SIX IS SWEET
By Daniel Quick
July 26, 2004
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.
The last time I wrote an article summarizing the previous twelve months of Apolyton Civilization Site, I had to careful not to transition the write-up from article to novel. I find myself in a similar circumstance in providing an overview of this past year, Apolyton's sixth. That's right: 2,192 days in ACS' timeline as of July 26th, 2004 and counting. That's a lot of nights too. 
In writing the "open letter from the administration" for the first time last year, I elected to break my analysis down by categorizing social, technical and financial aspects of Apolyton CS. It worked well then, so I'm not going to fix what is not broken. Here we go...
OVERVIEW
For a change of pace, let's start with a couple of personal notes. MarkG is still serving active duty in Greece's Hellenic Army, but he became stationed in his home town for the duration of this tenure earlier this year and therefore has been able to resume his regular roles on the site. When this is said and done with, he will be moving onto something else... but as to what that something is, only time will tell. As for myself, I graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario in June with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree in Law and Mass Communication. I am continuing and will be finalizing my formal studies beginning this fall at the Ajax (Ontario) satellite campus of York University's teacher college. My teaching subjects will be Law and History at the Grades 7-12 level. If you have read this paragraph to this point and are finding yourself asking "what the hell was the point of all of that" or something similar, it was to demonstrate how quickly time can fly as well as giving you a brief insight into what the ACS administration is up to offline.
As I predicted would happen, we survived a somewhat rocky road with Markos' limited availability for much of 2003-4. Adding his site workload to my own was quite a time management and frustration abatement challenge. As I knew I could count on, a dedicated ACS staff continued and today continues to aid immensely in the day-to-day operation of this fansite that from its beginning was realistically too much for two individuals to run on their own; over time, this fact has only been re-enforced through sunny and dark skies alike. While some members of the Apolyton and greater Civilization community have changed since last July, both have continued to enjoy growth in number, dedication and loyalty during this period. We at ACS maintained and continued to strengthen our relationships with the game developers and publishers of titles that we cover, and the quality and magnitude of our advertising agency relationships has increased overall.
Anyone who says that you can't teach an old dog new tricks had better not say that a website that can no longer count its years of existence on one hand is in decline: they are at best sketchy on the first point, but are certainly damned wrong about the second.
SOCIAL HEALTH
I would like to first reference the numerous write-ups from ACS staff members that do a formidable job in contributing to this section. Last year I discussed two major projects that I worked on in the preceeding twelve months. I won't be doing that this year for there are no comparable endeavours to look back on. Was the reason for this laziness on my part? A declining presence of Apolyton in the community that it serves? The answer is no to both. As Locutus and Solver point out in their overview of the site's fifth year, no new incarnations in the gaming series' that ACS covers were released during this period. This was a first, but that did not mean there weren't new goodies coming from the developers and publishers that we have all come to know. Conquests for Civilization III (Firaxis Games/BreakAway Games-developed) and Thrones and Patriots for Rise of Nations (Big Huge Games-developed) were expansion packs, the said titles' second and first respectively. The busiest industry beavers in this neck of the gaming wood were to be found at Stardock Systems working on Galactic Civilizations with Expanded Universe and then, in short turn-around, Altarian Prophecy. Elsewhere, Freeciv continued on a steady cycle of progression. Kudos are again in order for Activision and certain former employees for getting the Call to Power II source code released, an ACS exclusive when it came to fruition last fall and proud supporter of the effort. Lest we not forget the story that Apolyton brokered that Firaxis had begun development on Civilization IV. This revelation came not only as a surprise in and of itself, but also in the way that it came to light. A pleasant surprise to be sure!
Is there still talk of a void? No void. Stagnation then? No stagnation. Want more proof? I refer you back to the ACS staff views.
STATISTICS/TECHNICAL HEALTH
For several reasons, I have elected to present some different and some not-so-different types of numbers than I did at this time last year. According to Alexa.com, an Amazon.com company, ACS is averaging in the top 150,000 trafficked websites on the Internet as of this writing. Given the circumstances that I have cited above, this performance is strong. In March, 2004, the 50,000th user registered in the forums and since then 5,000+ more have joined this rank. Speaking of which there are almost 3,000,000 posts in more than 95,000 threads. Not too shabby. Some demographics on site visitors now, using June, 2004 as a template: the Windows operating system (OS) remains dominant (93.7%) not only because of its market share but also because of this site's target audience. XP is the most used version of this OS (62.3%), with Windows 2000 and Windows98 in a distant second (13.2%) and third (12.1%) respectively. Macintosh (2.1%) tops Linux (1.3%) ford third spot, but the collective 'unknown' takes second at 2.7%. Internet Explorer is still the dominant browser, but down ~10% over last June to 76%. Mozilla has lept into second at 14.1% followed by Opera at 4%. Netscape comes after the 'unknown' group at 1.8% for fifth place. Google continues to drive the most search traffic our way, with Yahoo tagging behind still, and of more than 32,000 logged keyphrases that individuals used to find this fansite the number one term -- at a full 2% -- was "apolyton" itself. Imagine that. 
On the server a.k.a. technical front, 'Settler II' thankfully managed not to follow in its predecessor's footsteps and bite the digital dust just shy of its first birthday. On April 21st of this year, Apolyton marked its second anniversary of separation from the now defunct GameStats News Network whose domain now, on a side note, is a portal for an IGN gaming service. Last August, ACS host RackShack (now Ev1Servers.net) completed an ordered memory upgrade to 'Settler II' from 512MB (0.5GB) to 1.5GB to meet the growing needs of this online operation. By contrast 'Settler I' had 1GB of memory, while 'Settler II' did not have that from the outset due to more pressing financial as well as technical constraints. After a most frustrating April-August period of downtime hiccupping, very few such incidents were logged thereafter as compared to the same time last year and even the four years before that. Just as critically, when there was downtime it was minimal -- more than not a few hours or less. This helped keep total uptime for the year to exceed the 98th percentile, a commendable achievement. All indications point to breaking the 99% mark in 2004-5 (*crosses fingers*). For the record, in addition to 1.5GB of Random Access Memory (RAM) 'Settler II' is powered by a 2.0Ghz Dual Xeon processor and the Linux OS.
FINANCIAL HEALTH/CLOSING REMARKS
In the past year, a few fansites have starting accepting donations to offset their operating costs and of those some openly solicit the making of such donations. More gaming sites and networks have joined the partially-pay-for-content model just to make ends meet let alone grow as a business. As Apolyton is not a business, placing ourselves in the context of the second discussion is inappropriate. As for the first, to begin with we have been fortunate in being able to continue and add associations with (a) advertisers directly and through agencies, such as BURST! Media and (b) retailers such as Amazon. Therefore, donations are not necessary. Further, we are personally not comfortable in asking for them regardless when most of our content is not "original" -- that is, not written by ACS staff/administration and/or with little/no creative components. At the same time, these affiliations as a percentage generate more or near equal monies for other outfits. An intermediary has been needed to fill the gap of those who still wanted to give a donation or equivalent, some even preferring it for this and related reasons. A subscription service was discussed and then promised some time ago, and on March 31st we were at last able to deliver with the debut of "ApolytonPLUS". While no guarantee of future earnings, I can tell you that as of now it is constituting a full one-third of Apolyton's revenue for fiscal 2004; this impressive status thumps internal annual projections by more than 20% and the service has yet to mark its sixth month anniversary. Today, "ApolytonPLUS" counts nearly ninety subscribers among its ranks with hopefully many more to come.
Thanks to each and every one of you "PLUS" and non-"PLUS" subscribers alike. Your continued financial support is keeping Apolyton online and its content free for one and all to enjoy. In this capacity, Apolyton is in the best position it has been since fiscal 2000. Resting easy is too relaxed and complacent a state for one to get into, but certainly breathing easier is possible here again.
It may seem a long way off now, but I'm already looking forward to writing and filing my report to light the seventh candle on ACS' birthday cake. It's full steam ahead for the good ship Apolyton. We wouldn't have it any other way.
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About the author: Apolyton Co-Owner/Webmaster
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Also posted as apart of "6 Years" special feature
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