Alsherok

After 11 long years of running, Alsherok is closing its doors to the public. There are many reasons for this, but for the most part they all point back to simply having no further desire to run an active game. Our playerbase more or less evaporated six years ago at the onset of the MMORPG age and has never recovered. The staff has all moved on to other things that actually have meaning. I have effectively been running a ghost ship for the last three years. The steady decline of the MUD community has also played a role in why this is being done now. It's no longer what it once was. There's no spark left. It's all about bickering, backbiting, infighting, and who's epeen is bigger than the other guy.

As of now, Alsherok is only available to her remaining staff. A glorified chat room if you will. No further work will be done on the areas, code, or anything else relating to it. That includes the still broken sections of the website, which I am going to unlink as they no longer serve a purpose. I will also not be renewing the domain, which expires in July of 2009. Any areas still held here that have not been finished will be provided to the staff members who still want them. If you wait too long though I may simply discard them. The two development ports have been decommissioned and will not be restarted. Everything has been moved to port 5500. If you have an email address or subdomain being provided through the alsherok.net domain, you need to get in touch with me ASAP as I am going to shut down email service to the domain as well as terminating any subdomains which are unaccounted for by the end of May. That will include deletion of any web apps or other materials UNLESS YOU SPEAK UP AND SAY SOMETHING!

For those of you who still hold fond memories of the game, I bid you farewell. At one time it was pretty cool and I even once enjoyed it.

I've spent a bit of time cleaning up some more neglect. Most of the pages in the information section ( that exist ) were a mess of tag soup. Those have been cleaned up now. I've also added to the deities page since it was missing information on our newer deities. Well, newer than the last time that data was updated anyway :)

This leaves only the missing external stuff I need to write code for. So there's still some info pages which are dead links.

Everything here should validate as XHTML 1.1 now too. So if your browser was giving you crap, it shouldn't anymore.

As you can see, the website for Alsherok has received a much needed revamp. Gone finally are the wretched frames, replaced with the sleek newness of the Sandbox website package. There's still some stuff left to fix, more to bring over, and some stuff that's going to be broken for right now. Hopefully the mess won't be too awful.

Rumors of our demise are as yet unfounded... for we yet live and breathe! Or, well, something to that affect anyway. Some of you may or may not have noticed that the pages and subpages on the site are going through W3C validation. Consider this a long overdue act of boredom or something.

On other notes, the MUD is still alive and kicking and being tweaked, poked, and prodded. The code is undergoing a conversion to C++ so things might get a bit shaky at times, but fear not, for we will prevail against the compiler and it's evilness!

As well, the forums have been changed over yet again, this time returning to the Ikonboard system. Thank you for being such a putz Invisionboard.

And sheesh, maybe letting more than 2 years go by in between news posts is bad....

Yes, we're still alive. News may be scarce, but cold harsh reality has ahold of many of us these days. This doesn't mean we aren't humming away quietly in the background though :)