It's the end of the world as we know it

Article by Hobbie

They promised us change, telling us that they would revive the OTF dream. That if we all worked together we could make it happen. It was a year ago, and HAL and Iain had just been voted in office, their program gathering near-unanimous support.
With the starship fuel prices rising, the unpopular war on Onderon diverting credits from such critical tasks as cleaning the elevator shafts or making sure Wuher’s beer supply didn’t run out, and unemployment rising due to departments outsourcing a growing part of their production lines to cheaper places in the Google Galaxy and the Wikipedia Star Cluster, we all felt we needed something different than business as usual in the EC, a more direct approach to leadership than what those corrupt bureaucrats had delivered until then.

All sarcasm aside, I think we’ve come a long way since the last anniversary. There were a lot of ideas being thrown around at the beginning, and very few visible results. None of us liked that but a combination of real life concerns and old habits prevented us from helping it.
Altogether, it has been a pretty difficult year and I didn’t check the numbers but I’m pretty sure the chatroom population rate has been dropping. But, at the same time, the financial issues have been dealt with, the departmental structure has been streamlined, the server has been upgraded and now the chatrooms have been brought together, all of which will in my opinion be quite beneficial to us in the long term.

In our goal of transitioning away from our ST/SW/LOTR roots while making the chat more enjoyable to all, we have now given ourselves a good base to work on. There is still some work to do but with your help I am convinced that we can make it happen.
We are now asking for chat top submissions, and there is a team working on renewing our avatars and offering a wider choice. Next, we can come up with additional rank sets. And gradually we will get there. If I could ask anything of you, I would like to hear your thoughts on what is happening and your ideas on what we can do to improve things. At a time like this, we can’t afford to be disconnected, and I just want to point out that Polson and I are only an email away, we are willing to listen to any suggestion or criticism you might like to throw at us, and we will do our best to reply quickly. Mostly, I want to encourage you to be in the chatroom when you can. After all, more than genres or avatars, this is what OTF is supposed to be about...

Hobbie
_{Acting co-Rear Admiral}