I second akots! It costs all those who are willing to donate so little to keep CDZ ad-free, that it's definitely worth it IMO. Same goes for vB.

In regard to the future of CDZ: I don't know about yous, but I'm still not bored of Civilization! I have to admit though, that as of late I can't find the will anymore to update my spoilers. That has all to with the fact that I'm working now rather than studying. Spare time is more precious. But I think we should try and keep CDZ mainly about Civilization. Perhaps we should all put a link to CDZ in our signatures on that other site and post there more often. [smirk]

I forgot to mention that in my OP but CDZ will remain add free as it always has been.

I certainly can:

At this point in time traffic amount is irrelevant for us. Since we're just the happy few that are left, we don't use up that much bandwidth


I agree with this and I would like to think about how to go ahead with CDZ. For me the site isn't so much about Civ anymore, I consider it our own little nook of the internet where we, a bunch of people who love strategy games and civ especially, talk games and whatever OT comes to mind.

I've been thinking what the beauty of CDZ has been in our civ3 days and I think CDZ worked because
1) we had nice people who were active players. It was easy to find a game, fair maps were made, strat discussions where good.
2) you could get your own forum and use that for spoilers and whatever else you liked

Now I really wouldn't mind reinstating the ladder. With modern CMS's I think you could do that a lot easier than before even. But I wonder if that will work. For now I don't see many of the regulars participating very actively and I think you need some running games to attract more people. However when a few people would like this I will make the ladder a priority.

The private fora and spoilers were getting traffic as well iirc, and there's something that's even easier to start again. Also this doesn't have to be Civ exclusive, which might make it easier to pick it up again.

The problem is we're all really busy these days and even our core group has been depleted markedly. I'm the age now where most of you were first starting to play civ and it's fairly safe to say i'm by far the youngest/least amount of kids/ least married ;) and even I struggle to find time to play an online game. For instance right now i could commit to playing a game for a few hours but i've no idea if i could play it for the next month.

Does anyone even post at the other site anymore? I think CDZ is now the only forum i actively post in and even then my posting has diminished over the past year and so would it really be that useful sticking a link in a signature?

The further problem with our MP of recent games is that we've advertised it at cfc and we've generally got a few playing but there has normally been one player who has not fit in to the cdz way of doing things leaving a bad taste in everyones mouth and more often than not having the open turn thread turn in to some form of minor flame war, I don't think anyone really wants/appreciates that/would want to come back should that happen again.

We could always start our own GOTM? I don't mind designing maps for it, this isn't dependent on a group of people playing for you to play your own turn. The only drawback is that this obviously isn't MP.

edit- we also need to fix the registration, the fact that most people can't sign up and post obviously hinders the growth of the forum.

You're 12? Remember, civ1 was released in 1991 ;)

That's a good thing. We started this site because of flame wars on that other site, heh.

People can register, but verification of new accounts is done manually and for that I have to accidentally log in to the admin panel. What makes registration difficult is that you can't get verification emails or something like that. At least password reminders don't work.

The email issue is highly annoying and it seems server related, not site related. I've tried fixing it but sadly it's beyond my tech skills. HOwever a site move will very likely fix this issue as a move equals a new server and also a VB upgrade so I'd be very surprised should that bug stick.

[bump]

2 week holiday now after a hideously busy time. Will take care of it now :)

ok, found a very reasonably priced provider with good reviews. Will set up our next move after new year. Will keep you posted.

I will post what will happen when and I'll also start a back up today already, just in case somebody ended some subscription on the 31st of december.

Good stuff!

I'll prepare The Fist, just in case [punch]