As of today, it has been exactly nine years since the Wongery went public. (That is, since the Central Wongery wiki became publicly viewable and I made an announcement about it.) And it's... nowhere near where I'd hoped it would be by now.
Oh, not just that it hasn't had any visitors. I mean, that's not a surprise. We have done literally nothing to publicize it. I acknowledged that in my initial announcement: "we think it'll be more interesting to just put it out there and see if people stumble across it and if it spreads by word of mouth." The answer is no. People do not stumble across it. Why would they? There are no links to it; it's not going to be ranked highly on a websearch; people would have no realistic way to find out about it. Lesson learned (though we should have known it in the first place): "If you build it, they will come" may apply to... uh, baseball ghosts? What was that movie about again? But anyway, it doesn't apply to websites. If you build it, and you don't tell anyone about it, and you don't put any links to it anywhere or give people any way of finding out about it, they won't come, because they won't know about it.
(Well, except the legions of spambots who manage to find the forum somehow.)
But when I say the site isn't where I'd hoped it would be by now, that's not all I mean. We'd hoped to have a lot more articles on the wiki by now, and a lot more site features, and we... don't. The site itself is... not much better than it was when it launched nine years ago. Not counting redirects and disambiguation pages, there are currently three hundred and twenty articles in the Central Wongery mainspace. That's... not many. That means in ten years, we've posted an average of slightly less than one article every ten days. That's... kind of pathetic. That statistic is a little misleading, though, because, well, our last article was posted more than four years ago (on September 19, 2017), and, more importantly, our first articles were actually posted to the wiki before it was public... as a matter of fact, the very first article, on the world of Dadauar, was posted... exactly at midnight on the morning of January 1, 2009? That can't be right. Huh. Okay. So anyway, during the time we were actually posting articles, from January 1, 2009 to September 19, 2017, we posted an average of... slightly more that one article every ten days. Okay, that didn't change the math much. A bigger reason the average is misleading, though, is because our posting rate has not been constant. We posted five articles on the first day (though by our current standards they were very short stub articles that are in desperate need of expansion) and fifteen articles within the first four days... but we posted only four articles in all of 2017, and no articles in 2016.
I (Clay Salvage, the founder of the Wongery) take full responsibility for the dearth of articles. I've had a lot of things come up and found it hard to devote time to the Wongery, as much as I would have liked to... though, truth be told, I could have made it more of a priority. It's not that the other Grandmaster Wongers haven't been writing articles. They have. There are a number of articles written and waiting to be posted. But the other Grandmaster Wongers can't post articles without my goahead; I always look over the articles myself before they go online. And I haven't found (or made) the time to do that.
So anyway, when the site "went public" nine years ago? Let's call that a soft launch.
Which isn't to say this is the hard launch today. No, no. Not at all. Like I said, the site still isn't nearly where I'd like it to be. But we're going to build toward a hard launch. We're going to get the site up to the standards we want, and then we're going to do what we didn't before, and actually publicize it. (We've got some (what I hope are) good ideas as to how to do that.) And we're going to set a date for that hard launch. The Wongery will have its hard launch one year from today, ten years after the initial soft launch, on December 21, 2022.
(Initially, I was going to be cagey in this article about whether or not it was really the same people working on the Wongery. I was going to kind of imply, or at least raise the possibility, that the Wongery was under new management (I'd even considered making "Under New Management?" the title of the post) and that that was the reason it was finally getting kicked into gear. But you know what? No. No, there's no reason to pull a pointless misdirection like that. No, the Wongery hasn't changed hands, and there are still most or all of the same people working on it. We're just finally taking it more seriously.)
I realize I'd said this before and you may not believe me... is what I would say, if there were anyone actualy reading this soon after I'd posted it, which there isn't, because nobody knows about the Wongery. Actually, I guess I said it anyway. Or wrote it. But I do mean it this time. And I guess... well, the next year will bear this out, when the hard launch actually does occur.
Of course, if we're going to do this right, there are a lot of things we've got to do now and then, including but not necessarily limited to:
More articles
Okay, this one's obvious, but yeah, we need a lot more articles. And we might want to change our focus a bit. We've been posting articles on a lot of different worlds, which isn't bad in and of itself, but it might be better to further develop the worlds we've already posted... it might be better to have a few richly detailed and worlds well described by hundreds of articles than a huge number of worlds with only a few articles related to each of them. That doesn't mean we won't be creating any new worlds—in fact, those articles I mentioned above that are already written and waiting to be posted include at least one article on a new world, in a whole new cosmos—but we'll maybe slow down the pace a bit in favor of fleshing out our existing worlds.
There are other ways we might want to think about changing the focus, too. I've been keeping track of the number of articles we've posted on different types of subject, and, well, I'm not sure we've been entirely on the right track with that. About forty percent of our articles are on different kinds of creature. Which is great, in one way; I like creatures; heck, I've always loved poring through monster books for role-playing games (and I know I'm not alone in this). But, well, maybe it's a bit much; there are other kinds of articles we've barely covered. For instance, especially if we're ever going to see the Wongery worlds adapted into role-playing game settings, we could maybe use more articles on spells... of which we currently have exactly one (mestral protection). There are some other types of article in which we're also wanting, but that's probably the most egregious.
Expanded articles
Not only does the Wongery need more articles, but many of its articles—including and especially some of the very first articles posted—could do with a lot of expansion. Like I mentioned above, the very first article posted was on the world of Dadauar, and it was about five hundred words long... far too short to do justice to an entire world. Other articles were even shorter, the shortest being the article on the tabulator batirine (the fourth article ever posted, posted on the same day as the article on Dadauar), at only 243 words. There's a lot more to say about each of these topics, and these articles really need to be further developed. Not every article needs to be a several-thousand-word treatise—the aforementioned articles on spells will probably end up being relatively short—but those early articles skew way too short right now, and even a lot of later articles could stand to be a little longer.
Site design
The site design right now is bare-bones and boring. We'd always intended to someday improve it; we just never actually did it. Just below the title, the Wongery main page says "Title graphic coming soon". It's said that since the site was first (soft) launched nine years ago. "Soon" is long past.
Code cleanup
As it stands, the Wongery site has at least a few bugs that need to be taken care of. There's a notice on the bottom of the Wongery main page about "Uncommitted DB writes". The Public Wongery is currently completely broken; its main page just shows a whole bunch of error messages. And any page within the Central Wongery that uses mathematical formulas (like the pages on dimensions and fractals) either doesn't show the formulas correctly or just doesn't show up at all and just spits out an "Invalid marker" error. These are clearly things that have to be attended to. Maybe this can all be fixed by just updating the MediaWiki software and the MathJax extension; maybe it'll take more than that; but we've got to get around to doing it. (For that matter, I had to do a little code cleanup just now to get the news page working again, because it turns out that was broken.)
There are other issues with the site code that maybe aren't quite so urgent, but still ought to be done. For instance, we could really use an easier interface to post news articles like this one. In fact, we could really use an interface, period, because right now there isn't one—this article, like every past article in the news archive, was posted by logging into the Wongery's hosting account and using the phpMyAdmin tool to directly create a new row in the news database. This is less than ideal. Which is to say, it's stupid and we should have done something about that a long time ago.
(Oh, and I just now discovered while I was writing this article that the whole site, aside from the forum, is completely broken when I'm logged in. ("Fatal error: Call to undefined method LoginForm::authenticateUserData() in [directory information redacted] on line 137") That's... odd, and annoying. And, obviously, something else we'll have to fix.)
Forum cleanup
Like I said, while no one else seems to have run across the Wongery (understandably, given the absolute absence of any sort of publicity), spambots somehow have, and the Wongery forums are full of thousands of spam messages. (There are currently 12799 posts in the moderation queue in the Off Topic forum alone... though that is the one that attracts by far the largest amount of spam.) Fortunately, the phpBB software is good about holding those spam messages rather than making them immediately public. Unfortunately, that means I have to manually go through and remove them. I mean, I could just nuke the whole fora and start from scratch, and I can't say that's not a little tempting, but I still have the almost certainly irrational fear that there might be some genuine posts I want to keep hidden among all the spam. So yes, I feel obligated to go through and delete all the spambots manually. At least it looks like they've finally relented a lot... there used to be dozens of spam messages a day, but now it looks like there have only been nine in all of 2021. Well... good. So once I do finally get all the old messages deleted, maybe I won't have such a deluge to keep up with. Still should probably look into whether there are some more effective captcha methods we can implement, though.
(Speaking of the forum, I guess I probably ought to update the forum software, too; I think the version of phpBB it's running is badly outdated by now...)
(Hm, on a hunch after discovering that most of the site was broken when logged in, I decided to check whether the forum registration was still working. Looks like it's not; there's a message saying you're required to enter a confirmation code, but the actual confirmation code doesn't show up, nor is there anywhere to enter it. Well... dang. Not only is that yet another thing we have to fix, but that raises the disturbing possibility that that's the only reason the spambots have stopped—because they couldn't register for accounts—and that once we do get that fixed the forums will be flooded with spam again. Well... like I said, we're going to look into whether there are more effective captcha methods we can implement.)
More news updates
I'm going to try to make a new news post at least once a week. Yes, even if nobody knows about this site yet so nobody will be reading it. Yes, even if there's not much of anything to say. Why? Because if I get into the habit of it, it's more likely I'll continue once the site has had its hard launch and people do know about it.
I may also go back and prune some of the old news posts. Not that there have been that many... there have only been ten news posts in total. But some of them have been kind of stupid, most notably the April Fool's hoax in 2013 about the site shutting down; the fact that nobody was visiting the site to read and fall for the hoax made it merely pointless instead of pointless and mean. As awful as that post is, I'm not sure yet whether I really want to delete it, but... eh, I'm definitely considering it.
Site features
There are a lot of site features I'd wanted to add that... aren't there yet, but I'll try to get (at least some of) them up before the hard launch. I want to add maps of the various worlds described in the Wongery—I have maps of many of those worlds, and certainly of those that have the most articles written about them and are most in need of them, but they're not really presentable. I want to make resources available for people who want to make games and other creative projects based on these worlds—game statistics for various RPGs; rigged and animated 3D models. The idea is that these will be made available within the Central Wongery itself, in additional tabs on the articles. This will involve writing extensions to the MediaWiki code, but that's doable... we just haven't done it.
Obviously we want illustrations for most of the articles, too, but that may wait till after the hard launch, since, well, we'd kind of like to start our publicity campaigns all more or less at once, and if we reach out to artists for illustrations then they could spread the word about the Wongery before we're ready for it. On the other hand, we could reach out to artists but not tell them what we need the art for, or ask them to agree not to tell anyone about the Wongery until the hard launch date, but... well, we're still thinking about that.
Licensing and copyright
Right now the Wongery copyright page says that all the material is released under a Creative Comemons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which it is, and that's fine, but... we actually want to also release it under an additional license, to make it easier to use commercially (with certain limitations—we don't intend to just release everything into the public domain; we want to retain some control of it). We have a pretty good idea what we want the terms of that license to be, but, well... we're not lawyers. We'd want to consult with a good intellectual property lawyer to get the license done properly, and obviously we haven't done that yet.
Speaking of copyrights, we probably should register a copyright on all the material in the Wongery before the hard launch, too. Technically a work is automatically copyrighted as soon as it's created anyway, but there are important benefits to registering the copyright, and we really ought to take care of that. Again, we'll be sure to get that done before the hard launch.
Cookie notice
I guess nowadays websites are supposed to give users a notice about their use of cookies, and let them opt out of nonessential cookies? The Wongery doesn't use any nonessential cookies; there are no ads, and we don't track usage patterns or give or sell any information to third parties. But I guess to conform with the law we have to officially say that.
World of the Week
In our last news post—which was, ah, way back in 2015—we said we were being hypocritical by using artwork found online to illustrate our World of the Week pages, and that we would remove those illicit images. We still haven't done that. Whoops.
As for rebooting the World of the Week, as we also said we'd do... we will, but not till after the hard launch. But in the meantime, yeah, we really do need to take down those images we used without permission.
Is there anything I'm forgetting?
Probably.
So anyway, yeah, we've got a lot of work ahead of us, but if all goes as planned, or even if only some goes as planned, one year from today we'll have our hard launch, and the world will know of the Wongery at last.
That sounded a little more melodramatic than I intended. And maybe even kind of ominous. Sorry.