User:TonyV/History of the Paragon Wiki

Well, here's a start. I'll probably try to shore it up and add dates and details as I can get around to it. Enjoy!

--TonyV 15:41, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

The Paragon City Free Press

A long time ago, about a month or two after the game's release, I signed up with City of Heroes and started playing. Before too long, I met some nice folks who had a supergroup, and we became pretty close-knit rather quickly. Over the course of a year or so, though, as almost always is the case, members of the group started drifting away. We didn't try to do any kind of recruitment, so the group just kind of died off over time.

The group's leader and I talked one night about starting a new group, and decided we needed some kind of concept that would appeal to players and that would entice them to join. Eventually, we came up with the idea of a group of super-powered reporters who worked for a newspaper called the Paragon City Free Press and that would go around the city, doing missions and writing about the things they saw. The clever thing is that all of the articles would be written in-character. It wouldn't be from the perspective of a player, but from the first-person perspective of a reporter in a real Paragon City. I figured that if we could write articles about real events going on (such as issue releases, new powersets, the arrival of the Kheldians, etc.) from an in-game perspective, it would make the game more fun and interesting for everyone. I created The Newsman on Virtue, set up a web site, wrote a bunch of articles and posted them, and we were off and running.

That was when I hit the first hitch in my plan: Running an active supergroup is hard. The other guy kind of drifted away as well, consumed by the day-to-day demands of life, and I was left on my own. I had a cool concept, and what I thought was a pretty cool web site, but the day-to-day demands of life kept me from recruiting like I wanted to. I posted some messages on the official forums to try to round up interest, but I found out that if you build it, they won't just come. You need more.

CoHWiki.org

So I pondered a bit about how I could get more people interested in joining the Paragon City Free Press. I decided to set up a site that was devoted to out-of-character information to be the companion site to the PC Free Press's in-character information, something that would add an element of practicality to the entertainment aspect of the Free Press. I found out that the software that runs the Wikipedia (called MediaWiki) was free for the taking, so it really became a no-brainer for what I wanted.

Around this time, I discovered another City of Heroes site that had been set up at cohwiki.org. At first, I thought, "Rats, someone else has already had the idea!" Oh well, I figured I could just use their site to write wiki articles in. It wasn't really that important for me to host the site myself. So for a while, I actually pitched cohwiki.org on the official forums as the wiki site and wrote a bunch of articles for it.

One day, though, I got to looking at the article histories. What I saw was that I was pretty much the only contributor, and even the administrator had seemingly bailed on it. What I was afraid of was that he had quit City of Heroes and would pull the plug on the site one day. I figured that if I was going to be the only contributor, I might as well host the site myself. The administrator of cohwiki.org later told me that the site was really just a pet project for him, that he indeed didn't play any longer, and eventually, he transferred the domain name and site contents to Stratics.

The Birth of the Paragon Wiki

I downloaded a copy of MediaWiki and installed it, and created a sub-site off of the PC Free Press called the Paragon Wiki. (To this day, http://pcfreepress.com/wiki still links to the Paragon Wiki.)

I started documenting everything in the game I could get my hands on. Contacts, powersets, and badges were probably the big ones, but I also wrote about the game's backstory, history, and everything else I could think of that was City of Heroes-related. I started patrolling the official forums looking for questions that I could answer, writing an article about anything that was missing, and posting links to it. Pretty soon, a few other people started editing the wiki with me. It was great.

The Site Grows Up

One of the great things about my web host is that they provide pretty good statistics on your sites. A couple of months after pitching the PC Free Press and Paragon Wiki on the forums, I got to looking at the site stats. I already knew that the PC Free Press wasn't as cool as I thought it was going to be. For one thing, I think that the competition from the Paragon Times was just too great. Even though it was published much less frequently, it was the official source for the kind of stuff I was writing. For another, the supergroup was pretty much dead. No one really wanted to join and help out with the site.

The stats backed up my impression. Traffic at the PC Free Press site was virtually nil. The vast majority of hits on the site were my own IP addresses. However, the Paragon Wiki seemed to be doing pretty well. It seemed that every day, the site would get more and more hits. Finally, I decided that the site had to stand on its own, completely separate from the Paragon City Free Press. I registered The Paragon Wiki.com domain name, moved everything over, and completely removed all mention of the Free Press, except the note at the top that site was provided by the Free Press, hoping that one day, I could get back to that project and give it more attention.

After I did that, the site really started to explode in growth. Funny how an easy-to-remember domain name can make such a difference. In November 2005, I promoted Arkenor to co-admin of the site. He was a prolific editor and had caught and reverted several spam vandalism attempts. StarGeek was promoted to site co-admin in January 2006. Arkenor moved on not long after, but StarGeek is still an active contributor.

More Content, More Admins

The wiki continued to grow. Seeing links to it sprinkled everywhere on the forums was an extremely satisfying experience. It seemed like everyone knew about the wiki. For the next several months, everything was cruising along at a pretty fair clip. Articles were constantly being added, and the wiki became THE definitive resource for pretty much everything City of Heroes (and Villains!). It was definitely in the "top tier" of fan sites that included sites like VidiotMaps, City Game Tracker, City Info Terminal, RedTomax's guide, and more.

I added more admins to the site, including Sleepykitty, Snorii, Konoko, Sister Leortha, Yakovlev, GuyPerfect, and Sekoia. Together, this team is awesome. I mean, truly unbelievable. If you ever catch yourself thinking, "wow, this wiki site is neat, and so useful," these are the people who really deserve the credit. The truth is that sometimes when I'm looking at the stuff they do, I feel a little guilty for not doing more. I've never met a bunch of people who are more willing to not just do the fun stuff, but to take care of the nitty-gritty pain-in-the-ass stuff that normal people just hate. As the wiki grew in the early days, I was really afraid that I wouldn't be able to find people who were as psyched about it as I was. Boy, was I ever wrong about that.

The Site Blows Up

Originally, the site was hosted on PeopleHost, a discount web host provider. It worked pretty well. However, it soon became apparent that a discount web host account wouldn't cut it. The site just required too much bandwidth and disk space. Soon after splitting the site off, I moved everything over to DreamHost, which provided vast quantities of both bandwidth and disk space. I thought the site was set for life.

As the admin team really kicked into overdrive, though, the site traffic exploded. Soon, I started getting nastygrams from DreamHost. Bandwidth wasn't a problem. Neither was disk space. What was happening, though, was that MediaWiki was killing the server's CPU cycles. Being a shared web host, this was unacceptable to them, as it was causing the performance of other sites to suffer. I tried doing a bunch of performance tweaks, but none of them were enough. The site had to move.

I found another hosting provider called HostForWeb. They offered a service that is becoming more popular called a virtual private server. Essentially, I would have my own web server to do with as I please, including eating as many CPU cycles as I want. I signed up and moved the site yet again, and everything was happy... For a while, at least.

The Wikia Move

A long time ago, I got an e-mail from Angela Beesley, one of the cofounders of a new company called Wikia. She and Jimmy Wales (the same guy who created the Wikipedia) started the company as a web hosting service that was dedicated to hosting MediaWiki wikis. I didn't think much about it at the time. The truth is, I had gotten a bunch of solicitations from people who wanted to buy the site. I explained that I wanted the site to be a fan site only, not a commercial venture, thanked her, and went my merry way.

Several months later, I got another e-mail from her just to keep in touch and talking about some of the new features that Wikia was offering. I politely brushed her off again.

However, soon after the move to HostForWeb, it became apparent that I was going to have to do something else. Performance was starting to suffer, even on my own VPS. I needed a real live server with real live resources behind it. The problem is that such a server ain't cheap. It's not so much the cost of the machine that's the problem, but the cost of colocating it in a decent datacenter. Once you get into such colocation, you're getting into the realm of at least $150 a month, and while I loved the wiki, that was just too much. For a while, I contemplated running Google ads or something to try to recoup the cost. Still, that was such a huge unknown, and I really didn't want to mess with it.

Around that time, I got yet another e-mail from Wikia, this time from Jimmy Wales himself. Aside from touting the virtues of hosting at Wikia, he explained more about the philosophy of the company, what they were out to do. My favorite quote from him was that if the Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Wikia is the rest of the library. There was a flurry of e-mails back and forth between me, Angela, and Jimmy. I decided that ultimately, Wikia really could host the site better than I could in the long run. They have more resources than I do, both in hardware and in staff that is dedicated to maintaining MediaWiki sites. Angela and Jimmy put me in touch with Angie and Tor, the people who take care of the day-to-day administration of Wikia sites, and together, we've made the move over to Wikia happen.

Rehosting the Wiki

The Wikia solution worked pretty well for a while, but within a year, I had begun receiving some nasty e-mails from within the community about an issue that I was personally passionate about: advertising. In our discussions, Wikia had told me that there would not be many ads--at most, one per page, with perhaps some buttons for other sites within Wikia itself. I stated repeatedly that making the Paragon Wiki an ad-supported site was my greatest concern about hosting it somewhere else. Unfortunately, none of their promises were ever codified into the agreement when we transferred the site, and soon after the transfer, the site began being plastered with ads all over, including injecting them within the articles themselves.

What was in the agreement, however, was a revenue sharing arrangment where I would receive a certain percentage of ad impressions for a time period after the transfer. The intention wasn't to make money; I was going to use all revenue to put back into running contests and start other City of Heroes-related community projects. A few months after the transfer, however, Wikia broke the agreement when, without any notification or approval, they changed the means by which they provided ads. We used this as leverage to leave Wikia and once again rehost the site ourselves.

At the time, I was really excited about the move to Wikia. I personally have a lot of respect for Jimmy Wales and what he did with the Wikipedia. Having to leave was one of the biggest letdowns I've experienced, but the support we've received from the community has been incredible, and it has always reassured us that it was the right decision. Every once in a while, I browse the site at Wikia to see how bad the advertising has gotten, and I've never been disappointed. Flash ads, expand-on-rollovers, even malware injected into third-party ads--yikes.

The Titan Network

When we left Wikia, there was a period of time during which we didn't own the ParagonWiki.com domain name. Obviously, you have to have a domain name to operate under to have a web site, so I contacted another group of people who had approached me before about joining forces: the Titan Network.

I was already aware of the Titan Network and some of its sites. I had used City Game Tracker before it was merged into City Info Terminal and they became City Info Tracker. I was also a big fan of RedTomax's site, frequently using it as a quick-and-dirty reference for task forces. In fact, wanting to expand on its data was one of the reasons I started the Paragon Wiki!

So when I had finally made up my mind once and for all to leave Wikia, I contacted the people in charge of the Titan Network and asked if they'd be willing to let me use the name wiki.cohtitan.com. They agreed, and thus the wheels were set into motion. I leased a new virtual private server from Linode, copied all of the data over, had the powers-that-be at the Titan Network create the DNS record, and we were off and running. As I said before, the community support was overwhelming, and it really didn't take much effort to publicize the new name. Soon after, we re-obtained the ParagonWiki.com domain name.

Over the course of the next several months, some of the Titan Network leadership retired from the game and from managing their respective sites. They needed someone to conduct the day-to-day server administration and, perhaps more importantly, foot the bill for the hosting costs. Since I was already hosting the server for the Paragon Wiki, I volunteered. Today, all of the Titan Network runs off of the Linode server that the Paragon Wiki does, and I am one of the administrators over the network. We've had an extremely mutual beneficial relationship in that each of the sites has picked up valuable administration and development experience from the other.

The Future

These days, I'm not as personally involved in editing the Paragon Wiki as I used to be. Truth is, I'm not sure I could be even if I wanted to. Life tends to get really busy and I tend to get sucked up into other projects. Which is okay; the Paragon Wiki today has the best editorial and administration volunteer staff that I've ever seen. These guys (and gals!) never cease to blow my mind when it comes to the speed and quality of the work they do. I owe them more gratitude than I could ever express for making the Paragon Wiki THE gaming community-run site that, in my opinion, kills all others.

As for some of those other projects, I am working on reviving the thing that started all of this to begin with--the Paragon City Free Press. I'd also like to enhance the integration within Titan Network sites, making them more cohesive and having more than just the Titan Key login as their common element. I've also had brushes with Paragon Studios over the possibility of licensing their names and logos for merchandising opportunities, we'll see how that plays out.

But most of all, I plan on continuing to play and support City of Heroes and its community.