About Phileas

Phileas is a Warhammer Online character on the Ostermark Server.  The player of Phileas (that would be me, *waves*) has been providing fansite support for MMO's since 2001 when she took a volunteer position with Warcry to help out their Dark Age of Camelot site. 

Back then I was known as Sneezy.  I worked with Warcry from 2001 until 2004 on various fansites for them, including DAoC, AC2, SWG, and their news Hub providing content and backend coding.

In 2005 I rolled on one of the first RP-PVP servers in World of Warcraft, Twisting Nether (TN) and was known as Mortica.  I had very little experience with RPers before TN, although I had done some D&D in High School and participated in collaborative story writing through AOL in the mid 90's.  I was amazed at the talent and creativity of some of the writers on TN and lamented the fact that the official Blizzard forums only kept posts for about 2 weeks.

And so The Twisting Nether Gazette (TNG) was born.  Initially it was just a forum with real life moderators who didn't tolerate the RP bashing that happened on the official forums and that gave writers a place to keep all of their writing in one place.  It had a hacky news page that most people never visted and some journaling features that nobody used.  But the forums exploded.  People were churning out incredible RP and making RP connections which lead to even more spectacular stories.  Since then, TNG has evolved and switched over to a vBulletin base and grown into the RP social networking behemoth that it is today.

vBulletin is a great system.  Very slick and polished.  However, the startup costs are prohibitive to my poor starving teaching salary, so when I decided that I liked Warhammer enough to create "WAR-TNG" I had to fish around for an alternative programming base.  After messing around with a dozen different things (SMF, Wordpress-Mu, Joomla, and many others) I finally decided on Drupal.  I fell in love with how clean and unrestricitve Drupal is and ended up spending over a month just messing around with a test site to learn as much as I could before I started creating The Ostermark Gazette (TOG).

Originally I had planned to post links to TOG a week or two after the game went live, but I kept thinking of newer and better things to add to the site.  I'm not sure if TOG will rival TNG ever.  They are very different sites with slightly different purposes.  I don't anticipate the same forum chatter as can be found on TNG.  Warhammer has the Warhammer Alliance and several other big name websites that essentially plays the part of the official forums for Blizzard, but they seem to be fairly on the ball as far as moderation goes, and posts aren't disappearing after two weeks.

I don't believe in competing with large sites.  I enjoyed my time with Warcry, but I'm happy catering to a small set of people where I can provide tools for RPers but not be so large as to require advertising to pay for the bandwidth.  I hope you enjoy the site, and let me know if you have any suggestions for improving it.