Alright, 3 things.
‘I witnessed the closing of Spacequest.net, and the note posted on there now reminds me of how old I am getting.’
1) I’m confused by Frans’ message. Does he mean the site will still be closing, or does he just mean that he’s decided to put it back up, but will no longer update it at all? After all, why bother to put the entire site back up if you’re going to close it? In that case, he would have just put up the message and nothing else. I guess his original intention was to close the site forever, but after speaking with Colin Davis he decided to at least allow it stay online.
‘get the ‘Sierra Archives’ page up AND GET IT UP SOON’
2) I am responsible, along with my fellow historian Brad Herbert and a number of others here who have made contributions, as well as many former workers in the community, for The Sierra Archives. TSA has had a long history, and we’ve finally come to the point where we decided that this continual process of archival sites coming and going and being in various states of disarray is quite bothersome. We mean to unite all Sierra archival material in the ultimate Sierra website. Everything that you could possibly conceive of wanting in such a site will be there, and probably more. The downside to this is that it takes much longer to plan, develop and implement than just doing a standard website design – not to mention that we are engaged in a number of very significant archival projects besides the TSA website. Every once in a while people announce that they are setting up an archival Sierra website and there are some out there, and we just let them go about their business. We realize that we don’t have much to show for ourselves but all we can ask is your continued trust that this is all in the works.
‘BUT this site is put together like crap.’
3) As for this website – and props to Ken for the site and his Talkspot system – but I do believe that this site would see many more visitors if it was a conventional website with content that I could design myself and regularly update outside of the Talkspot system and with a conventional bulletin board system (likely I would choose phpBB). Ken has a lot of innovation and the success of his Talkspot system is proven among the thousands (I don’t know the exact numbers but it’s a lot) of sites he hosts – but I’m just not sure that it’s the type of system best suited for SierraGamers, at least as it is, and I have no doubt that many Sierra fans turn away from it simply because it is unfamiliar and not structured like many other bulletin board systems that they are used to. Now that is a more helpful way of saying what you said, by identifying what about the site you may not like. Ken’s system is in continual development though, so if you have suggestions for how the system could be improved, you can certainly voice them. Ultimately this is Ken’s site.
I hope that addresses some of your comments and feel free to comment more.