Hi all,

I wanted to drop a "short" message about the developments on our website,
http://www.bat.org/ as you all know. If this doesn't interest you, feel
free to stop reading anytime . This is part of letting-you-know-what's-
going-on movement.

The current status as of now is that we're seriously understaffed in
terms of web development (any wizard with serious Php-skills and free
time apply for the open position, pretty please).

However, we have been able to complete quite a few of 'renewals' to the
website. The philosophy behind this has been and is to add knowledge about
the game in a web-presentable form ..to those who don't actually (yet)
play BatMUD. Looking at our number of concurrent players, we haven't
really succeeded in this so far, which brings me to the point that
"marketing" BatMUD to the *right audience* isn't easy. If you can help,
please do.

Taking a quick look back-- after getting the basic functionality available
already in the old (hacked) website, we started out with adding/creating the
following enhancements:

- batclient-pages http://www.bat.org/play/batclient in order to get the
word out there about our Custom-made gameclient
- character creation http://www.bat.org/play/creation a rather fancy way
to make your BatMUD character on the web
- web-finger such as http://www.bat.org/char/amarth with some by-products
from the latest client developments
- character picture http://www.bat.org/mychar utility to have your
personalized image visible on the web and Batclient, if you wish
- password recovery http://www.bat.org/pwdrecover having set your e-mail
you can request a password through the service

The main team consisted of Gore, Multi and myself with an occasional Durand
doing the dirtiest game-side deeds, Favorit poking about and Nina being
buried on revitalizing the Gallery and its descriptions. Simultaneously,
the lovely lady behind the ancient Batlore comics, Livia, was working hard
on creating the new race images. Now, we already had a working website with
some nice new functionality.

The latest proceedings include what you could call "candying-up" the
website as the top level menus have been partially redone:

- http://www.bat.org/help the top-level teaser information page about
BatMUD, just a kind of a transponder to the deeper layers information
- http://www.bat.org/help/races the gallery and information page of all
BatMUD races, playable and also the ones available (perhaps) later in-game
- http://www.bat.org/help/maps taking the Realm maps to a more fantasy-level,
while Jeskko's Google-maps give the pixel-accurate data
- http://www.bat.org/community mudcon & convention information, player
produced data as well as the dreaded galleries

This is where we are at, right now. There's plenty of more that we could do,
if.

I've received a number of requests based on such as having the race-info
pages redone, portraying the information better. This has indeed been our
plan from the very beginning. The page is just about ready, but it is still
lacking some major effort to get it into play.

There's also plans of such as portraying player controlled regions -related
information on the web, as sketched internally by Dralith. Good things could
be coming, we just need to keep the people motivated and working in unison.
A little guerilla advertising would probably do wonders...


Consider yourself updated!


On behalf of the Conclave,

Amarth Shadowstring**