Ambrosia Software Web Board: The Fate of Ambrosia and the Cythera Forums - Ambrosia Software Web Board

• I still think that the gandreas.com boards are an appropriate backup.
  
• We all (I think) know of #cythera on AfterNET. Anyone that doesn't isn't going to find us anyway.

I don't think there's any reason to create a new forum before we need it.

Honestly, I'd prefer something else. I'm not certain gandreas would appreciate certain topics (such as saved game hacking) being discussed on his boards, although he might not even notice.

I thought the plan was that whenever this board ceases, Sely will make a new one somewhere (probably the place he linked a bit ago) and then post a link on the Gandreas forum. No?

I got another Ferazel's Wand CD-ROM from Ambrosia in the mail today. I didn't order another one... I'm taking this as a bad sign :(

Small data point: a couple months ago, I looked at old domains that Ambrosia owns (evnova.com, handsomeharry.com, avara.com, at least one or two others). They haven't been used in a long time, but were still on the books. Many of them were set to expire this year; I think evnova.com was going to expire this month. But, in December, Ambrosia renewed the registrations. They were renewed until 2019, quite a long time in advance. So, that's some evidence of forward thinking from them.

Though, why they would think holding on to avara.com until 2019 is important is anyone's guess.

(two other former ASW domains, delver.com (Cythera) and arescentral.com (Ares) expired years ago; I own the latter and Sears owns the former)

This post has been edited by Pallas Athene: 14 January 2014 - 08:38 AM

Ooh, that's encouraging! I don't think I've even heard of those websites.

My best guess is that when they sent me the Ferazel CD before, they forgot to mark it as fulfilled, and have just recently gotten around to reading the support email I sent in July, asking them to send me a CD? Do you think I should try to contact them or anything? I feel a little guilty, but I kinda doubt they'd want the disc back.

Send them a support email asking! Then you won't have to deal with it for a few months.

Update: I never bothered trying to contact Ambrosia about the extra Ferazel's Wand CD. I got another one in the mail yesterday. It had six stamps on the envelope (it only needed two).

Surely they'll run out of copies of the disc eventually, right?

Well, Bernard replied right away once I got around to sending it a support email about it. I guess I should've done that after the second disc. He said he'd try to stop sending me discs. Also the number of stamps needed depends on whether the post office decides to classify it as commercial or not, apparently they're not very consistent.

You could hang the spare disks on your wall and make a reflective display.

There goes your chance for a lifetime supply of free coasters...

I got my fourth(?) copy of Ferazel's Wand in the mail today. This time the disc arrived fragmented with a chunk broken off :(

Are they trying to pawn off their entire store of discs on you one at a time?

Hmm, well, I guess you could try contacting them again. Either that, or make a reflective display, or enjoy a lifetime supply of coasters.

I wouldn't've thought optical discs would make very good coasters? A decoration would be fun.

I did email Bernard again, I haven't heard back.

A brief google search indicates that they can indeed be used as coasters, but a decoration is also a nice alternative if you wish to pursue that route. I suppose you could always mail them back, but I don't think there is much reason to do so, since they seem glad to be rid of them.

It'd be cool to have it on the gandreas forums. Maybe he'd even pop ion once in a while and laugh at us haha.

I'd still prefer to have it elsewhere. I could be wrong (since I don't read people all that well) but gandreas doesn't seem very interested in Cythera these days. I he were interested, it might be nice, but I don't think he'd enjoy the hacking topics and such. Also, it is convenient to have a moderator about (to delete double posts, lock old TSs, etc.) and that would be more difficult to achieve on gandreas' boards.

Has he been contacted about this kind of thing before? Also why wouldn't he like the hacking topics?

Maybe if we all swarmed his forum and were halfway active, he'd notice that people still care about Cythera and he'd make Cythera 2. *daydreams*

Two Jacks, on 28 September 2014 - 01:38 PM, said:

I seem to recall having read somewhere that he didn't really like Bryce's work on hacking, but that might have been a misunderstanding on my part. I've not personally ever had a chance to speak with gandreas, so I don't actually know much about him. I suppose you could try contacting him; however, I still think an external community would have the advantage of being easier to moderate.

He has said in the past that he dislikes the stories and chrons (and other types of "fan fiction"), which is why I think his forums wouldn't be a good place to go.

I don't really like the idea of relying on someone who isn't involved in the community and is no longer interested in the game. gandreas could decide to take down the forums without notice (which would be perfectly within his rights) and we'd be in the same situation we're expecting with ASW. Plus it feels like hijacking his resources when half of what goes on here has little to do with the game.

I've been thinking about this a bit. I still think it would be good for us to meet on Gandreas' forum to discuss our new forum, then dispatch to the new forum once it's been made. That way, we could stay here until it no longer exists (or is usable).

Just staying on Gandreas' forum has some appeal (after all, he does have a Delver section, why wouldn't he want it to be used?). But Sely's comment about savefile hacking and Tyry's comment about stories made me wonder if we'd be an annoyance to Gandreas. I went back and skimmed over Gandreas' posts on this board.

This was the only post I found regarding our stories (I may have missed others, I wasn't reading carefully). I looked up J Micheal Straczynski, and it seems he was a writer for Babylon 5 (or something like that?) and ran or was part of a forum for it. He asked that no one post links to fan-fiction where he could see them, so the fan-fiction community for that show ended up being "underground," away from Mr Straczynski. In this way, it does seem like it would be rude to post TSes or chronicles directly on Gandreas' forum. :\

As for save-file hacking, I didn't find any posts where he addressed that directly, but he did several times address the issue of a Cythera editor; where one of his reservations was people potentially using it to bypass the restrictions on the unregistered version. (I don't really see how that would be an issue, since I'd assume the editor would only be available in the registered version; but the Cythera editor was never usable/ready for release anyway.) Since people could perhaps bypass registration with savefile hacking, maybe that would be a concern. But I don't think anyone has used savefile hacking to steal the full version, and at this point, I doubt the registrations are rolling in anyway. In my opinion, it doesn't seem like an issue anymore. Barely anyone even has a way to play Cythera, and Gandreas has pretty-much said there will never be a Cythera X, right?

I agree with Avatara about using the irc channel as a backup if this forum crashes, until a new forum is established. I still favor an external forum, especially if gandreas is not very fond of the TSs and such. There seems to be no gain to annoying him in this regard.