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Gimp Mask: Can you tell us a brief history of how you became involved with DAC and ultimately ended up pretty much single-handedly running the whole shebang?
Taluntain: Good question, I'm wondering about that one myself. I became "involved" with DAC when I took it on as one of our hosted websites, about 20 years ago now? I founded Sorcerer's Place (sorcerers.net) and when I started running my own server to get away from bad hosting that we've had to endure in the past ourselves, a few other websites decided to get on board. DAC was among them.
As for single-handedly running DAC, I hope that that's not the case. It's definitely not my intention. My hope is that I'm simply holding the fort until I can pass the responsibility down to a regular or regulars of DAC who are still around and have an active interest in keeping the site alive. The people who have been in charge before have disappeared over time and several attempts at finding new management in the previous years have not yielded any committed candidates. DAC has been without dedicated management for much too long and consequently neglected in every area that matters; that needs to change if it is to be anything more than an archive of an (in)glorious past.
GM: To be honest I never really paid much attention to you, in my mind you were just some tech guy doing computer stuff behind the scenes, but after finally realizing you're pretty much the sole reason DAC didn't shut down for good ages ago I feel pretty embarrassed. I suppose it's mostly because you've never been very active on the forums or making a big number of yourself. Or maybe I just didn't bother reading your posts. Either way, could you tell a little bit of your level of involvement with Duck and Cover? As in, what is it that you actually do?
T: The tech guy doing domain and server stuff behind the scenes, keeping the website up & running smoothly should pretty much be the description of my involvement on most of my hosted sites. And early on, when these sites still had dedicated teams of people maintaining them, that's more or less how it was. But with the passing of time the people involved gradually lost interest and moved on, with no new people stepping up to replace them. So I've wound up being involved a bit more with many of the hosted websites, performing the most pressing content and software updates to keep them working well into the 21st century. On DAC, I also made several efforts in the staff forums and in public at finding and guiding suitable people to make the necessary site and forum upgrades. Initially, back in 2013, it seemed that things would finally get moving. But as is often the case with fansites, the person who volunteered to take on the task of upgrading DAC lost interest before anything concrete actually materialized.
GM: Are you going it alone right now or are there other people working (in any sense of the word) on the site behind the scenes?
T: For all intents and purposes, I'm flying solo right now. I've tried to get DarkUnderlord involved to an extent again, but due to his bad breakup with DAC and other commitments now, it's questionable if and when he'll have any time to dedicate to DAC again. For those who don't know, DU single-handedly coded the platform/CMS that DAC is running on, including the integration of the website and forums. He did the brunt of heavy lifting in the past, getting DAC to a state where other people could contribute and post news, articles and other content on it. He was also the only one qualified for maintenance of all the systems. After he left, there was nobody to handle the website code and perform any kind of updates. In the long run, that's an unsustainable situation because every website needs regular code updates here and there to keep it working normally over the years and DAC is no exception. This will become especially apparent once I migrate the old DAC forums to new forum software, which will break the integration with the website and require that to be redone from scratch, or replaced with something simpler or temporary until that happens. Delaying the upgrade of the forums is not an option any more due to various technical reasons.
GM: You run sorcerers.net which hosts a bunch of gaming sites including RPGCodex. Do you love all your children, or is DAC like the deformed baby that you would rather have just exposed to the elements were it not for the current ethical climate?
T: This one had me laughing for a while.
I run my own fansite so you could say I have a sentimental attachment to long-standing fansites, especially those that have (had) a lively community and played a notable role in many people's lives – DAC is definitely one of them. So just for that reason alone, I would hate to see it join the digital graveyard of fansites which have suffered such a fate over the last couple of decades.
I'm not fooling myself believing that old RPG fansites today could enjoy the same kind of popularity that they did 20 years ago, of course. But surprisingly, even with new registrations closed for over a year now, DAC has shown quite a few signs of life on the forums, so it's definitely not as dead as it might appear at a glance.
GM: On a related note, is it the development / administrative stuff you enjoy the most in general, or are you simply more involved with the other communities than with DAC?
T: Pretty much, yes. I've been working in various project management roles most of my professional life and running your own website isn't very different. Much of my free time is spent managing Sorcerer's Place and I'm somewhat more involved on the technical side of things at RPG Codex, but I've done the most pressing upgrades across all the other hosted websites mostly myself as well, since they're all basically orphans now.
GM: You seem to have a weird interest towards hosting dead sites for old obscure RPGs. I thought DAC was pretty dead but then I checked out some of the other hosted sites like Terra-Arcanum and The Pit, and they're not exactly thriving either. Why do you bother?
T: You have to remember that I took on most of these sites about 20 years ago. They weren't nearly as dead then. The communities across most old gaming fansites have dissipated over the years with significantly increased competition and hundreds of new communities with broader coverage or preferential search engine treatment, but the treasure trove of content produced by the fansites in question still remains just as valid and usable as it was 20 years ago for those returning to these games or playing them for the first time. That, combined with my own contributions to the websites in question over the years is reason enough for me to keep them around. Some of them manage to cover their own costs via advertising along with the costs of those which don't, so as long as I don't need to personally fund them in addition to taking care of them, it works out.
GM: I feel like you're like this life support machine for said communities, or maybe we/they are in the palliative care stage already. Why do you think these communities are dying? I mean we're talking about 20 year old games and there's pretty much nothing left to discuss about the games themselves; still, at least Fallout has had several hugely popular sequels, yet DAC has all but withered away. I feel like the bigger megacommunities (such as Reddit, the Walmart of the Internet) are in part to blame if you're inclined to see it as a negative phenomenon.
T: I've partially answered this above but yes, the fansites of old have been dying for a long time. The way I see it, there are a number of contributing factors to this; everything from the shift to mobile to lowering the difficulty of the games for a broader audience to the rise & preferential treatment of various commercial gaming wikis by the search engines to the explosion of Reddit and new gaming communities, and even the considerable improvement in the communities provided for their own games by the game developers themselves – none or very little of this existed 20 years ago when old-fashioned fansites ruled. Basically, the entire ecosystem has changed in such a way that classic fansites are no longer anywhere near as important or widely visited as they used to be.
GM: What are your favourite classic RPGs? If I was to draw any conclusions from the name "Sorcerer's Place", I'd guess you're thematically more into fantasy than sci-fi/apocalyptic stuff, but do you like Fallouts as well? Do you still actively play video games?
T: I started SP as a Baldur's Gate fansite in 1999, so that should answer your question. Of the Infinity Engine games, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment are definitely among my faves as well. I like sci-fi just as much, I simply never got around to playing the Fallouts because for the purposes of SP, I had my hands full just playing and covering the (A)D&D RPGs that were being released regularly back then. So as far as RPGs go, I never really branched out beyond the fantasy kind. Shameful, I know.
I still play games on and off, but I'm definitely not the "spending hours playing every day" kind of gamer any more. I've got a long list of games on GOG that I never got around to playing when they were released originally and I do my best to play a new one every so often so that I can tick it off my list.
GM: Let's talk money for a bit: has the community donated reasonably to the costs of running the website over the years, or has it come mostly out of your own pocket? I'm just kinda trying to figure out where I stand on the piece-of-shit scale because the first time I ever donated was last year, after nearly two decades of membership (to be fair I was a teenager most of my more active years and whatever pocket money I received from my parents was spent on cheap moonshine). Are the other communities better at this than we are? I like to think that we're the best, which probably means that we're the worst.
T: The community has consistently covered the cost of renewing the overpriced .cx domain name over the years, but it took dedicated donation drives to make it happen. The recent donation drive to collect funds to upgrade the forums has also been successful in the long run. There haven't really been any other donations aside from that for as long as I can remember. The other communities were a bit better years ago, but over the last decade it's been more or less the same across all of the less active ones since the active forum membership has reduced considerably. Most of the people who care enough to support a site with donations are active community members, and the less of those that there are, the less support you can expect.
GM: Why do you keep DAC alive? You recently mentioned something about the time and effort you've invested in this website, but surely you could just consider it a sunk cost, so DAC must have some sort of sentimental value for you as well.
T: Sure, part of it is simply nostalgia as well. The other consideration is that getting DAC properly upgraded and moved to SSL (https) also increases its chances of attracting occasional better paying advertising placements, which can offset the costs of running the site for longer periods of time. Regular advertising brings in very little since most gamers block all of it, so I'll probably be looking at setting up something like Patreon so that people who'd like to contribute can chip in with a few bucks on a monthly basis and help offset the costs of running the site.
GM: What do you think the future holds for DAC? I know this one gets asked in all the community interviews, but I figured better ask the puppet master for once instead of the puppets. 10 years ago when Pooper interviewed a bunch of people everyone pretty much either said that it'll die soon or that it'll keep on going forever, but it's not up to them really is it. Or is it?
T: It's up to the people still around mostly and what they make of DAC. Any kind of successful website needs constant work and improvements and if nobody is interested in putting in the effort, it can't really function. Migrating the forums to new software will be the first step as it will at least allow for normal operation of the forums and enable new members to join. Worst case scenario I can put together a relatively simple system that will allow DAC to function as mostly a forum well into the future, with only the occasional forum upgrade. If the members are happy with that, that's fine as well.
GM: Thanks for doing the interview and thank you once again for everything you've done for the site over the years. Any parting words for the 3 or 4 people that might actually read this?
T: You're welcome, thanks for the interesting questions and for being an active part of DAC – it doesn't necessarily take much more than that to make a big impact and bring about big changes in a community.
