NOTE: This is The Column, a regular feature on Apolyton where anyone can write about anything to do with Civilization or the gaming industry as a whole. If you feel like writing, please visit the article submission page.

LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE	LENGTH
Read By 'DanQ' - With clips from Kool & The Gang's "Celebration" (1980)	(19m:03s)

It's that time of year again. No, not tax filing -- that was a few months ago. No, not scrambling to find the perfect presents for first, second and twice-removed cousins -- that's a handful of months down the road. No, I'm talking about another candle making its way onto the birthday cake for Apolyton Civilization Site (ACS). There is five in all now. Five-year-old humans are typically a handful. Apolyton would fit right in on the playground.

PREVIOUS ARTICLES

#220 WHAT MAKES A GOOD CIV GAME (PART 4) In the fourth of four installments, Spiffor l'Omnivore breaks down the fourth and last two of eight points needed towards building a good Civ-style game. #220 WHAT MAKES A GOOD CIV GAME (PART 3) In the third of four installments, Spiffor l'Omnivore breaks down the third two of eight points needed towards building a good Civ-style game. #220 WHAT MAKES A GOOD CIV GAME (PART 2) In the second of four installments, Spiffor l'Omnivore breaks down the second two of eight points needed towards building a good Civ-style game. #220 WHAT MAKES A GOOD CIV GAME (PART 1) In the first of four installments, Spiffor l'Omnivore breaks down the first two of eight points needed towards building a good Civ-style game. #219 A VERSATILE GAME Rasbelin recalls the comforting familiarity of Civilization II. #218 I HAD A WHALE OF A TIME Rasbelin reminisces about the days of MicroPROSE now all in the past. COLUMN ARCHIVE

This "open letter from the administration" is a time to reflect on the preceding twelve months with specific but not an entire emphasis on ACS itself. The 'Civilization' community, both nuclear and extended in nature, has been a point of discussion as well. Nonetheless, I find myself thinking most about the past three months. As you may or may not have read or otherwise heard [ reference ], Markos Giannopolulos -- better known as 'MarkG' to the vast majority of you -- began serving his mandatory tenure in the Hellenic Army in Greece on May 26th of this year. As the other co-owner of this site, almost all of the day-to-day administrative functions have fallen on my shoulders for a majority of the time since then. It has been and continues to be a difficult and untested road to travel, but I am boasted by several positive points. First, several members of ACS' dedicated staff have taken on increased responsibility both in terms of type and magnitude. On behalf of Markos and myself, we cannot thank them enough for that. Second, the continued support of a loyal base of ACS visitors and contributors numbering in the thousands has proven to be an even greater source of comfort and energy than ever before realized. Contributions range from visiting the site on the daily basis through to purchasing products from various companies affiliated with Apolyton (e.g. Amazon, CafePress and Chips&Bits). Third, the companies that develop and publish the various games covered on ACS continue to offer their own support through activities such as regular interaction with fans through the site's extensive message board system and providing materials for winners of various contests. Fourth, our steady and mutually beneficial partnerships with a network of companies advertising and their advertising agents are invaluable and will continue to be in the future. All of these influences have and continue to make a difference in helping to both ensure and expand Apolyton's social, technical and financial health.

Speaking of the various healths, I will shortly reflect further on the history of Apolyton for the calendar dates July 27th, 2002 through to and including July 26th, 2003 under these headings. First, let's breakdown the statistics.

STATISTICS: NUMBERS, TRENDS
Good golly, Miss Molly. When Apolyton switched to RackShack (RS) for its hosting service back in April, 2002, we were finally able to obtain detailed statistics textualizing and illustrating the site's traffic volume. And no, for the record, I care not that the first adjective I used to describe this traffic is one that I have made up to serve my convenience. As will be discussed in the 'Technical Health' section below our move from our first to a second server ( = computer) on RS was far from pre-planned, nor did it go as smoothly as we would have liked. However, one of the advantages that results from this "internal" move is access to even *more* statistics.

Before getting to raw numbers, let's discuss some of the characteristics of the average Apolyton visitor that we have been able to gleam from these newfound stats. Let's take June, 2003 -- the most recent month concluded as of this writing -- as the base example. On the search engine front, Google brought in almost five times the volume of traffic that second-place Yahoo did. MSN came in third. The average length of each person's visit was just under twelve minutes. It is only fair to note that just under 42% of these visitors came and went in under 30 seconds, but it is obvious that this was a most productive half minute-and-less. Look at how quickly they were able to find what they were looking for...

Around 40% of these individuals run WindowsXP as their operating system, followed closely distantly by Windows98 (~20%), Windows2000 (~18%), and WindowsMe (~8%). Throwing in Windows95, WindowsNT, WindowsCE and... yes... even Windows 3.1(!), the Windows series of operating system enjoys a monopolistic dominance of roughly 94% in regards to operating systems in use browsing ACS. Mac (~0.8%) slightly outpaces Linux (~0.7%) in terms of traffic when combining Mac OS X and its previous incarnations. All others including Sun Solaris, FreeBSD, and Irx -- the latter being one I had personally not heard of before I saw the names behind the numbers -- come in at less than ~0.1% of the total traffic to the site. In the browser wars, Internet Explorer soundly crushed the competition with an 86.1% penetration rate. Netscape was second at 7.5% and Opera placed fourth with 2.3%. In third was a 3.5% where a percentage of users managed to foil our statistics program as it could not ascertain the browser type they were using. Ah well: nothing is exact.

The first six months of the latest 'Apolyton Year' (July 2002-December 2002) saw 71,790,339 pageviews and 2,145,191 users dishing them up. For this period, that's a monthly average of ~11,965,057 pageviews and ~357,532 users logging on. We turn the spotlight on the forums exclusively for a moment here. At the time of this writing there are over 85,000 threads and 2,011,000 posts within them(!) Over the past twelve months, they are averaging near or above the 3,000 thread-per-month and 1,300 post-a-day mark with 1,000 new accounts being registered every four weeks or so. Depending upon the time of day, there are anywhere from 200-350 simultaneous connections on average; that is to say, at any particular second of every minute of every hour of every day. As for the status of these users, ~47% are presently active in these series of bulletin boards.

Without further delay, here are the daily unique and daily pageview numbers along with their corresponding averages in black and white. Due to the way traffic numbers have been counted since May of this year, those numbers are not available at the present time.

	======================================================================================
	MONTH/YEAR		        TOTAL UNIQUES		      TOTAL PAGEVIEWS
	--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	April 2003                           286,779                             06,430,601	
	March 2003			426,450				10,668,875
	February 2003			453,589				12,898,871			
	January 2003			505,692				15,229,261				
	December 2002			384,004				13,352,112				
	November 2002			397,056				13,487,764
	October 2002			389,023				12,097,979
	September 2002			347,787				10,761,482
	August 2002			308,722				10,742,610
	July 2002				318,599				11,348,452	
	======================================================================================

	======================================================================================
	MONTH/YEAR		DAILY UNIQUES (Avg.)		DAILY PAGEVIEWS (Avg.)
	--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	April 2003                           ~09,600                             ~214,400
	March 2003			~13,800				~344,200
	February 2003			~16,200				~460,700
	January 2003			~13,400				~491,200
	December 2002			~10,300				~430,700
	November 2002			~11,000				~449,600
	October 2002			~12,500				~390,257
	September 2002			~11,600				~358,700
	August 2002			~10,000				~346,500
	July 2002				~10,300				~366,100
	======================================================================================

SOCIAL HEALTH
This category is by far the one that most visitors will identify with and is undeniably a 'catch-all' term for various points of operation that themselves can be grouped under their own sub-headings. I had originally planned on writing something extensive in this category, but I am going to refer mostly to the reflections of various staff members to cover this instead. Many of them talk about the how the various communities on ACS have come along since this time last year be it for better, worse or somewhere in between. As such, I see no reason to have the same things said twice. That said, I would like to comment on two projects on Apolyton that I was instrumental in overseeing. They are most certainly atop my list of highlights for this site over the past year, and for reasons not beginning or ending with "because I was their charge".

First: between August 17th and November 4th of last year, I posted the first through sixth installments in the "Rise Up: Reynolds on RoN" feature that previewed Big Huge Games' Rise of Nations that would eventually be released in late May of this year. I had the opportunity and pleasure to sit down with the president of the company, Brian Reynolds, in his summer home to talk about the game. It turns out that this residence is situated less than fifty kilometres from my own! An exchange of several emails between Brian and myself beginning in March led to our meeting over the first weekend in August, 2002. It was the first time and to date still only time I have ever (at least knowingly) met in person anyone associated in one way or another with my work in the Civilization and extended community which dates back to August, 1996. For this individual to be a member of the gaming industry, and one who has played such an instrumental role in the direct or indirect development of many of the titles covered on Apolyton, made the experience all the more exciting and admittedly nerve-wracking. I like to think that what resulted from my two-hour sit-down with Reynolds about RoN made one of the most unique and interesting features ever to reside on Apolyton's server.

Second: in late December of 2002, I was approached by Atari (then Infogrames) Senior Producer Constantine Hantzopoulos with an offer for me to preview Master of Orion III which at the time had been in development for nearly two years. Honestly, the offer left me in a haze at first. When I received my beta copy of the game shortly thereafter, I learned that I was one of very few external of the publishing company and developer Quicksilver Software to receive a build for evaluation. If it hadn't hit me before then, it did now: I had a tall order to live up to in giving MoO3 a proper preview. I forced the fog to clear. This six-part feature was completed on a whirlwind timeline, whether I compare it to that of "Rise Up: Reynolds on RoN" or not: just four weeks (January 9th to February 13th). There was admittedly expressed discontentment with my writing style by some here, and to a lesser extent the content in places, but nonetheless I believe that this feature was another reason to be thankful. To be thankful for the trust and belief placed in us here at Apolyton not only by the companies that develop and publish the games this site covers, but also by the individuals who took the time to read and respond to what was written -- criticisms included. Cheers!

TECHNICAL HEALTH
As with most fansites, Apolyton is not a business -- but it is a venture. As with any venture, online or otherwise, infrastructure is needed. First and foremost on this list is a server, a computer that stores and manages traffic to and from that storage. At this time last year [ reference ], I commented on this site becoming a more independent entity in this regard: moving onto a commercial hosting provider's network. More to that end, as of April 21, 2002 Apolyton has been hosted on a server unto itself [ reference ]. It was powered by a Pentium 4 1.7GHz processor with 1GB RAM. It is true, as some of you might point out, that the next rung in the independence scale would be hosting the site on a server we own outright in our own space with our own allotted bandwidth. We felt then, and continue to feel to this day, that this is not only a lofty goal but also unnecessary operation-wise.

Less than a day after its first birthday, 'Settler I' -- the server-of-our-own mentioned above -- went offline once and for all. Serious hardware problems resulting from faulty memory was the culprit, and it took a solid three days before the move to 'Settler II' was completed [ reference ]. Due to our vigilance, a back-up somewhat less than a week old at the time of 'Settler I''s crash had been made and was almost completely both recoverable and transferable to 'Settler II'. This eased the transition by decreasing both downtime and stress levels. This new box was then, and is still now, driven by a Dual Xeon 2.0GHz processor with 512MB RAM. This episode also marked the first time since the Christmas, 2001 crisis [ reference ] that Apolyton was down either completely or effectively (that is, with all services suspended) for longer than a twenty-four hour period. Here's crossing our fingers for a smooth passing of April, 2004...

Beyond this notable mark, downtimes at other irregular and brief intervals have come and gone. As with anything in life, nothing is perfect but the strive towards perfection does not stop us from wanting to achieve 100% uptime. Realistically, our goal is 99% uptime throughout a day, week, month and even when looking back on a year such as we are now. Given the difficulties in calculating an exact percentage, a rough estimate is that for the time period stated above Apolyton's uptime straddled the 98th and 99th percentiles. If not for the extended downtime previously discussed in this section, it could be said with near certainty that we achieved an uptime in the 99th percentile. Hopefully, you can forgive us for this slight performance degradation (if you haven't already). If you'll pardon the appropriately timed swear, **** happens. Oh man, **** sensor... ****... Eh, I give up. :D

FINANCIAL HEALTH
Near the beginning of this article, I mentioned that our steady and mutually beneficial partnerships with a network of companies advertising and their advertising agents are invaluable to sustaining this site and will continue to be an integral component well into the future. While not fan sites necessarily, other websites -- in the gaming industry and otherwise -- have begun and/or continue, as the case may be, to charge their visitor base for partial or in some cases full access to their content. This is even where the basis of the site is non-for-profit. On behalf of the Apolyton administration, we are reaffirming our commitment that we will not follow this example. We need not to and, more importantly, we choose not to. A subscription service of a different sort has been discussed in the past and may indeed come to fruition sometime in the next twelve months, or not. We are not ready to state either way at this point. However, as previously stated this service would entitle subscribers to additional benefits that while convenient would not result in non-subscribers losing access to site content. Again, this is not an acceptable practice in our assessment for our purposes. These additional benefits, as executed through our forums, may include but are not limited to: ad disabling, increased private messaging (PM) and Upload service storage, and special user titles. I will take a moment here to note that the suggestion of implementing a donations system has been broached on several occasions in the past year and before. Undoubtedly the point will be raised again. As has been said in response to previous instances of the suggestion, and will be reiterated here, we are not comfortable with this premise and as such are not supportive of exploring this avenue at the time being.

I can assure you that through advertising and affiliation revenues, the operating expenses for Apolyton are more than being covered at this point on an ongoing basis. Monies received in excess of this amount are saved for "rainy days" when unexpected and often sudden expenditures hit the balance sheet. In fact, ACS' financial health is notably better at this time than the same time last year and the best that it has been since January of 2001. Indeed, part of this equation is a recovering advertising market from the fallout earlier this century. Another part is the increasing direct approach advertisers are extending to us, largely the result of our 'going independent' last April as I earlier mentioned. Without question the largest part of this working formula is the continued support ACS visitors impart by purchasing products through various partners of which a fraction of each sale is disseminated to Apolyton. These are the affiliation revenues I mentioned moments ago. For a listing of these partners, and links to their websites to follow that will credit ACS for any transactions completed during the resulting browser session, click here.

CLOSING REMARKS
The fall of 2002 saw the release of Civilization III expansion pack Play The World. The game's second, Conquests, is anticipated to follow suit in the fall of 2003. Master of Orion III was released in February, with Galactic Civilizations a month after that. The latter's first expansion pack, Expanded Universe, is scheduled to become available at the end of this summer (and free of charge to GalCiv purchasers, no less). Rise of Nations hit gaming shelves in late May and early June, depending upon your geographical location and an expansion pack for it -- although not official -- has all but been unofficially declared a near reality.

Apolyton was there to cover all of these titles, before and after their release, as is our intention for those yet-to-be-released products named. Certainly only those who are looking for this site to disappear are going to be disappointed with the following proclamation: we're not going anywhere. Keep On Civin'!

---------
About the author: Apolyton Co-Owner/Webmaster

Comment on this article!
Also posted as apart of "5 Years" special feature

The opinions expressed on this page do not necessarily reflect those of Apolyton CS. They are just the personal opinions of the writer.