New website look

AfterDusk.nl/RPG-Chat.com ; 8 years under construction.

Yes folks,

you read it right, this is the 4th incarnation of RPG-Chat.com (formerly known as the website that started out originally as Afterdusk.nl)

I thought I'd take the moment of switching to the new setup to write a little article about the websites history and evolution up until now.

Originally, the site started out as a story seed collection site. A resource site like BJ Zanzibar's or the Tales of Terror website. For Storytellers, by storytellers was the idea.

The original incarnation of Afterdusk can still be admired on Afterdusk 1.0.

After that I was approached by the couple Deven and Katie as well as my current partner in crime Valentijn. The idea was to make Afterdusk (AD) 2.0 which had an ongoing online vampire game with a chat, forums and everything such a community site needs to be successful. So AfterDusk 2.0 was made, and that was built using DragonFly CMS and the Flashchat we have all come to love (or hate).

It featured the Creed City/Brisbane City setting, and a lot of fun times were to be had there, whether it was in Vampire, or the spin off games that came later, like Mage, Werewolf or Demon and even a Pentex based one led by Romaine for a while even still.

Anyway, things go as they do and with DragonflyCMS not being developped on any longer I decided to port the site over to PHP Fusion 7. And, register the domain name RPG-Chat.com and also start offering web/chatsite hosting for others out there. After all, why would everyone had to reinvent the wheel on their own right? (Old RPG-Chat.com) ; which was the latest installment of the website...

Until we got hacked about a month ago, and I noticed PHP Fusion 7 development hasn't been what it used to be given that the lead developper (Nick Jones R.I.P.) passed away this year.

So I decided to start over from scratch, get all the components I knew would work well with a single account registration and a single login for all things concerning the website itself. It eventually became a mix of the Content Management System Joomla, PHPBB3 for the forums, Mediawiki for the wiki and still flashchat for the chat as a standalone as registrations are done there on a per character/nickname basis instead of per user. And as an added bonus, I managed to integrate the single sign on for the Profiler character sheet database.

So here it is. I hope you can all enjoy and appreciate the 4th installment of the AD/RPG-Chat.com Community website. As always, work is still in progress. The forums need to be expanded and the Stories Section will find it's way into the site again as well at some point. If you find something that you think needs improvement or could work better if done differently, please, feel free to email me or leave me a Forum Private Message.

Game on folks,

Cheers, Dennis. (& Valentijn)