Yep, it is I, Drako, one of the original members of this site, staffer, and otherwise NEVER HERE type person (this is the first time I've logged in in nearly a year...sheesh). I found myself browsing through the site earlier and I stumbled into the NavCenter. Ah, the memories.

For those of you who don't know, I spent nearly a year of my life writing the NavCenter. I coded, I tested, I spent months upon months chasing down links. When it opened it was among the first of the gaming search engines, and one of the most fully featured. It was originally dubbed the Gamers Yellow Pages, and after conversations with Mark Surfas it was supposed to become part of the Planetquake network...until delays and politics intervened, and PQ began work on their own engine (GameSpyder). After long negotiations fell through to make the GYP part of Blue's site, Bini Parkhurst graciously offered me space and a permanent home on Quake2.Com. The Gamers Yellow Pages became the Quake2 Yellow Pages, and since Q3 was on the horizon by launch time, the whole thing was redubbed the NavCenter at the last minute. The NavCenter was launched to rave reviews and its future looked bright indeed.

Then real life intervened...

Jobs, marriage, children, and other "time consuming" activities have eliminated my ability to maintain the system for some time now. A quick trip to the NavCenter shows that it was last updated in September of 2000...well over a year ago. So this project, which once consumed most of my waking hours and nearly a year of my life, now sits forgotten and unused in a dreary, cobweb filled corner of this site. Do you guys realize how depressing that is?

Which brings me to my dilemma...what to do with it. Even today, years after its opening, it's one of the most feature rich engines on the Internet, so I hate to see it sit idle. On the other hand, I do not have time to maintain it, nor do I see that time appearing within the forseeable future (I'm the Webmaster and CIE of a 20,000+ student university system, as well as a married father of two...free time is rare for me). Furthermore, with other games like Wolfenstein on the market, and Doom3 coming in the near future, the system needs a redesign if it is to continue operating. While I might be able to spare the time to do the code updates needed to keep it operating with the newer games, that might be a wasted effort without the time to update the database itself.

So what should I do? I tried looking for an assistant once, but didn't find anyone who would stick with it. Should I just close it? Leave it be? Try the assistant search again?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I hate seeing it sit there unused, but I'm at an impasse about what to do with it.

[ 12-29-2001: Message edited by: Drako ]

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Originally posted by Cyborg6:
Try to sell it to another gaming site. I still use it to find stuff. I will miss it though there are lots of dead links now.

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I agree. Make the small updates to the code and try to sell it to somebody who has use for it. The sad fact is that q3arena.com has crawled to a halt (at least the forums have) and it's not doing any good here.

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and that the webpage doesn't work also is new to me... maybe itès really dead after all.

[ 11-08-2002: Message edited by: DGhost ]

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DGhost

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