I'm not dead yet!

December 15, 2008 • 2 min read


This post is over ten years old. Chances are, I've learned enough to have advanced my thinking about some of this stuff.

After exactly a year of being AWOL, I’m back looking at Altering Time. My life has been wrapped up in a lot of other things, so I’ve been neglecting the site badly. However, seeing people still playing Asylum and Oldguy still answering questions warms my heart and makes me feel like a terrible parent. And so, I have a plan to clean up Altering Time. These are my responsibilities as I see them:

Protect people from spam

Forum and Private messaging spam have been rampant. I’ve temporarily disabled PMs, but the real solution is to upgrade to phpbb3. Although this will be a lot of work, customly redoing the mods that make AT run, I think it’s the least I can do for you all. As well, I’ve done mind-blowingly overdue thing and made Oldguy a Forum moderator. Not only will this help him clean up anything he feels like, it’ll give him a bit of credit where a lot is due.

Close off the parts that are no longer maintainable

There are parts of AT that just don’t make sense to maintain anymore. For example, the WTF Sites will remain as an archive, but new submissions will be closed off. Other sites such as wtf.reddit kick WTF Sites’ butt, and are updated many times a day. Engineering Faith is a big question in my mind, and I’m going to take a hard look at how far it can be from being self-sufficient. Definitely I’ll make a further post about Faith one way or the other. In general, I want to make it obvious to people what’s being maintained and what’s fresh, and what’s not.

Let people enjoy the good parts of AT

Just Ask Oldguy, the Forum, Asylum, and the Quotes are the core of AT. My mission with the site should be to make these accessible and keep them going. Thanks to everybody who still visits and is keeping things alive in my absence!


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