01-11-2013, 05:32 PM
Hi all. Benevolent Dictator Bolty™ here with an update on this website and its future direction.
The Lounge was founded in 1999 as a side project in HTML design to track Diablo 1 strategy. A few short years later, it was a gigantic (in terms of traffic for those days of the Internet) gaming site covering Diablo II in-depth, and was almost overwhelming in terms of activity. These days, the Lounge obviously is a small forum sitting in a tiny corner of the Internet where a bunch of crotchety old gamers kibitz over politics and discuss "them good old days." Which is just fine with me.
However, honestly here, I'd kept the site going for a LONG time (10+ years really) waiting for that Diablo III game that only finally materialized about 8 years later than it should have. And it's no secret that I was disappointed by it. I couldn't make up my mind if Diablo III just failed to capture the essence of the original games or if so much time had gone by that those kinds of games just don't interest me anymore. Maybe it was a combination of both, but in either case, it left me sitting around wondering what to do with this place.
There is an insane amount of history to this website. There are people still visiting here regularly that were around back in 1999. When you consider how fast the Internet moves, that's pretty nuts. Gaming websites were all fan-driven back when this place got kicked off. Nowadays it's all corporate. The Internet itself has changed massively and yet we're still sitting here. Sometimes a user comes back after years and years go by, and surprisedly exclaim "wow, I still have my account here." Yep. We don't throw things out here at the Lounge.
So here's my conundrum: I don't really want to hang this place up. You ever want to lose an afternoon? Try digging through the forums reading things from 2003. Poof, where'd the last hour go? More information and knowledge is sitting around here about Diablo II than an encyclopedia. I love it. But I have no idea what to do from here. Diablo III didn't really pull things together, and the Internet's changed so much since the D2 days that without a really strong driver of the site who is crazy committed to following the game, it's not going to go anywhere.
Add to that something else: the cost of running this place is not really justifying its existence. The domain registration is coming up for renewal in May, and the monthly server costs are starting to look like a poor value proposition. I'm just starting to debate shutting the whole thing down after almost 13 years.
So I'm calling out for some help here. I'm looking for a place to put the site, somewhere where I can have MySQL databases, a few hundred megabytes of storage, the freedom to plop this MyBB forum software, and let's say about 200 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. Cheap. Being able to run a Mumble server (Murmur) a plus. I'm currently paying $50/month for the Lounge to be hosted, plus domain registration fees. If that can get cut to $10/month or less, great, and we can keep this home for kibitzing about them good old days. If not, well, it'll be time to start backing things up, finding new homes for things like Jarulf's Guide, and to start saying our goodbyes to each other. I'll never forget this little home on the web.
We still have a few months here, so I'm hoping to start a decent conversation on some options we have. Any help is appreciated.
The Lounge was founded in 1999 as a side project in HTML design to track Diablo 1 strategy. A few short years later, it was a gigantic (in terms of traffic for those days of the Internet) gaming site covering Diablo II in-depth, and was almost overwhelming in terms of activity. These days, the Lounge obviously is a small forum sitting in a tiny corner of the Internet where a bunch of crotchety old gamers kibitz over politics and discuss "them good old days." Which is just fine with me.
However, honestly here, I'd kept the site going for a LONG time (10+ years really) waiting for that Diablo III game that only finally materialized about 8 years later than it should have. And it's no secret that I was disappointed by it. I couldn't make up my mind if Diablo III just failed to capture the essence of the original games or if so much time had gone by that those kinds of games just don't interest me anymore. Maybe it was a combination of both, but in either case, it left me sitting around wondering what to do with this place.
There is an insane amount of history to this website. There are people still visiting here regularly that were around back in 1999. When you consider how fast the Internet moves, that's pretty nuts. Gaming websites were all fan-driven back when this place got kicked off. Nowadays it's all corporate. The Internet itself has changed massively and yet we're still sitting here. Sometimes a user comes back after years and years go by, and surprisedly exclaim "wow, I still have my account here." Yep. We don't throw things out here at the Lounge.
So here's my conundrum: I don't really want to hang this place up. You ever want to lose an afternoon? Try digging through the forums reading things from 2003. Poof, where'd the last hour go? More information and knowledge is sitting around here about Diablo II than an encyclopedia. I love it. But I have no idea what to do from here. Diablo III didn't really pull things together, and the Internet's changed so much since the D2 days that without a really strong driver of the site who is crazy committed to following the game, it's not going to go anywhere.
Add to that something else: the cost of running this place is not really justifying its existence. The domain registration is coming up for renewal in May, and the monthly server costs are starting to look like a poor value proposition. I'm just starting to debate shutting the whole thing down after almost 13 years.
So I'm calling out for some help here. I'm looking for a place to put the site, somewhere where I can have MySQL databases, a few hundred megabytes of storage, the freedom to plop this MyBB forum software, and let's say about 200 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. Cheap. Being able to run a Mumble server (Murmur) a plus. I'm currently paying $50/month for the Lounge to be hosted, plus domain registration fees. If that can get cut to $10/month or less, great, and we can keep this home for kibitzing about them good old days. If not, well, it'll be time to start backing things up, finding new homes for things like Jarulf's Guide, and to start saying our goodbyes to each other. I'll never forget this little home on the web.
We still have a few months here, so I'm hoping to start a decent conversation on some options we have. Any help is appreciated.
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.