Café de Nuit

I may be misremembering this, but wasn't a request sent to WotC to have the official Ravenloft site changed to the FoS? Why haven't they done this yet? Is it sooooo hard to change the link on their site? Or do they have THAT much email backlog to look through? Or is there a ridiculous mess of bureaucratic procedure that has to be gone through?

Unfortunately, WotC don't have to make any site a official setting site if they don't want to. I would imagine, however much we might like to disagree with them, that the Wizards don't think this site "high enough quality" to become an official site. That or they've forgotten about it. I would prefer to believe the second one, but the first could be true (NOT that I agree with it, of course, if I could I'd have made them in-charge quite a while back).

The official answer we got is that "Thanks for writing us about your interest in continuing to support our Ravenloft campaign setting. While we appreciate your enthusiasm and support, we’re currently reviewing our fan site policies and cannot grant permission at this time. "

That was months ago...

So I don't think we are in their priorities We were absolutely ignored by WW, as all the other fans or writers move, but we expected a little more from WotC.

Any idea welcomed!

Joël

Joël of the Fraternity wrote:The official answer we got is that "Thanks for writing us about your interest in continuing to support our Ravenloft campaign setting. While we appreciate your enthusiasm and support, we’re currently reviewing our fan site policies and cannot grant permission at this time. "

That was months ago...

So I don't think we are in their priorities We were absolutely ignored by WW, as all the other fans or writers move, but we expected a little more from WotC.

Any idea welcomed!

Joël

Could you ask again, or petition them?

I did a few months ago, when I-6 3.5 was announced.

But hey, fan sites are not their priorities for the moment.

Joël

I say we wait until after October. Yeap, it is some time but not that much. After all they haven't published anything Ravenloft yet. Petition again after they put out the Ravenloft Adventure.

My guess is that fan sites arent a priority, not that this site isnt "high quality" enough. I personally think this site is as good as the old kargatane one, in some ways better because of things this place has that the old did not. I just think that WotC, being a business, has other things on the front burner rather than a fan site, unfortunately.

Out of curiosity what would be the advantage besides the more obvious increased traffic? Sponsorship or something? Also, could the same problems that led to kargatane.com closing do the same thing here if this place became "official" (I am not even exactly sure why they closed)?

As an "insider" from back in the day, I'm confident in saying that the whole "Official Sites" program wasn't much more than a method of dulling the sting of cancelling the different product lines at the end of second edition. While there were some concrete advantages to being official at the beginning, they more or less dried up completely about a year later (namely, as soon as Cindi Rice moved onward and upward in the corporate world).

For about five years now, I'd say that "WotC official site" means WotC will toss you a link from their message boards -- and that's it.

Still, the link helps people new to the setting and would likely shift us up a few notches google-wise.

Other than that I'm enjoying the Fraternity being the sole authority on the 'Loft. We have the power!

Well with the WW RL phase, it was understandable that WotC didn't want to bug WW with an official RL site, as this notion surely wasn't in the contract between WotC and WW.

And WW didn't have the authority (or didn't take it, or didn't care, the most probable answer being "b" and "c" combined, judging from their own RL "page").

Mangrum wrote:For about five years now, I'd say that "WotC official site" means WotC will toss you a link from their message boards -- and that's it.

Indeed, the other D&D universe fan sites do not have much to show as far as WotC-made freebies / content.

And this link is going to Ole K site, where we have a link, thanks to Stu. So they end up here sooner or later

Joël

It seems to me that the real advantage (and it may be quite significant, although I don't know enough to say for sure) to being the official WotC-Ravenloft site is that the Fraternity site would be the first or second site returned on a Google search.

That would be advantage enough for me.

WotC is recently working on something unofficially called the *redone classics* series, including licensing DL 1-15 to SovPress, rerelasing Tomb of Horrors and WPM, and now bringing back I6 for 3e. Maybe they even want develop RL any further, like redoing the Lord Soth adventures as well... This might be a reason why they are so cautious with giving away any licenses.

- Last year, btw, Charles Ryan, something like the fan-lawyer at WotC, left the company, and since then, on gathers reports of less and less fan-friendly
behaviour by WotC from all sides... Rumours and rumours...

Joël of the Fraternity wrote:And this link is going to Ole K site, where we have a link, thanks to Stu. So they end up here sooner or later

Link would be on this page:
clicky
but it was removed ages ago. Now all 'Loft fans have to rely on google...

Oh, they removed the K from this page. Didn't know.

However, if they browse the RL WotC forum, they will get hints of our site

Joël

Nathan of the FoS wrote:It seems to me that the real advantage (and it may be quite significant, although I don't know enough to say for sure) to being the official WotC-Ravenloft site is that the Fraternity site would be the first or second site returned on a Google search.

That would be advantage enough for me.

This google rank is mainly built by making other D&D sites having links to our site, and number of updates. It will take time, but we should be closer to the tope everyday, slowly but surely.

Google is ranking home pages according to the number of links to it they have from other web sites, and the number of updates.

ex: most Ravenloft fan site = 1 or 2
FoS = 3
Mordent Carto Society = 4
Kargatane = 5
(Yahoo home page = 7)

The more links we have, and more frequent updates on the home page would help us.

You have the google explanation here: http://answers.google.com/answers/main? ... &id=168516

Joël