A revived merger proposal.

[SirNitram]

Didn't anyone remember to take the Chair Forceman's keyboard from him before he started drinking?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Ma'am he is drunk and posted prematurely. Darksilver as removed his post.

It's alright.


Would you speak to me privately, please? It has been a long while, and I have something to say.

[Dark Silver]

that would be my doing, I felt his post wasn't particularly politic, and thus i was endeavouring to split it prior to your viewing it.

Obviously I was not quick enough.


We are in discussion at the present of your proposal Marina. We will get back to you soon with our thoughts and a answer.

[frigidmagi]

Would you speak to me privately, please? It has been a long while, and I have something to say.

We have PMs for a reason.

[B4UTRUST]

No, nobody has taken my keyboard, nor will they. That is the glory of living multiple states away from everyone else and being at a LAN party full of likewise drunken Chair Forcers.

And here I thought my post was rather polite. I mean I didn't call her names or make fun of the way she dressed or even question her sexuality or heritage or parentage or lineage of any of that... Not that I wanted to mind you, I just thought I would bring up the point that I didn't.

Ooo more vodka...

[frigidmagi]

May the Good Lord in his Heaven eternally curse drunks who serve pilots.

[B4UTRUST]

They do on a weekly basis, trust me. But we're getting off topic with my ranting of those damnedable flight crew and those damnedable planes that I curse to crash upon every landing...

[Dark Silver]

Marina:

After discussing your proposal between ourselves and members of our staff, we've come to the following conclusions:

a) Your proposal offers a a greater pool of assets for Librium Arcana. A considerable amount of new assets, to be precise, and no merger should be gone into without a proper inspection of these new assets.

b) While expansion of the current staff is not the most ideal, especially the addition of a new member of the Administrative board, we have come to a conclusion which would seem most oppurtune for all parties involved.


As such, We cannot agree to a merger until such time as we can can review these new assets you propose to bring to our table. We understand DS is currently undergoing a move, and as such, those assets are not readily available for review. We feel that should you desire it, after your board has returned to a functioning state, and we have reviewed the content you wish to bring to us, we will continue these discussions to their hopfully, logical conclusion.


I hope this is agreeable with you.

Cordially;
Allen "Dark Silver" Thibodaux

[B4UTRUST]

To inform you, Duchess, we are currently discussing the whole issue within the staff, to bring forth all pros and cons towards this.

Give us a day or so to debate this and we will settle this matter. Though, honestly, several of us would like to view your board to see the state of the userbase we would be recieving before we totally agree to it. Also, we would like to write in as an additional clause that all positions given are on a probational period so we can make sure that everyone works and meshes cohesively and there are not to many conflicts of personality and ego to work through in the given positions. This is not to say anything against you or yours only, but for all of us who may or may not get along well with our counterparts from the other board and potentitally will require a period of adjustment to get to know each other.

The probationary clause is given so that we can attempt to rectify any problems between the staff members prior to solidfying positions.

If this is acceptable to you, please let me know. Again, we would really like to view your board prior to this and we, the staff, are still debating this issue.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The proposal is quite acceptable.

The board should be up at its new location shortly--I'll provide a link as soon as it is.

The membership roll has never been properly purged because our original format was in support of a blog, so we didn't want to restrict the membership in interest of having people being able to post to the blog comments. However, the rough size of the posting commmunity can be gained from the number of posters who've made posts there before, and additional people beyond that are in my 'invitational circle' who are liable to frequent areas simply on my presence.

The main body is one of exceptional amounts of original and fan-fiction, most of which has not been reposted elsewhere, and lots of material for gaming events.

Some of it, however, is in private forums (there are three)--if you joined the board I could give you memberships to those.

[B4UTRUST]

Rough estimate, how many active members(posting at least once a week if not more) would we be gaining?

[Rogue 9]

There's quite a bit of overlap. Divine Salamis has a few thousand registered users, but that's because it has a massive spambot problem. By my own estimate I wouldn't say there'd be more than twenty regular new users, though I could be underestimating since I don't pay much attention to DS' game forum.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Rough estimate, how many active members(posting at least once a week if not more) would we be gaining?

Weekly posters? Not less than 20 but probably around 30.

The daily poster rate in that number is, however, fairly high. The occasional posters muster around again that same number.

The total number of new posters has already had the duplicates with LA removed from consideration when I said around 50--there are around 150 people who have been active posters on DS.com at some time or another in its history.

The number of people may actually increase, however, as there's another message board I was involved with where the moderation is in a major power-play at the moment, and I'd like to be able to direct them to a healthy community as a refuge.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There's quite a bit of overlap. Divine Salamis has a few thousand registered users, but that's because it has a massive spambot problem. By my own estimate I wouldn't say there'd be more than twenty regular new users, though I could be underestimating since I don't pay much attention to DS' game forum.

The game forums, including the three private forums, actually have some considerable usage.

Also, there's several people who don't regular post there who would probably start posting here because of the higher traffic here already (it has a positive effect), or other synergistic reasons.

[B4UTRUST]

We already have game forums so I feel we could, or should probably merge any duplicate or overlapping forums as opposed to making additional ones. Private forums only if they're really needed.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

We'll institute redirects, and DS.com is fairly high-traffic, or so I'd like to think, anyway. Here's the 15-day period of 1 February to 16 February:

Unique visitors: 1598.
Number of visits: 4401
(2.75 visits/visitor).
Pages: 24711
(5.61 pages/visit).
Hits: 99073
(22.65 hits/visit).
Bandwidth: 378.14 MB
(87.98 KB/visit).

Visitors come from the following countries, in order of hits (in several places this is probably local censorship boards doing checks of our content, for instance, Saudi Arabia.):

United States
Norway
Finland
European Unio
Unknown
China
Canada
Australia
Germany
Great Britain
Russian Federation
Hong Kong
South Korea
Brazil
Ukraine
Spain
Thailand
Latvia
India
Japan
Saudi Arabia
France
Malaysia
Netherlands
Turkey
Kuwait
Mexico
Chile
Taiwan
Vietnam
Israel
United Arab Emirates
Argentina
Sweden
Poland
Portugal
Colombia
Venezuela
Philippines
Barbados
Czech Republic
Belgium
Egypt
Denmark
Bahrain
Singapore
Iran
Austria
Mauritius
Romania
Greece
Bulgaria
Estonia
Italy
Hungary
South Africa
Guatemala

[The Duchess of Zeon]

We already have game forums so I feel we could, or should probably merge any duplicate or overlapping forums as opposed to making additional ones. Private forums only if they're really needed.

The problem is that the TGG material is a mixture of fanfiction and actual gaming, which sprawls across dozens of threads, some of which are of more than a hundred posts already, and it is a very active subject.

We have 13 active story threads on TGG-based material alone, and that is with no currently active game set in the universe, which we desire to change.

The private forums are for two reasons:

1. Game/story discussion so that we don't get bogged down in technical details (for instance the Drakaficverse has more than 35 technical discussion threads by itself).
2. Protecting authors' priviliages to the rights of unpublished original fiction, which they may find impossible to sell if it's posted openly on the internet.

I was thinking of one private forum basically for each of those two justifications.

The Drakafics could be reposted to the TGG forum as well and instead of being dedicated to the TGG it could be an official "round-robin" forum or something otherwise intended for heavily comment-based, combined RPG/fanfiction universes like those two.

[B4UTRUST]

guess I would have to see this TGG to see exactly what you mean by all of that. Again, remember I have no history or experiance with it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well, the transfer of material to the new board should be completed by sometime late Sunday night or very early Monday morning, so it won't be long.

[Josh]

I'll hold off on commenting until we hash things out in the staff forum.

[Steve]

http://divine-salamis.net/phpbb/index.php

I think it's up, if you're registered already let me know your SN so I can make sure you're approved for posting and can see the three private forums.

[Steve]

guess I would have to see this TGG to see exactly what you mean by all of that. Again, remember I have no history or experiance with it.

Well, there's "The Anatomy of a War", a 216,000 word story I wrote and posted on SB and SDN (and DS of course) that's set in the TGG Multiverse.

There's also "55 Days in Kalunda", which has already surpassed "Anatomy" in word-count and which is co-written by myself and Marina (Chris and Fima - fgalkin - have contributed here and there), and a few other stories such as "The Decision" (which is the only one, IIRC, that is here on LA now).

To try to describe it quickly, TGG is short for "The Great Game", a reference to the initial incarnation's SD on Spacebattles (an SB SD is like an STGOD) when we had multiple power/alliance blocs competing in a geopolitical (Astropolitical?) environment similar to pre-WWI Earth.

Revised and improved, it is essentially about a "Multiverse", a number of universes that are in contact with one another via IU jump gate (and jump point generation) technology; technology that generates wormholes using exotic "'Zynski" particle waves at various frequencies. The universes have various designations of letter and number combinations, as well as nicknames in some cases.

Current stories take place roughly in the 2150-2170 AST time frame (for reference, 2021 AST was around the time that Humanity in two different universes found the IU tech and began the "Multiversal Era"). By this time, a number of the most powerful and most democratic/free nations of the Multiverse have combined to form a new governmental body, the Alliance of Democratic Nations (that's "my" power), and it tends to be the focus of all my TGG stories save "55 Days in Kalunda". Shortly after this, the new ADN's multiversal exploration makes contact with the first full-blown "established" sci-fi universes, making contact with the BattleTech, B5, and Star Trek universes in the 2148-2152 timespan.

Marina, Chris, Fima, and Sunhawk all have their own "powers" or "factions" in TGG; Marina has her original creations, the Taloran Star Empire (space bipeds with a feudalistic society and a Zoroastarianistic religion, and while bipedal and vaguely elvish, not very similar to humans in a number of aspects); Chris aka Cavalier has the Holy Roman Empire (an alternate timeline where various things when in favor of the Habsburg dynasty, allowing it to eventually rule Europe and with it the destiny of the world; it's based off a much suckier idea from an SBer); Fima has an interstellar power in Universe CON-5 (an "original" creation of myself and with input from various others, it's the "central" universe of TGG in which all of the Great Powers have holdings, as well as the "indigenious" Human powers), Fima's pwoer being the Slavic Empire (basically the Russian Empire in space that holds the mantle of pan-Slavism, proclaiming itself "Slavia"); Sunhawk controls a vaguely Elvish race called the Zohan who live in particular clans and always in spaceships, their entire society is geared toward engineering and building, and different groups/clans go to live in the space of various powers, including the Taloran Empire and the ADN.

Other "players" or contributors will of course be welcome (which, I think, is part of Marina's intentions). For instance, I still don't know if Phong wants to bring back his Turtledovian sci-fi universe with NATO and the Warsaw Pact continuing the Cold War into the interstellar age, while simultaneously having a Cold War with the lizard "Race" from Turtledoves "Alien Invasion in WWII" books.


Any other questions?

[Josh]

Okay, we're discussing it right now. One important point I'd like to make about the nature of the Librium is that we're very much a family board. Our users mostly know and refer to each other by name, and on the admin side we're kind of like a group of bizarre siblings.

(I'm the good-looking one, Adam's the genius coder, and I've yet to discern what virtues Scottie and Allen possess. Well, Scottie's a good cook and an ace interior decorator...)

Personally, I'm for some form of merger, but we're going to hash out what our proposal is, and that'll take a little while.

[Steve]

Well, Marina can be the eccentric intellectual and I'm the crazy writer.....

[Comrade Tortoise]

I dont think the word "eccentric" does her justice. "Eccentric" is the word you use for a woman with too many cats...