Project Redcap:Current events

2015

I seem to have forgotten about Project: Redcap for much this year. Partly, I've been actually playing role-playing games more, which cuts into the time for side projects.

I have been checking in from time to time to see the recent changes. There have been steady edits and contributions from a handful of people, and -- importantly to me -- no spam or vandalism. The anti-spam measures I've put in place have been working.

28 December 2015

I'm getting started on some major re-organization work in the hope of making the site easier to navigate and more informative. I've learned a lot about usability in the past couple of years and I'm trying to put that knowledge to work for the fan community. Admin (talk) 08:04, 28 December 2015 (MST)
I deleted some neglected foreign-languages pages. The Main Page versions in Danish, Finnish, Swedish, and Japanese had not been maintained since about 2012 and still contained mangled characters from the migration from PageWork. If no one has bothered to fix the text in three years, no one really cared about those pages. On the other hand, the French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese pages are all in good shape, so at least some people in the community are using the language features. Admin (talk) 08:04, 28 December 2015 (MST)

27 December 2015: Upgraded from Mediawiki 1.20 to 1.26. This involved significant changes on the back-end, including switching to PHP versions. To ensure a smooth transition, I migrated the content (including user accounts and edit history) to a new "beta" site, which will go live in a few days if there are no major problems. In the meantime, I've temporarily disabled editing on the original site. The "beta" site is open for editing and I am starting on some reorganization.
26 December 2015: I came out of hibernation and realized I haven't posted an update here in almost two years! Sorry.
8 December 2015: Project: Redcap experienced an outage of several days. I was attempting to upgrade to a more-recent version of MediaWiki, backed out my changes, and proverbially left one part on the workshop floor. Folks over at the official forum commented on the outage, it came to my attention, and I fixed it right away. My apologies for forgetting to check everything was working after I aborted the upgrade.

2014

9 February 2014: Multi-language support is finally working. See Project Redcap:Language policy and Help: Languages
8 February 2014: Content the late, great Ars Magica fan site durenmar.de is available on the new page, Durenmar (website).
3 January 2014: As has become my tradition, I am writing to inform the community about the past year's developments at Project: Redcap.

This year, I became aware of another Project: Redcap hosted at http://www.project-redcap.org. This is some kind of non-profit data-sharing project for university researchers. I became aware of it because I received a bit of correspondence from people who meant to write to that other redcap. In fact, I received more correspondence for the wrong redcap than for the right one, but I've come to expect that, from the Ars Magica community, no news is generally good news.

In order to reduce confusion and also to reduce my out-of-pocket costs, I donated the projectredcap.org domain to the other Project REDCap. I had registered that domain years ago as a hedge against the original redcap.org domain expiring beyond my control. That is no longer a risk, by the way: I control the redcap.org domain and am paying the expenses of maintaining it as a contribution to the community.

We have had more extensive contributions from more users than ever before. I am pleased to say that mid-year, we had at least a stub article on every Ars Magica product ever published -- and very little of that content was written by me. :-) In the sense of engagement from the user community, Project: Redcap is thriving relative to recent years.

I was not very active on the Atlas forums this year, and the Berk List was pretty slow. The one user request I received for Project: Redcap was for a user-friendly guide to how to use the site and post updates. It turns out that is easier said than done. :-) I didn't reply to the requester at the time (sorry), but today I spent a solid day re-organizing, updating, and expanding the user help and documentation. I will respond to user feedback -- it is very important for users to tell me what they think, because my mind-reading skills are below average. Clear, constructive feedback is always welcome and will be acted upon ... eventually. :-)

If you have an interest in contributing to Project: Redcap but have been daunted by the lack of user-friendly help, please take a look at http://www.redcap.org/page/Help:Getting_started and let me know whether that meets your expectations and needs.

What we did not see this past year are a lot of new links to Ars Magica web sites. We did get a few. I remain convinced that there are a lot more out there that aren't currently listed. I could look for them myself, but would greatly appreciate some help. One trick that works nicely is to Google for the name of an Ars Magica spell, such as Ball of Abysmal Flame, and see what covenant libraries come up.

My priorities for the coming year are to straighten out some of the complex, organizational issues that affect multiple pages. User help was one of those. Foreign language support is long overdue. The FAQ is in reasonably good shape but can certainly be improved. I'll work on all of this as time permits, meaning it probably won't all get done in 2014. I am running like a real project now, with goals and priorities (but no budget, other than what I pay to keep the lights on). If you want to help out, you know where to find me.

All in all, I think Project: Redcap is in pretty good shape, perhaps the best since I took over in 2005. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you can share about how to make Project: Redcap better suit your needs.

Best regards,

-Andrew Gronosky

2013

1 January 2013: The version of MediaWiki that runs Project:Redcap has been upgraded to 1.20.2.

Older Events

For older events, see Project Redcap:Events history