May Contain Nuts

I touched on this a bit in my last post, but I wanted to take some time and go over a few (but certainly not all) of the possibilities for what we might end up being allowed to do with OpenURU, depending on how the Plasma and the Uru content are licensed.

First off, I think it’s at least somewhat likely that Cyan will release the Plasma code under a Creative Commons license, in which case the most likely candidates are Attribution, Attribution Share Alike, Attribution Non-Commercial, and Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (I’m not going to go into GPL, BSD, MIT, etc. because I have very little knowledge of their inner workings, and I don’t have a supremely large amount of time to devote to what is essentially a thought exercise).  The Share Alike licenses are, to my mind, the most likely of the most likely candidates, and the Non-Commercial versions seem like a reasonable certainty, but I’ve been wrong before. Any of these licenses would enable developers to take the Plasma engine, the Plasma server code, or both, and use them to build their own brand new, not-D’ni-related MMO. The only question is whether those new MMOs will be able to make a profit, as determined by whether the license is Non-Commercial or not.

None of this covers the actual content of the game, though; just the code that makes the game run. That, if it’s licensed at all, would almost certainly be licensed separately.

What I would prefer to see Cyan do is license the entire existing game’s contents under the Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, or something fundamentally similar. This would enable the community to fix long-standing problems with the game’s content - from fixing minor graphical issues, to overhauling the KI, to completely revising how the game begins for new players - without running afoul of Cyan’s intellectual property rights by ensuring that the content remains under the same license. Since this license would apply only to the material that Cyan created and any derivative works that were made from it (they’d be licensing the models, not the universe), I believe (but am not 100% absolutely certain) that user-created Ages would not be subject to the Share Alike clause - treating the content as divorced from the engine powering it is a cheap but effective way of attempting to ensure that. In any case, if the Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license ends up not quite fitting the bill, I’m sure something could be found that would require changes made under the license to Cyan’s own content to be redistributed under the same license without requiring new Ages added by the community to be similarly licensed.

It should be noted that under this sort of license, Cyan would be creating a platform for fan fiction, but not the creation of an Extended Universe of D’ni canon. Without a specifically-defined process by which content created by the community can be approved for inclusion into the Extended Universe canon, the story of D’ni will be static until Cyan (or a licensee) is able to add to it in the future.

Since I’m all about increasing the breadth and depth of the D’ni universe, I would love to see Cyan maintain its stance on user-created canon expansions that RAWA outlined for MORE: a community-run panel would review submitted content, and approve it if it passed a set of well-defined criteria. I don’t know if the FCAL panel should necessarily retain its originally-intended composition though. What would be more flexible is a dual panel, with the GoW and GoMa in charge of overseeing the inclusion of content into OpenURU based on its stability, where such content could be added to any shard upon approval. The GoA would run a separate “canon review” panel, which would be entirely optional, but whose approval would enable the applicant’s content to be placed on an (the?) Exnteded Universe Shard, which would likely be managed by the Guilds.

(I should note that Guild approval is obviously not going to be a requirement for content inclusion depending on the shard, but I would hope that if something passes a GoW/GoMa test plan, it could be added anywhere with reasonable assurances as to its stability. Clearly, though, content is going to need to be tested before it’s added to a live shard… exactly how that happens will likely be up to the individual shard managers.)

This is, of course, all what I would prefer to have happen, because it’s incredibly flexible in what it allows, without requiring Cyan to give up creative control of their intellectual property - all derivative works would have to be properly attributed, with their content specifically (i.e. the stuff from MOUL) licensed under a Share Alike-format agreement. It sets up the possibility for both canon wonks and casual storytellers alike to have a place and a way to contribute without stepping on each other’s toes. It also makes it possible for other groups or companies to benefit not just from Cyan’s years of work on their engine, but also from the mountainous improvements that are bound to be rolled into the code by the open source community. The MMO space has never really had a AAA-quality engine be this accessible to so many people; it will be interested to see what happens in the future with Cyan taking the first step towards leveling the playing field for newcomers.

Of course, what could also happen is that Cyan retains exclusive ownership of the content from MOUL, which seems like a bit of a dick move, since it would severely hinder the ability of the community to fix some of the more eggregious problems with the game - not just technically, but gameplay-wise as well. It would require us to figure out a completely different way of integrating new user-created content too, rather than doing the “easy” thing of piling it into the Nexus, or the more visually interested thing of expanding the Library.

In such a situation, Cyan will still need to have a license in place for user-created content, because even if Cyan isn’t interested in letting players expand the D’ni universe anymore, user-created content within the D’ni universe still requires a license from Cyan because at the end of the day, you’re building off of their intellectual property and distributing it to other people (and it’s the “distributing it to other people” bit that causes problems, legally). Given the immense interest people have in adding content to Uru, I don’t think Cyan in its current state is going to be able to handle individual requests in a timely manner; a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license for the D’ni universe IP with a few additional restrictions (basically what’s on their Legal page) would probably be more than sufficient.

I, of course, have more thoughts on what I would like to see happen, gameplay-wise, in OpenURU, but for now, I kind of need to get back to work.  More later :).

So, evidently Cyan is open-sourcing Myst Online. After re-reading the comments in the Spokesman Review a third time in preparation for writing this entry, I’ve picked up on a couple of things that I’m not sure others have really noticed… I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, my initial reactions.

I suspect that it’s currently one of my worst-kept secrets, but since the plan to release MORE essentially dissolved earlier this year, I’ve been working hard-core on ideas for how to build a new MMO set in D’ni (the chances of actually pulling it off without obscenely large piles of money were always very slim, but I considered it a good thought experiment at least). To say that this new announcement has drastically altered any and all of my thoughts about this little side-project of mine is something of an understatement. I may be one of the few people in the community to actually be a tad conflicted about this revelation, but then I had some pretty slick ideas for how to improve on what I saw as the game’s fundamental flaws. I’d like to discuss some of these ideas in the future in the interests of making OSMOUL a better game, so keep an eye out for that.

My very next thought was, “oh crap, what’s this going to do to the Archive?!” I initially missed the part in the Spokesman Review blog post where it says that Cyan still plans to operate the central Vault, and flipped out about the potential for a completely fragmented multi-shard insanity where no shard’s implementation of OSMOUL was the complete one, and the complete view of OSMOUL’s shards was a contradictory mess. Having now realized that Cyan intends to keep MOUL itself on one instance with multiple servers attached to it from around the world, much in the same way that MORE would have, I’m less freaked out by the prospect of OSMOUL than I was an hour ago. I have no doubt that other shards will inevitably appear, whether out of necessity or desire, but I think it’s safe to say that any official canon expansion or Extended Universe canon development will take place on the shard backed by Cyan’s Vault, while other shards will range anywhere from high-end fanfic to “just goofing around”, and honestly I have no problem with that. As it stands, Uru can most certainly not be all things to all players, and while I hope that the official shard develops quickly enough that newcomers of all persuasions can find something that interests them, I also understand that for any number of reasons, some fans might want a different type of experience with Uru as a game from that offered on the official shard.

With all of that said, I’m very much interested in finding out what Cyan wants to do about fan-created content on their shard. If the plan is to basically just run it like an open-source MORE, then I think the Guilds (myself included) ought to get back to the task of creating the FCAL Panel and hammering out a process for how content will move from a testing environment to the official shard. I hope to get the Archive back into a more active state as well, since the future of D’ni doesn’t look quite as bleak now as it did a couple of hours ago. On that note, I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Invision Power Board 3, which powers DPWR’s backend, as it should enable the site to do pretty much everything I’ve been trying to hand-code in some form or fashion over the past several site revisions. More on DPWR later, though.

Having thought this whole thing over for some time now, I’m actually rather excited now at the prospect of what OSMOUL could do for Uru. With fans able to get their hands on the code, hopefully some long-overdue projects will finally get taken care of, like an overhaul of the KI, or fully debugging the stupid doors, or the client collapsing under the weight of handling physics objects in a highly populated area (or making the client more capable of loading and rendering massive Ages intelligently). Depending on how lax Cyan intends to be with what they let us create and add into the game, maybe I could even get to some of the places I’ve been oggling over since I first read the Book of Ti’ana over 10 years ago. A complete implementation of the Descent would be beyond awesome, and getting to more of K’veer or into the Guild Hall would be super cool. At the very least, getting some of the lingering graphical glitches in MOUL tidied up would be nice to see.

Sadly, I don’t have quite the readership of Ursula Vernon, who tends to get unfathomable quantities of feedback when she asks questions far more obscure than the one I’m about to, but hopefully someone on MystBlogs will be able to point me in the right direction here…

I’m thinking about looking for a new printer soon, because the printer/scanner/copier we’ve got right now (an Epson CX-7400) sucks down ink like a cocaine addict in a sugar factory (or something), and tends to get its heads clogged at more frequent intervals than I would prefer (granted I’d prefer “never”, but I’ll take what I can get on the reliability front).

There are a few requirements for a new printer:

1. It needs to be able to print photographic prints with a reasonable degree of quality.
2. It needs to have large enough ink reserves that I’m not buying new cartridges every month at $12 a pop.
3. It needs to play nicely with Macs and PCs (this is largely a given, but as some animals are more equal than others, so do some printers play more nicely cross-platform than others… a Bonjour-compatible one would be ideal).
4. It would preferably be a multi-function printer, because we don’t have a lot of room for a printer and a scanner (or worse, a printer and a printer/scanner, since getting rid of the scanner in the CX-7400 in favor of a dedicated device seems unlikely).
5. For the purposes of this discussion, price is not necessarily an object, but keeping it below $300 would be nice, because then I’ll be able to afford it before the end of the world.

I have, in the past, had bad experiences with Canon printers just falling apart after a year or two, because Canon hadn’t evidently mastered the concept of selling an affordable, functional printer that runs forever but kills you with ink costs the same way that Epson has, but if that has changed, by all means point it out to me. I’m also hesitant to go with Epson again at the moment because of the aforementioned ink-sucking tendencies of our current printer, but if the higher-end models are less susceptible to this, again, please let me know.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to buy a laser printer for the day-to-day document printing, and save the color printing for an inkjet… if you think such a split-responsibility setup is a good idea, what would you recommend in the way of laser printers, and would you still suggest replacing the current inkjet all-in-one?

I’m sure at least one person in the community has noticed that I haven’t been saying much in public these days. I want to take a moment and apologize, as well as lay out why that’s the case.

First off, I’m definitely not trying to ignore folks. If you’ve PMed me on DPWR, sent me an email, or otherwise tried to contact me and been met with silence, I’m sorry. I’ve been super busy at work for the past couple of months, and the onset of winter coupled with the fact that the sun sets around 5:00 PM here has left me feeling incredibly lethargic when I get home for the day. I typically manage to find the time and energy to read my email and skim some news feeds before collapsing on the futon for the night and zoning out to MythBusters, Countdown, Daily Show, and Colbert Report.

As some may also have noticed, I seem to have stumbled into helming Mysterium in 2009. This is super-convenient since I actually live in the host city, but it’s also a lot more work than even I thought it would be, mostly because I’m trying to keep the ball rolling while keeping a master plan for both the planning process and the event itself in my head. There’s also a fair amount of pressure, whether real or perceived, to pull this off well because of how passionate about Mysterium its attendees are, and that’s not really doing wonders for my psyche either ;). I can easily see why Eleri decided not to be in charge again this year, and honestly can’t fathom how Scraper managed to do it for 8 straight years (I think it’s safe to say I won’t be chairing the committee for 2010 if I can possibly avoid it).

I’ve got so many things to do in terms of digital projects and general around-the-house work that I’ve gotten a little overwhelmed lately, and when that happens my brain tends to go into full-on lockdown mode, at which point not much ends up getting done, which just increases the number of things I need to do later and furthers the cycle. It’s incredibly frustrating, and I’m going to try to work myself out of it over the next month or so.

So, with that said, I need to go do laundry, contact a few people about Mysterium stuff, start a load of dishes, and see if I can start banging on one of the various gaming projects I’ve got rampaging through my head. Then tomorrow I get to veg out to lots of food and good company, so that’ll be an awesome and welcome reprieve before heading back to work Friday.

I’m not dead! I’m just acting like it!

Okay, while this is cool and all, I don’t think I’d want to (or even be able to) surf this new interplanetary internet. Can’t we make with the particle-entangled communications arrays yet?

(For those who may not know, entangled particles are a pair of particles that reflect changes made to each other instantaneously, regardless of distance. Forget subspace, Quantum Mechanics makes science fiction more awesome every day.)

So, evidently you can circulate false information about Democratic voting times in Virginia, claim it was an office prank gone wrong, and not be charged for it, even though it’s patently illegal to do so.

You can also evidently make misleading robo-calls to voters in Ohio telling them the same thing (vote on the 5th if you’re a Democrat)… I wonder if you can get away with that too.  Please tell me someone’s gotten the Caller ID on that robo-call office for local and state authorities to investigate… should we take bets on whether they get charged with voter suppression and disseminating false information?

It would seem that, since the polls are indicating there’s no way for McCain to win this election fairly, certain Republicans (or other McCain supporters) are taking it upon themselves to win by any means necessary, even if they’re immoral, unethical, and outright illegal.  No wonder Obama’s been pushing early voting… you can’t miss election day thanks to Republican-sympathetic undermining efforts when you’ve already voted last week!

Why can’t we all just vote?  I’m all for increasing your own party’s voter turn-out, but if we’re going to call this a democracy (which it really isn’t, it’s a republic, but whatever), we should be encouraging everyone to vote, regardless of the outcome of the election.  I’ve reminded several of the people I work with to send in their ballots (Spokane votes via mail-in ballot), even though I know they support McCain.  The strength of this country is its people’s ability to choose their leaders in an open and fair election process, and while I may not agree with who someone is voting for, in no way would I want to see their ability to cast that vote hindered.

… is in the tank for Obama.

I think the most amusing part of that article are the comments accusing FOX’s own poll of having a liberal bias. And of course, the saddest part are the comments trumpeting the Bradley Effect as McCain’s saving grace / ace in the hole. Evidently in order for McCain to win, he has to do so with the help of racist bastards. Nice.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over, but at this point, I think the Fat Lady is getting ready for her overture. Hopefully this’ll be called early tomorrow night so I don’t have to stay up all night waiting for the results to come in from Colorado (though I may stay up just to see which color Arizona turns). At least I’m on the west coast this election cycle… I watched the last two in Kentucky, and that sucked. Was up until 4 AM waiting to see who won… then went to bed with nightmares :P.

I typically try to keep political discussion to a minimum because of how caustic the subject can be, but I’ve spoken my mind on the subject in the past, and refuse to be a prisoner of political correctness on my own blog, so here we go.

Living in Spokane, Washington, where voting is done entirely via mail-in ballots (I suspect mainly because the county is large enough and generally has a low enough population density that polling stations are less effective and cost-efficient than they would be in Seattle or an eastern state where it seems you’re always 5 minutes from three other cities), my wife and I have actually already voted, so I guess this is more of an explanation and commentary post than a “who am I gonna vote for” post (of course, IMO, being undecided at this point means you’re either not paying attention, are probably not going to vote, or Ron Paul isn’t on your ballot this year).

I have cast my vote for Senator Barack Obama, and it’s not because I’m black (which I’m not), or because I’d feel guilty about not voting for the black guy because of some inverted racism BS.  I voted for him because after 8 years of having a President who is only barely capable of forming complete sentences in front of the American people, it’s incredibly refreshing to see a candidate who is not only well-spoken, but who speaks to his audience like they’re adults, and not stupid children unable to handle complex truths.  I voted for him because after 8 years of “with us or against us”-style governing - something that McCain seems all too eager to perpetuate - Obama readily recognizes that the world is not a Hollywood action film or an episode of 24.  I voted for him because throughout his campaign, he has been able and willing to discuss his plans and policies, while John McCain has been increasingly focused on bad-mouthing his opponent at the expense of putting forth his own ideas.  I don’t think I’ve heard a new policy idea from McCain since before the last Presidential debate, and in an environment of extreme market volatility and evolving economic crisis, that’s not good.  It doesn’t matter now, but over the past few weeks I’ve been looking at McCain and thinking “tell me what you’re going to do as President, sir, don’t waste my time and attention rambling on about Bill Ayers and false assertions that your opponent is a socialist for giving me a tax cut,” and not once has he done anything of the sort.

Obama also strikes me as far more presidential than McCain in terms of personality, mannerisms, and approach.  He is level-headed, objective, and slow to anger (judging by the last debate, though, he does get easily amused at people spewing total bullshit, but that’s fine with me), with a long-term view of this country’s future, and a plan for getting us there.  He’s not afraid to speak his mind if he disagrees with someone, but is respectful in how he handles those disagreements, and generally seems very tolerant of opposing viewpoints, even if he thinks they’re ultimately wrong.  In a stunning change from the norm, he’s also an incredible optimist who sees the best in this country and its people.  McCain on the other hand bounces from attack to attack on a weekly basis, is quick to anger, makes rash decisions (Sarah Palin, Q.E.D.), is very resistant and intolerant of views other than his own (also evident in the last debate, with all the eye-rolling and obnoxious chuckling [and greepy grins] whenever Obama opened his mouth, especially toward the end), and seems to have the same attitude towards the rest of the world that Bush has, and that alone terrifies the hell out of me.  He’s also personally admitted that the economy is not his strong suit, and when we’re in the middle of an economic crisis/meltdown, that’s not a good person to have in charge of the country.  The nail in the coffin is probably that he’s taken to using the same divisive fear-based politics that Bosh has employed over the past 8 years to get people to join his cause because the alternative could be the complete destruction of the entire nation (ZOMFG TERRORISM!  ALERT LEVEL ORANGE!).

In a way it’s sad, because I might have considered voting for McCain if he were the same person he was in 2000, and was able to convince me that he’d actually clean up his party.  Now, though, he’s become a slave to his party, turning his back on many (if not all) of his former principles in what looks like a desperate effort to win the election at all costs (and if your desperation is that transparent, it’s not a good sign for your chances).  His choice of running mate has only further damaged any positive opinion of him I might have had.  Sarah Palin has only been on the national stage for 2 months, and in that time she’s displayed a gross lack of understanding about the responsibilities of the job she’s seeking to obtain, a complete inability (and even reluctance) to talk to the press, has been caught in numerous bold-faced lies (including her most recent claim that the Trooper-gate investigation cleared her of any ethical wrongdoing, when in fact the report stated just the opposite), has spent over $150,000 on clothes and accessories (which is more than 6 times what I make in a year… so don’t go telling me you’re a “common woman hockey-mom”, ma’am), and it’s been reported that while governor, she flew her kids around Alaska on the taxpayers’ dime to the tune of over $22,000.  This is just in two months!  Hell, her complete lack of understanding about what the Vice President actually does should disqualify her from the position all by itself.  If the VP debate were a job interview, she’d have been kicked to the curb in a heartbeat with all of her winkin’ and not answerin’ the questions she was asked and makin’ fun of the other applicants.  (On a side-note, I want to state for the record how delicious it was when Obama told Joe the Plumber what his fine would be for not providing health care to his fictional employees… “ZERO!?!?!”  Oh the lulz… THAT is how you win debates, by shutting your opponent up and shutting their argument down, literally.)

While I’m on the subject of treating the Presidency like a job and not just an elected office, I continue to be completely baffled by the number of people in this country who seem to be completely terrified of the concept of a smart person being President.  Honestly, in any other job, being smart is an unequivocal bonus (well, aside from minimum wage positions where being smart and highly-educated means you’re a high-risk employee, because odds are you’ll find a better job before your soul is crushed by the fry machine…).  Why, then, would we not want the single most powerful person in the country to be an egg-headed boy-genius?  I actually posed this question to a co-worker who isn’t voting for Obama partly because he’s “an elitist” (and partly because he’s “a socialist”, which I’ll get to…), and his response was that if someone’s too smart or too successful, they have no concept of how the average person thinks or what they want from their country, and end up making all sorts of bad policy decisions that negatively impact everyday working-class Americans.  Honestly I was so baffled by the implication that Barack Obama is more of an elitist than the guy with a multi-million-dollar trophy wife, 7 houses, and 13 cars that I couldn’t come up with a counter-point (in hindsight, this sentence is perhaps the most perfect response I could have given).

Now, as for this whole Joe the Plumber business… John McCain has spun this guy’s story into a completely mythical fabrication.  As McCain tells it, Obama knocked on the man’s front door, was asked a “tough question” about his tax plan from the perspective of a small-business entrepreneur, and his only response was that we should “spread the wealth around”.  Now, Obama is persecuting poor Joe for asking a question and invading his privacy by having news vans parked in front of his house.  The patent falsehood of this entire talkign point is so completely unfathomable I have to wonder if anybody in the McCain campaign even lives on this planet.  In truth, Joe approached Obama at an unscheduled campaign stop in his neighborhood, asked his question, and was told unequivocably by Obama that he would be paying no more taxes than he would have under Clinton’s administration (and would only be paying those higher taxes on income over $250,000… so making $260,000 would mean only $10,000 would be taxed at the higher rate), and that by cutting his taxes on his current wages (which are, in fact, well below the $200,000 bracket for single-filer small business income), he would be helping Joe buy his company sooner.  After that conversation, McCain (not Obama) mentioned him 21 times in the last debate, and has mentioned him at seemingly every opportunity since then.  If anybody’s persecuting the poor guy and keeping him in the spotlight for asking Obama a “tough question” (and honestly, “are you going to raise my taxes if I make over $250,000 a year” is not a “tough question”, that’s fact-checking), it’s John McCain.  McCain brought him up frequently enough that the media wanted to talk to him and find out more about this mystical “Joe the Plumber”, and that has nothing to do with his original question about Obama’s tax policy.  But, McCain can now use this iconic figure as a talking point and rallying cry among his supporters (few people outside of that base seem to be buying his BS) rather than having to spend time talking about the actual issues, so I guess in some twisted way, it’s a win for McCain’s strategy of campaigning.

Finally, I’ve noticed a lot of talk about Obama having significant ground games and even significant ad buys in very red states like Texas, North Dakota, and Georgia, as well as long-shot battlegrounds like West Virginia (and to a degree, Indiana, though that one seems closer to flipping now).  Mostly, people are confused about why he’s wasting money and effort in those states instead of just concentrating on the ones he knows (or thinks) he can win to pass to 270-mark in the electoral college.  Honestly, I think this is a concerted effort on his behalf to spur voter participation and drive up the popular vote, so that even if the electoral college is close, his win percentage in the popular vote is significant because of participation in all 50 states.  This is how you be a uniter, not a divider, ladies and gentlemen.  The more of a mandate he can claim to have because of electoral college and especially popular vote success, the easier it will be for him to do his job as President… and if a 51% popular vote win was enough for Bush to have a “mandate” in his second term, well more than 51% should be beyond sufficient to claim the same thing (and actually have those who didn’t vote for you believe it).  Plus, when you raise $150 million in a single month, you gotta spend it somewhere, so why not?

Obama/Biden ‘08!

I think I’m beginning to understand how and why Blizzard continually manages to make more money than some third-world countries… they make one game and sell it to you three times.  Clearly taking the Square-Enix Final Fantasy approach to storytelling through games (whereby you answer an increasingly large number of questions about the primary story’s plot through additional titles, ideally on completely different consoles so that hardware manufacturers can get in on the consumer screw-fest), they’re releasing StarCraft 2 as 3 separate titles, each focusing on a different race.  I suspect that to get the whole story, you’re going to have to drop $150 on what should by rights probably be a $60-$70 experience.  And before I go any farther, I would just like to point out that this is a different sort of “sell one game three times” magic than what the likes of Tell Tale Games does with their products… you really only have to buy a season once to get the whole story, and a whole season is still cheaper than most stand-alone titles.  Blizzard, on the other hand, will probably charge full price for each installment of their epic title of ultimate destiny (dun da-da-dun!).

While I respect Blizzard on one level for being able to turn such massive profits off of the backs of crushed souls the world over World of Warcraft players and bucking the trend toward games being varying shades of brown and black, stuff like this (as well as the completely unnecessary and inexplicably popular portable soul-crushing experience World of Warcraft: The Gathering CCG) just strikes me as exploiting a fanbase already slavishly devoted to your every whim.

I’ve been mulling this over for more than a month now, since I brought it up to Blade as part of our conversations about the GoA after attending the GoMe meeting in August, and have finally reached a conclusion: I can no longer be the sole point of development and administration for DPWR.  The site has gotten large enough, and I’ve gotten busy enough, that I simply can’t handle the work load anymore.  Unfortunately, because of DPWR’s history, transitioning to shared ownership will not be an easy thing.  The code has never been under source control, and development hasn’t exactly been what one might call “professional” at any point in time.  DPWR is how (and why) I learned PHP, and a lot of what I do with the site generally consists of hacking and modifying existing files in Invision Power Board, with poorly-documented and poorly-commented results.

What I want to do is essentially start from scratch in some ways.  I want to start with a virgin installation of IPB and the various components that I use for DPWR (Links, Gallery, and Wiki), and then build the current feature set back into the site.  It’s a fair amount of replicated effort, I know, but I think it’s the only way to start off on the right foot.  To make things potentially easier, I’ve already subversioned the current files so that there’s a base point of comparison that can be built from and re-implemented whole-cloth where appropriate (and possible).  In addition to re-programming the PHP, I would also like to tackle modifying the site’s skin as well, since it’s got some rather obvious legibility issues and needs some love to pull it more in-line with the Guild of Archivists concept (Tweek being the awesome person that he is has provided me with his “Guild Pub” emblem for the GoA, which I’d like to run with).

Ultimately, my goal is to get everything updated and moved to the live site by the end of the year (just in time for IPB 3 to come out and start the process all over again :P).  Since most of the stuff on the site doesn’t need much (if any) modification to work, and all of the really hard work of getting the Archive to support tags has already been done (it just needs to be re-implemented into the vanilla install), I think the thing that would take the longest would be the skin.

I’ve decided to do this now (rather than wait for IPB 3 to come out) for several reasons: 1) I want to make sure that the site is actually maintainable by a small group before IPB 3 comes out and the really hard work of porting the Archive component to the new version begins, 2) I want the site to be able to support all of the requirements that being the host for the GoA puts on it ASAP, and 3) I don’t have the time to do any of this by myself anymore.  I’ve got one pro bono web design project I’m working on right now, and will hopefully have a contract for another site by next month.  Coupled with the 3 months worth of other small-to-massive-sized projects I’ve accumulated over the summer without a Mac to call my own and the fact that I’m at work 9 hours a day, I just don’t have the ability to throw myself at DPWR the way I did when I was 15 without a care in the world ;).  (On a side note, it’s actually kind of scary that I’ve been managing this site since I was 15… it originally launched on Homestead on June 30, 2000)

So, if you’re a PHP developer interested in helping to get DPWR on its feet, please leave a comment with some way of getting in touch with you, or email me and let me know you’re interested.  I realize I’m asking a great deal with no real compensation (all I’ve got are my gratitude and appreciation [as well as my most profound apologies for the current sorry state of the code base]), so I don’t exactly expect a stampede of volunteers, but anyone willing to lend a hand would be very, very greatly appreciated.  I’ll discuss the details of how to get to the SVN source, as well as some other guidelines and requirements, privately with anyone who volunteers.  It’s not nasty, mean, paranoia-inducing “OMG SEEKRETS!” stuff, just stuff that I would rather discuss in confidence because it has to do with a non-open-source project ;).