OTF's Blue Publication August 2008
Polson has agreed to give me some space in the Blue Report to talk about things that are going on at OTF now that we've moved away from the old genre teams and whatnot. So here's the monthly Admiral's update for July.
First I'd like to say that I'm very happy with the continued support that the community has been showing in the form of donations. At the moment the Outpost has enough money to stay online through February of 2010. I'd say that's something to be excited about considering that the Outpost has gone from running on a $1000 annual deficit on an outdated machine to the new shiny facilities we have now. I can't say this enough: I'm forever thankful to the community who stepped up and saved OTF from deletion at the end of February.
Of course with that transition to a new machine has come some technical difficulties. At the moment Iain is working on consolidating the chat rooms and getting a proper mail subsystem working so that we can easily add and remove people from team rosters. I know that there have been complaints about the lack of a mail system, but it's my understanding that this is a result of difficulty in setting up a secure system, something that we didn't have on the old machine where potentially hundreds of people had access to everything.
On the subject of team efforts, that has been going well. Iain and I hoped that by giving team leaders the autonomy to run their teams as they see fit that we'd start to see more work in the teams. After some initial confusion (Did we really mean it when we said "do what you want with your team"? Yes!) things are starting to get underway again. The Writer's Guild and the Simming Team are both looking for new members to assist them. The poetry guild has some exciting plans in the work for the future and is also looking for a few good men or women to help out. Trivia is going strong as always, and I expect to see good things from the Library and Film Guild in the future.
We've made some big changes, with more to come, and I'd like to ask everyone to be patient as we work through all of this. As of the end of February this year the Outpost had been run into the ground and was on the verge of closing its doors forever. HTML chats and our big three genres aren't the big draw on the Internet today that they were ten years ago. This isn't anybody's fault, it's just a matter of the technology moving beyond our community. We may have to downsize and make some changes as the OTF of today is simply unable to sustain the level of activity that we had even five years ago, but I, Iain, and the rest of the people in the Team Leaders group are working hard to make sure that OTF will remain online and cater to the core community that has made this place great over the years.
That's it for this month's update. The anniversary is coming up at the end of August, so look for some special events on the weekend of the 22nd!