Blast from the Past: Apolyton Archaeology Site Uncovered!

[Aeson]

You're looking for a series of features called (IIRC) "Interviews with prominent Apolytoners". I think there were five of them which were terribly worthy hagiographies of people who were super and special and wonderful. And then there was a sixth which was (as you'd expect, given who was responsible) a ribald stream of nonsense from two people dicking about. It killed the feature stone-dead and caused site war between Poly and Planet-ACOL that got Markos banned.

I see several of these types of interviews, but not one with AH?

Wes W
Velocyrix
Yin26
Tau Ceti
Xin-Yu
Lancer
Ming (2 part)
Stefu
Jay Bee
DanQ (2 part)
DarkCloud

[Aeson]

Cool! Just read a couple of them, and I agree, you're doing an awesome job with this. Any plans/ideas to revive the "classic" communities, e.g. SMAC?

EDIT: Actually, SMAC's not doing too bad--but CivIV, for some reason, is a ghost town. Not trying to criticize you--you inherited this--just excited for a revival here.

Yah, it would be good to revive them.

One of the problems with how Apolyton is set up as a forum now is we archived a lot of sections. I guess this was done to save server resources. Now no one can post there, so even if the threads get traffic it doesn't help activity at all. We'll need to revisit the forum structure and bring some of these forums out of the archives. Mods forums for past games especially once the downloads section is fixed up.

I think bringing back the mods/files that have been found (there seems to be tons of them, but not sure how much is duplicated with the Downloads section we have now) and putting them in a more user-friendly format will help a lot. Currently it's such a mess that even if someone happens to find something they're interested in, there isn't an obvious way to give any feedback or talk about it.

CivBE should bring some new players who might be interested in trying out past Civ games, or bring back older players who still play or would like to go back to playing the older games. The keywords "Beyond Earth" are different enough that I think we have a chance to compete with anyone for the traffic. We're starting in a hole, but at least in this case everyone is to some extent. Other sites like CFC may be better situated for digging themselves out. We still need to build (and in some cases invent) our ladders and shovels

The Wiki will eventually cover all games, and that should draw in some interested users as well. Wikis are generally good for promoting community activity, but need a lot of work to get to the point of critical mass. I think we have a decent chance to be the first result for "Civilization Beyond Earth Wiki" type keywords. We're ranking 10-15 out of the gate in Google, without much content yet. Wikia is hard to beat out, but Apolyton does have a good amount of "Civilization" authority left in it. Plus, we can add more server resource-intensive features to the wiki that Wikia won't allow for.

I have other ideas/projects ... but they're secret!

[Aeson]

Any chance of recovering Apolyton's OT reactions to 9/11?

Parts of the forum (actual threads) that went missing will be hard to recover if someone doesn't have a database dump. Even with one it might be very hard to integrate back into the forum now. Google doesn't seem to have anything indexed/cached during that time.

[Aeson]

It's been a while since I last checked, but are the Viking files of Civ2 still available? It was one of the things that drove me to this site way back.

Do you remember any details about them, like who was the author, any specific titles or file names? Were they maps, mods, modpacks, and/or scenarios?

[Nikolai]

They were shorter and longer novellas with the eternal civ2 leaders as characters. I found them on the then front page under the civ2 section back in 1999/2000.

[Aeson]

Is that the "Viking Scribes" section?

[The Mad Monk]

but CivIV, for some reason, is a ghost town.

I just started playing the C2C mod. If you know what that is, you already know the reason.

[Nikolai]

Is that the "Viking Scribes" section?

That sounds correct.

[Aeson]

Is this it?

http://apolyton.net/showthread.php/206211-The-Story-of-Civ-II

It wasn't part of the Viking Scribes, but was next to it on the Civ II sidebar at one point. A quick glance through the Viking Scribes I didn't see anything that would fit your description.

[Nikolai]

No, that is not it. PErhaps it's lost in the mist of time.

[Nikolai]

I think the Viking scribes is it. I didn't find that awesome long AAR/story I remember best, but the Wayback Machine has it under the Civ2 section, and the headr Viking Scribes: https://web.archive.org/web/20000818...yton.net/civ2/

EDIT: However, without reading it through, I think this story is the one I remember: The Story of Civ II, under the header The Story of Civ2.

[Aeson]

That's the one I posted.

[Nikolai]

Oh, I didn't recognize it. It was not part of the forums when I read it. It was a separate page, as linked.

[Aeson]

Yah, all of these were seperate sections, not part of the forum. That may be why they got lost in fact. Rather than put up a new section of the site I thought it would be nice to integrate them into the forums by posting them as threads. This way they'll fit in with the theme of the site (whatever the poster has selected) too.

[Nikolai]

I'm glad it was not lost fwiw! Check out the stort AARs I linked to too, there might be some good there.