The Wongery

D minus negative seven days and... okay, never mind.

It has now been seven days since the much-anticipated "hard launch", when we finally broke our silence and publicly announced, or at least acknowledged, the Wongery's existence, making some attempt, however meager, to bring in readers and users. So how did it go, and what are our next steps?

Well, due to dual considerations of (a) still not having as much content as we would have liked, and (b) not having much money to spare (thanks for both largely due to circumstances in the industry I work in that made this last year very difficult for me, though honestly also largely due just to my procrastination and incompetence), the hard launch wasn't nearly as elaborate or as involved as I'd originally aspired. I'd hoped to be releasing free RPG supplements, hosting a game jam, soliciting submissions for a fiction anthology, doing all sorts of things that... absolutely did not happen. Instead, the "hard launch" consisted of my making a Blazed Tumblr post and posts on the ENWorld and RPGNet fora. That's... that's it. That's the extent of the hard launch. That's all that ended up happening.

And even then, there were... issues. I've already briefly related my concerns about the site possibly being down during the hard launch because of the migration to a different hosting plan dragging out much longer than I'd initially told it would. Well, at the time of the official hard launch, it was still up. But I wasn't sure how long that would be the case; the site's going down shortly after the hard launch would be almost as disastrous as its being down at the moment of the launch. Furthermore, it turned out that both the ENWorld post and the Blazed Tumblr post had to be administratively approved before going live, so those posts still weren't visible yet, and the site could go down before they did.

Well, it didn't. At the time the Blazed Tumblr post went through, the site was still up. But it went down about an hour later. I frantically replied to people who responded to my post saying they couldn't access the site, and contacted the hosting plan although I wasn't optimistic they could do anything to get it back up immediately. As it turned out, fortunately, they could, and it was back up in less than an hour, though that was still less-than-ideal timing. However, I'm still not sure what actually happened there. I received another message from the admins later saying that I could manually change the DNS pointers once the migration was complete and I was satisfied with how things were on the server, so given that and how relatively quickly the agent was able to resolve the issue, I guess maybe this wasn't because of the migration at all and the site just coincidentally happened to go down at that time due to unrelated causes? Though that seems unlikely, so maybe they are connected and I'm just misunderstanding something, which isn't a stretch; I am definitely not a computer expert, and I'm not really knowledgeable about all the details of how the domain resolution and the migration process work, or about anything else, really.

(And, incidentally, that was the last I heard about the migration process, so... I have no idea where it currently stands. I never got a notification that it was complete, but it's been long enough by now that it surely should have been. Did they cancel it, as I'd at one point asked them to if it wasn't going to be done on time, even though they later told me that was unnecessary because I could change the DNS pointers at my leisure? Did they complete it, and just not tell me they'd completed it? What's going on? In any case, one way or the other it seems likely that I'll have to get that finished soon, so... it's possible the site may be down for a day or two within the next week. Sorry.)

So what were the results of the hard launch? Did it actually bring anyone to the site? Well... Last I checked, the RPGNet and ENWorld posts had received no replies. That doesn't necessarily mean anything; people may have looked at the site because of the post but not responded in the thread; but it's not a great sign. I did, however, get a fair amount of engagement to the Tumblr post. A lot of people replied, and many even followed the Wongery Tumblr account. But that didn't apparently translate to visible engagement with the site itself. Since the hard launch, nobody has posted in the Public Wongery, and there has been exactly one new post on the forum, and that didn't come from soneone who found out about the site on Tumblr; it came from someone from the Strike Engine Discord, where I had posted to ask Silly Rookie, the Strike Engine creator, if he was okay with what I had written on the Strike Engine Main Page. Again, the lack of posts does not mean that nobody checked out the site; it could be that there are a lot of people lurking, but they just haven't posted. But it's not a great sign.

(If there are any lurkers reading this, though, who haven't posted on the Public Wongery or the forum because they are reluctant to be (among) the first ones to do so... please do! Go for it! Someone's gotta be first!)

So does that mean the hard launch was a failure? Should I have waited after all until I had more content and could do more of what I had originally planned, or should I have just scrapped everything entirely and given up on the Wongery?

Eh... let's come back to that question at the end. First, let's address a different question: What have I been doing on the Wongery in the week since the hard launch?

Well, not as much as I'd like, because, having focused almost exclusively on the Wongery for the week before the hard launch, I'd neglected other work I really needed to get done, so I've had to focus this week on some other projects I was behind on. But I did get a little done. The night of the hard launch, while lying in bed, I checked the site on my cell phone to make sure it hadn't gone down again... and realized that in the site redesign (or in the original design, for that matter), I really hadn't taken mobile accessibility into account, and the site looked terrible on a cell phone screen. That was something that seemed relatively urgent, especially since I think a lot of people use Tumblr on their cell phones so there was a good chance anyone finding the site through my blazed Tumblr post would look at it on mobile, so I went ahead and fixed that. Also, while after spending so much time just before the hard launch getting those MediaWiki and phpBB extensions working, I had planned on taking a break before delving into any more programming, but there was one minor bug that was annoying me enough I really wanted to try to fix it immediately: all links to pages in subspaces were showing up as redlinks, complete with the "(Page does not exist)" in the tooltip, even if the page did in fact exist. It took me longer than I expected to figure out how to resolve this, but resolve it I did, and that's no longer an issue.

Other than that, most of the time I've been putting in toward the Wongery this week has been geared toward actually getting some content up in the Gamespace, now that that exists. There are two main components to this. First, I've been reading through the rulebooks to the games of which I hadn't previously finished reading the rulebooks, primarily those I recently ordered: Savage Worlds and the latest editions of BRP and Pathfinder. Okay, I probably could create content for those games without reading all the rules cover to cover (especially since the latest editions of BRP and Pathfinder, the former especially, differ from the previous editions, which I have read, mostly in licensing), but I want to be thorough and make sure I know what I'm doing, so I want to read all the way through through at least the core rulebooks.

Second, I've been taking a Udemy course on Lua, which is a scripting language used in many MediaWiki templates, and that I figure I'll have to use to make good templates for stat blocks for the RPG space. I'd been taking a break from Udemy courses, as from almost everything else, while I focused on getting as much as possible working on the site in the days leading up to the hard launch, but I figured now I could get back to it; I had been in the middle (well, really still kind of near the beginning) in a course on PHP, but given that I had somehow managed to get the extensions I wanted mostly implemented with what very limited skills in PHP I already possessed, I figured that completing that course was now less urgent than learning Lua, about which I knew basically nothing, since I did want to start getting some content in the Gamespace very soon. I'm making fairly rapid progress through the course; Lua is a simpler language than PHP, and the main thing that occasionally trips me up so far is that I keep forgetting that, unlike Javascript, PHP, or most other modern programming languages, Lua requires its if statements to include the word "THEN". (The very first programming language I ever learned, Applesoft BASIC, used THEN in its if statements, and for that matter so did Pascal, a language I used as a teenager (the creator of which, apropos of nothing, died the day of the Wongery's hard launch), but I don't think any language I've used since then has, so I'm definitely out of the habit of using it.)

After the main content, the Lua course I'm taking on Udemy includes a section on "Using Lua with Roblox Studio" that at more than two and a half hours long makes up nearly a fifth of the course. That, of course, isn't why I'm learning Lua, though judging by the comments on a section where the instructor asks people's reasons for taking the course that is apparently why most of the people taking the course are learning Lua. So I considered just skipping that part, since it's not something I'm going to need. But I'm enough of a completionist I do want to try to finish things I start (I may not be very good at finishing things I start, but I do want to), so eh, I guess I'll go ahead and get through that. But not right away; I think when I get to that part I'll go back and finish the PHP course I started, and then come back to the Lua course and finish that part. (Ah, but if I did learn how to create Roblox games, couldn't I make a Roblox game based around a Wongery world as a further way of promoting the Wongery? Eh, yeah, I guess, in principle, but there are a few problems with that. (A) The demographics of Roblox's userbase skew much younger than the intended demographics of the Wongery's users; I kind of feel like advertising through a Roblox game would be marketing to children, which... doesn't really feel right. And (B) Knowing how to script in Roblox Studio is one thing; I'm sure there's more to making a Roblox game than that, and I... don't really know much about Roblox. It would take time to learn enough about Roblox to make a game in it, not to mention the time it would take to make the game itself, and if I want to promote the Wongery there are probably much more time-efficient ways I could do it. So yes, this did very briefly cross my mind, but no, it's almost certainly not going to happen. I will probably get through the part in the Lua course about using Lua with Roblox Studio, just out of a sense of stubborn completionism, but I'm not likely to actually end up using it.)

Anyway, I'm hopeful—though not certain—that within the next week I'll know enough Lua and have read enough of the game rules (which is to say all the game rules) to start putting some real content in the Gamespace. But we'll see. Oh, and also I really hope that within the next week I'll get some new articles up. I really need to do that.

So, having covered that, let's return to the question broached earlier: Was the hard launch a failure? Or, more specifically, was this something I shouldn't have done? Would I have been better off sitting on the Wongery longer out of the public eye, or just abandoned it and moved on to other things?

Well, I can't call the hard launch a smash success. Sure, I definitely wish the site were getting more engagement. Still, I think overall, even if it didn't have all the results I hoped for (though "hoped for" is not synonymous with "expected"; I'm not necessarily surprised that it didn't have better results), this was the right thing to do, for several reasons.

First, it gave me the impetus to finally get things done on the Wongery that I'd been meaning to do for a long time and kept putting off. The site redesign. The title logo, which the site had said was "Coming Soon" for years. (I'm not 100% happy with the current logo, which was definitely a rush job, and I may refine it later, but it's better than nothing, which is what I had previously.) And, most importantly, the subspaces. Oh, wow, the subspaces. The Gamespace, the Buildspace, etc. I still can't believe I finally got those implemented. I seriously had been sure I was ever going to be able to; I had never written an extension before for anything, and was very much worried such MediaWiki customization would be far beyond my meager programming abilities, and would remain so even after I completed the Udemy PHP course I was taking. But I really wanted to get that done before the hard launch, and so, even not having completed that course yet, I sat down and focused and tried to do it, and I somehow did it. I am still a little in shock about that. That's a major site feature I'd been wanting the Wongery to have since the beginning, and I wasn't sure when, if ever, I'd actually be able to do it, and now it has it. It's there. There's no content in those subspaces yet, but that'll come. The subspaces exist; the extensions are implemented. That's the hard part. And it wouldn't have been done, at least not yet, if I hadn't had the hard launch looming imminent motivating me to try to do it.

Second, well, now that the Wongery hard launch has happened, now that the Wongery has been publicly posted about... that's been done. The proverbial cat is out of the equally proverbial bag. (Well, it would have to be equally proverbial, wouldn't it? Could you put a proverbial cat in a literal bag? Or a literal cat in a proverbial bag?) That means I don't have reason to hesitate to bring the Wongery up in public, if the occasion arises. In particular, all those things that I'd hoped to do for the hard launch, but didn't? The anthology, the game jam, the free adventures? I can still do that later. And now once I am ready for any those things, I don't have to wait for the hard launch. That's already happened. I don't have to coordinate them, or wait for a specific date. I can do it whenever. Once I finally do have the money to spare to solicit artists for illustrations for the Wongery? I can do that. The Wongery is (in principle) public knowledge now; I won't be preempting the launch, or feeling shady by doing it as part of the launch. Anything else I do in the future to promote the Wongery, I can just do whenever, because the big date is already past. (One thing I think I'm going to try to do next year—I'm pretty sure it's too late this year, and even if it weren't too late to register I wouldn't be able to have things ready in time—is releasing a Wongery adventure or two for Free RPG Day.

And third... well, those posts aren't going away. The posts will still be there on Tumblr, on ENWorld, and on RPGNet, and someone can still run into them later. And there are people following the Wongery Tumblr blog now, and there may be lurkers to the site who haven't posted... the word is out, however tenuously, and it may still grow over time. Even if the hard launch didn't lead to much immediate engagement, it could still build in the future. There's no guarantee it will, of course; maybe it won't; maybe the Wongery will always remain obscure and unvisited. But the fact that there are those public posts about it and linking to it at least increases the chances, however marginally, of people running across it. The Wongery may still have a lot more popularity and engagement in its future. Maybe it won't; I can't honestly say the response to the hard launch gives me too much reason to be optimistic. But it's still a possibility.

So, yeah. Could the hard launch have gone better? Well, yeah, absolutely. Did it get the Wongery as much attention as I hoped? No, not even close (though again, "wanted"≠"expected"). Do I regret having gone through with it? No. No, I still think this was the right step. And now, with the Wongery's hard launch finally in the past... we'll see what the future holds.