On Dec 12, 7:33 am, Nick <nckmccn... DeleteThis @yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On 2007-12-11 23:53:06, twerpina... DeleteThis @gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I notice that my original point, that a whole variant seems to have
> > appeared basically without fanfare due to the rgra/forum split, has
> > gone completely by the wayside here. This event torpedoes the theory
> > that important announcement-type information won't disappear from the
> > newsgroup due to the forum.
>
> Portralis is the new name for NewAngband, which has been around for some years,
> and was originally based on PernAngband. It was renamed Portralis on the first
> of January this year, but the only mention of that that I saw was a note that
> pav put in the news section of oook (NOT the forums, which still didn't exist at
> that point).
Curious. Nonetheless, it's no doubt oook (and perhaps the forums) that
prevented it from getting any mention here. Not to knock oook,
exactly, as the ladder for instance is a beneficial addition to the
community, as is the rgra gateway though I don't use that. But the
inadvertent dividing of the community is a problem. Announcements made
solely at oook get missed by rgra regulars, whether they are made in
the forms or elsewhere. If the sole discussion of a variant occurs
there, likewise. The fragmentation even seems to have manifested
itself in an increasing tendency to not name variants as bands; for
the longest time the only such variant was Ubuntu, the black sheep of
the family anyway. Then ToME. Now there's this Portralis and I seem to
recall hearing of one or two others recently. Again, I think this may
be a symptom of the community's fragmentation, but is the forum at
oook solely responsible? Doubtful. Partly it has to be centrifugal
forces. Variant maintainers and their core user base seem prone to set
up their own mailing lists or other discussion areas separate from
rgra and focused solely on the one variant (Steam and ToME come to
mind). Why this is happening now is a question not yet addressed in
any of the newsgroup-vs.-forums or why-is-the-community-dying debates.
It isn't as simple as the rise of the web and web forums, because the
rise of the web happened ten years ago, and that of web forums five
years ago. Mailing lists are a frequent place for a variant to "move"
to away from rgra, and have existed for about as long as usenet has
existed. Yet only in the past two or three years has there been a
wholesale migration of variants to mailing list based (OR web forum
based) discussion away from rgra. These days you can't tell if a
variant is dormant/dead or not just from absence of traffic on rgra
the way you used to...
> It has its own forums
And there, no doubt, is a large portion of the cause for Portralis'
existence being obscure in rgra.
But the bigger question is: where has the centrifugal force come from?
Web forums just provide an outlet for these forces, awful and limiting
though they tend to be to use. While there is a good case to be made
in favor of burning all the web forums
, the real issue seems likely
to lie elsewhere, and the whole forum thing is itself merely a symptom
of a deeper schism -- nay, a schism-forming *process* of some kind.
(And before any wiseass decides to use this as an excuse for personal
attacks and blame *me* for causing this, sorry, no can do; I've been
around rgra in some form or another for almost as long as the web's
been mainstream, for longer than web forums have seen wide use, for
twice as long as oook has even existed, and for years before this
community-fragmentation phenomenon began. Argue that I exerted a
centrifugal force that just didn't find an outlet until web forums
were widespread, and I'll just point out that a lot of the rgra-
abandonment has been in the direction of mailing lists, technology
actually older than my chronological age nevermind my participation in
rgra.)
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