Sarngate, here's how the history went down:
It used to be that there wasn't so much to talk about for news, and there were two or three people that I encouraged to post news on the board whenever they could think of something--like a new color of yellow nail polish that matched Beethro's hair or whatever. In practice, the three webmasters used the News board mostly to announce when they'd updated the site in some major way, and occasionally we'd be lucky enough to have something else to report on.
One day I freaked out about us not having a mailing list, like our competitors were eating my lunch or something. In Schik-like fashion, Schik coded up a feature where every post on the News board went out to our opt-in list of e-mail recipients. It was an elegant solution that allowed news dispersal without duplication of effort.
The number of newsworthy items has gradually gotten larger so that now if we post something whenever the news actually happens, we'll have half a dozen messages each month. And that's too many for an opt-in e-mail list, when each message has got a convenient and legally-mandated "
unsubscribe"
link at the end of it. The audience on the list is made up of DROD regulars, but also a lot of innocent bystander types who want just a little bit of the DROD world without receiving a full-on torrent.
So we've got the monthly "
newsletter"
format now, and the "
News"
board serves as an archive of all the monthly-mailed newsletters. These infrequent summaries work well as a top-level view of the whole crazy sprawl.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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