow but whenever I go to your Wiki homepage for Donjon at http://www.anvilwerks.com, all I get is a load of chinese text and stuff about installing editing programmes for Wiki.

Do you need to install specific software to view a Wiki page?

I've just come back to Donjon and am interested in looking at the stuff you've been doing with it.

Thanks

Dave

[rafial]

Hugin -- there is no special software need to view Wikis. I believe Clinton is in the midst of transitioning his site and so the content is currently unavailable.  Hopefully, he'll have it back up soon.

[Hugin]

Many thanks

Dave

[Bob McNamee]

The site was hit by a variety of wikispam which drops links on wiki pages in order to boost those site's standings on various search engines. This is a variety of spam becoming more and more prevalent on wikis as well as blogs (and even a little attempted here).

This is because many search engines value cross linking between pages as a method of deciding a site is popular.

This spam is also what killed the Universalis Arena II - City of Hope wiki based games (see Universalis forums here on Forge). These were happily hosted by Clinton for a couple of months worry free...then the spammers hit multiple times...destroying pages full of content, with no easy way to recover. Evidentally other pages of Clinton's site were hit too.

A shame that a good friendly easily editable format like wiki can be perverted in this way.

I believe Clinton is very busy in real life, so the above is just my understanding as a player in the wiki Universalis game.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Wiki spam has, in fact, trashed my site. I'm going to have to re-design it, probably sans wiki. I'll let you guys know when it's back up, which should be Wednesday morning.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

The grand Wiki experiment is over. My site's redesigned, although not complete yet. (I still have to do all the Donjon stuff.)

In the end, it was a good experience, but vastly underutilized.

[ScottM]

Your site looks good.  I've always liked the contents and appreciate the little drawings in and around TSOY.  Adding Paladin is also cool... I see that it's version 1.1.  Did you add the .1 for converting it to HTML, or are there rules changes buried in there?

Sorry the Wiki experiment died; it was a good idea pre wiki-spam.  Thanks for providing the lab and encouraging us to use it....