Saying goodbye

Black_Vulmea

This has been a long time coming but it's time to make it official. Sometime in the next week or so, Le Ballet de l'Acier, my featured campaign wiki, is going away for good. I stopped adding content to it years ago, out of frustration with the extended neglect and arbitrary changes which eliminated the functionality of my wiki by the various developers controlling Obsidian Portal, but the last straw came with the change three days ago of Photobucket's terms of service which would require me to pay $400.00 a year for the privilege of hosting images from my library on other sites. With the change, Le Ballet was gutted, as were most of the images on my two blogs.

I joined OP over eight years ago, was an ascended member for two years, but I never renewed because even then the site suffered from malignant neglect by the original developers that no one since has improved upon but rather complicated even more, most notably with the Kickstarter. I grew tired of having to repair things the developers broke, to the point where I simply stopped adding extensive new content, just keeping it in a file on my computer where only I could screw it up. In the process OP lost an ardent advocate.

Photobucket has also been a pain in the ass, as ads became more and more intrusive over the years, slowing the site dramatically, but the ads were the price I paid for storing images and I accepted them accordingly. Apparently my server-crushing 71 MB of storage and links to my wiki and blogs were too much for Photobucket, which decided that my massive bandwidth demands could no longer be accommodated.

I'm disgusted with the whole experience.

Mike aka BV

dr_venture

Yeah, I'm pretty wary of putting any further time into developing my OP sites when the platform looks to be pretty much coasting on autopilot with no one anywhere near the wheel.  At some point the wheels are going to start coming off, and I don't trust that there will be serious efforts made to keep the property alive.



So where are you taking your business?  I haven't looked for a gaming wiki/blog site in ages... are there any good ones out there?

SkidAce

I'm building a reasonable google site.

Johnprime

I like OP because it allows me to spend less time building a campaign site than it would take me on my personal website. That's what I was extensively using prior to coming here, but everytime I come to the OP forums and read about the issues, I worry more and more than this will go away and I'll be forced to once again develop sites on my own.

While I'm very capable of developing sites, it is a time consuming endevour and OP makes it much easier to focus on the look I'm going for and not have to work about database work, backend code work, etc. I'll be staying with OP till it stops being useful to me. I've begun spending some time working again on my own sites, as the inspiration to code something new modivates me.

GamingMegaverse

Ah, the originator of the golden jacket says good-bye- a very sad day indeed.

We have missed you here, just so you know.

I have been running my site on Wordpress for a while now- has been great- you should try it out.

You have my phone Black Vulmea- would love to hear from you.

dragoner

Sounds similar, BV. The good that came out of all this is that it forced me to go start my own forum, where I have a blog (that I don't use), a forum for my games (used heavily), and a place to host pics (because I also used photo bucket).

Forum:

http://dragonersdomain.com/forum/

Host:

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/

There is a bit of a learning curve setting it up, and then pretty painless afterwards, inmotion is helpful though in getting it all sorted.

-d.

 

twiggyleaf

Fare well, BV!