What's the story behind RPGDot shutting down and RPGWatch being born?

Here is some of my history with RPGDot and the start of RPGWatch.

Next to running RPGDot, Rendelius was also running a hosting service on BlinkingDot, where people could get their site hosted for free, by placing some ads on their site. At the time I was operating The Locus Inn, which was focusing on Infinity Engine games (some more and some less in detail). This was the year 2000.

I'm not sure when exactly, but at some point in 2000, Rendelius was looking for people to post news for RPGDot and I applied for that position, finding myself posting news after that. I don't even recall what we used for that, but it wasn't that great, so in 2001, a guy named Stijn, Garrett and me worked on creating a new design from scratch creating our own CMS. This first version was written in PHP, but had the layout embedded in the PHP files. This actually meant that we only had one design and it would be really problematic to make design changes to it, but it was working.

The year after that I redesigned the whole thing and separated the controller part from the view part. This allowed us to create different skins, which we used a lot for the hosted sites we had, of which there were plenty. Any game of some substance had its own hosted site at RPGDot. The best known ones were the Gothic and Arx Fatalis sites. Next to that we also had a site dedicated to adventures and a site dedicated to MMORPGs. Most of these sites also had at least one person posting news and articles for that site, but news posted on RPGDot would also be automatically visible on hosted sites when it was applicable for them. So some sites only functioned as a filter of news and articles, similar to our current indie site. In any case this kept us going until 2006.

The RPGDot forums were a place that was reasonably well visited and at some time we decided that it would be a good idea to create user groups and provide those groups a space on the forums that was only visible to the members of that group. Several groups were founded, with the biggest group being the Non-flamer's Guild. These groups were one of the two main reasons that the RPGDot forums became a somewhat desolated place. What happened was that people spent more time in their dedicated group forums than they did in the rest of the forum. Some people only spent time in their group forum. This drove the number of public visible posts down.

The second reason was the moderation policy. We had quite a strict policy, even more strict than what we have now, which resulted in bans, warnings and other moderation actions that drove the number of public posts even further down. The end result was that it didn't take too long to check out the new (public available) posts for a day.

Rendelius paid the server fees and tried to earn some money by selling adverts. I don't know how well that worked, but at some point in time Jolt came into the picture. They were most interested in the MMO side of the RPGDot sites as that fitted in their business model. I don't know how much money Rendelius made of selling it to Jolt, I hope for him it was plenty, but somewhere in the first half of 2005 a deal was made. I think his biggest motivation in selling the site was that he wanted to pursue other things than running an RPG site and Jolt was willing to pay him for doing that.

Jolt wanted to make some real money of the sites and a few months later the design had changed in such a way that there were several ads on each page, but especially on the front pages of RPGDot and all the hosted sites. It slowed things down, but it also became annoying to navigate and work with, in my opinion.

So somewhere in the first half of 2006, I decided that it was time to move on and start a new site. I asked around in the team and everybody in the team wanted to move with me to that new site.

Even though the source code and designs of RPGDot were not part of the deal that was struck with Rendelius and Jolt, I decided to start from scratch again to create a new site from the ground up. Arhu took up the responsibility of designing the lay-out of the site and together we created what you see now. I don't exactly recall how we got to the name RPGWatch, but I think it was a combination of interesting names and available domain names.

Arhu and I worked on the site throughout the summer until we reached a point where we felt that we could go public in the near future. At that point I informed Jolt about the decision that I would leave RPGDot and move to a new site and that it looked like all team members would move as well. As we were all volunteers, there was not much they could do about that, but they did ask me to make sure news posts were added to RPGDot until they gathered a new team. So I implemented a way to transfer the RPGWatch news postings to RPGDot and make them visible there as well.

On the 17th of October we launched the new site, starting with a first news posting by Dhruin. In the meantime I already filled the site with the news posts of the previous months that were until that time only visible on RPGDot.

I don't recall that there was a filter implemented on the RPGDot forums that prevented to use the word RPGWatch, but we felt it was not in the interest of RPGDot to publicly advocate there was a new site named RPGWatch, where almost the whole team moved to.

Some time after that there were two new persons working on RPGDot and I severed the last tie, which was the news syndication from RPGWatch to RPGDot. After that Jolt found out, that it is really hard to find a dedicated team that would be willing to post news on a regular basis. I belief they also had issues in keeping volunteers working for RPGDot. The place never recovered from us leaving, which in the meantime also included many of the active forum forum members.

And 10 years later we are here. We are probably in need of a new design, but neither Arhu, nor I have time available to accomplish this anytime soon, so you still have to look at this design for a while.

Earlier this year I also tried to resurrect the RPGDot site on my local system and got it functioning, both the RPGDot site itself and the forums. However it is an insecure piece of software to be honest, so it needs quite some work to get things fixed, but I am still hoping that I can accomplish that somewhere this year and that you can get a peek into what RPGDot and its forums looked like before (when it wasn't plastered with ads). I will not resurrect the hosted sites, but integrated all contents of those sites in RPGDot. I have a backup of all the designs, the database and the contents on RPGDot, but I noticed that I did not have a backup of the specific Arx Fatalis and Gothic files (images, downloads, etc.). So, at this moment I have a bunch of pages that have text but not the images. It can't be helped, it is what it is, but at least you will be able to make a trip down memory lane with it.

Thanks for the history lesson, Myrthos. Very interesting.

Myself I was mostly a lurker at the Dot, but I did occasionally post. I still remember my surprise when the place was dying, as I didn't know at the time what was going on. I found my way to the Watch through someone's signature, and never looked back.

The shadows group I was a part of has an online pnp version of gothic. It was a lot of fun. We tried to do it here but Kostas who was dming left in the middle of the play through


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by Myrthos
We are probably in need of a new design, but neither Arhu, nor I have time available to accomplish this anytime soon, so you still have to look at this design for a while.

Whatever you do and whenever you do, just please don't turn it into something confusing like other sites tend to do with their changes.
I see nothing wrong with current design. Maybe I'm just too old to realize something could be much improved, on the other hand "touch buttons" because of phones perhaps should be added - to me these things are irrelevant but are probably of great importance to younger audience. And I don't mean phones. Sooner or later all monitors will become touchscreens, we won't be able to buy one that isn't (just like we can't buy CRT any more).

Thanks for the input, I never knew you were involved with Locus Inn!

Originally Posted by Moriendor
In case anyone was wondering: I googled for good old Rend the other day when the news of the anniversary came up and found out that he is now a Whiskey Expert (Bernhard Rems… second entry from top). I guess that means he still has good taste .

Depends on the whiskey Single malt I presume?

pibbur who can detect the difference between single malt and … … other whiskey types… by reading the labels.

PS. I think I remember the non-flamers guild. Don't think I joined. Not sure if I was a pibbur back then,
DS.

Originally Posted by Myrthos
The RPGDot forums were a place that was reasonably well visited and at some time we decided that it would be a good idea to create user groups and provide those groups a space on the forums that was only visible to the members of that group. Several groups were founded, with the biggest group being the Non-flamer's Guild. These groups were one of the two main reasons that the RPGDot forums became a somewhat desolated place. What happened was that people spent more time in their dedicated group forums than they did in the rest of the forum. Some people only spent time in their group forum. This drove the number of public visible posts down.

The second reason was the moderation policy. We had quite a strict policy, even more strict than what we have now, which resulted in bans, warnings and other moderation actions that drove the number of public posts even further down. The end result was that it didn't take too long to check out the new (public available) posts for a day.

I would add a third reason which was the very poor performance. IIRC, opening a forums link often times took anywhere from several seconds to a minute. It simply was no fun at all to surf the RPGDot forums when you are used to links opening in a split-second.

Rendelius paid the server fees and tried to earn some money by selling adverts. I don't know how well that worked, but at some point in time Jolt came into the picture. They were most interested in the MMO side of the RPGDot sites as that fitted in their business model. I don't know how much money Rendelius made of selling it to Jolt, I hope for him it was plenty, but somewhere at the end of 2005 a deal was made. I think his biggest motivation in selling the site was that he wanted to pursue other things than running an RPG site and Jolt was willing to pay him for doing that.

Hmmm… Rend must have sold the site quite a bit earlier than late 2005. I quit the Dot in October 2005 (IIRC) and I had to (or tried to ) deal with Jolt for quite some time before that.

Now, the redesign must have happened in 2005 as I still have a Jolt_Design_Previews.rar file stored on my PC which is dated as "last modified" on August 21, 2005 but it was "created on" September 4, 2014 so I'm thinking that Rend must have sold the site before September 2014 even or why else would there be a redesign document, right?

I also seem to remember that Jolt first did not do anything at all for months and months after the acquisition and we were all kind of puzzled why they bought the site at all (it didn't help that they barely ever replied to e-mails ).
Then the redesign happened and it became clear that they were only after the ad space for their online services.

Finally, I remember that Rend mentioned that he put the equivalent of a "small car" (his exact words IIRC) into running RPGDot and that he was happy with the sale to Jolt since he managed to at least break even or even made a small profit so my guess is he got a nice high four digit or low five digit €uro sum for the sale depending on whatever Rend's definition of a "small car" is .

I think I joined the Dot when I was tracking down info that Corwin had posted about on Usenet. Forget the game but it was something old…like us

@Moriendor, that could very well be. I only have a site backup of the design before the Jolt look and feel, so I was going from memory, which isn't that good apparently

One thing i wanted to comment on is I like the current design. I've seen so many sites feel they require a 'redesign' only to make the sites awful (imho). Most of the sites I visit have a very clean layout; if you do decide to redesign (and i hope not) I hope it is not made too flashy and leaves the basics as currently exist. Having said that if you are using an off the shelf engine it is good to keep ti reasonably up to date for security.

I'm perfectly happy with current design as well. Its clean, light, nice looking and easy to use.

There are no big changes planned, only the addition of 3 or 4 ad banners and an animated front page that will take half a minute to load

I like the current design as it is. Please please please should anything change, don't make it some huge bloated page like most other sites I go to seem to do these days. Dunno why big an ugly seems to be all the rage these days, personally I think it looks horrible.

Originally Posted by Myrthos
There are no big changes planned, only the addition of 3 or 4 ad banners and an animated front page that will take half a minute to load

Sounds good!

Could you also please add an age check/verification before the page can be accessed? And I would also really appreciate a geo IP check so RPGWatch gets displayed in German automatically without my consent. Finally, let us not forget about some cookie disclaimer pop-ups. Those are awesome, too.

Well, if I can't have targeted ads for Viagra and Cialis, just because I'm over 50, then this site can just go hang

And if you have ads you must of course completely shut out adblock users in order to foster a harmonious user base. Everyone will benefit.

Oh yes that was the site previously - still remember being part of RPGDot - loved the brownish/golden colors of the previous site…

Originally Posted by Moriendor
Sounds good!

Could you also please add an age check/verification before the page can be accessed? And I would also really appreciate a geo IP check so RPGWatch gets displayed in German automatically without my consent. Finally, let us not forget about some cookie disclaimer pop-ups. Those are awesome, too.

I've got to ask, how is your hand?

https://web.archive.org/web/20030810…ndex.php#19581

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
I've got to ask, how is your hand?

https://web.archive.org/web/20030810…ndex.php#19581

Haha thanks for asking . The hand is fine and has fully recovered except for some minor scars. It wasn't -by far- as bad as my 1997 bike accident of which I have lasting memories .