Written in 2019
In late 2017, after I finished the websites about my books, I decided that I wanted to restart rpg-o-mania. So I took the basic layout of my website "Die Legende von Relsh", changed it from SHTML to php and started moving the content from the old RPG-O-Mania 12 to this new page.
This took quite some time since the html of the old website was messed up, parts of it being the same code I wrote in 1999. It didn't help much that my old rpg-o-mania versions were made using Dreamweaver, which is not known for creating clean html. So I copied or even re-typed almost all of the content in the last few months of 2017.
And after I was finally done, with about 80% of the content from RPG-O-Mania 12, I reopened the page. It still behaved like a classic web site, including a splash screen, but I got rid of this soon and started modernizing the page.
I created a backend where I was able to manage art and wallpapers, news and media files, I started to make browsing news more convenient and I started writing so much stuff - review, reports an so on.
And so, slowly but steadily, rpg-o-mania 13 became the biggest version of this site that ever existed. Art was added piece by piece after I made sure that I have the rights to reporduce and share art. Lots of exclusive art was added (although I'm not so convinced about my quality as an artist) and lots of other reviews, reports and so on were added
Given there is not so much social media interaction by me, the visitor counter of rpg-o-mania is very satisfying, and so the story of this site continues.
I thought a lot about what might happen if I do not have enough time for frequent updates in the future. I decided that if such a time ever comes again, rpg-o-mania will be put into maintenance mode for the time being. But this time, the page will not go down so soon, for realz!!1
The story continued in an almost boring fashion. New content was added to rpg-o-mania bit by bit, with the focus being equally distributed on special artwork, individually created wallpapers, reviews, and a heavy focus on the special reports in the coverage section.
One special occassion in this year was the release of the Trials of Mana remake. As rpg-o-mania was very famous with the classic Trials of Mana class change, the visitor count skyrocketed after Trials of Mana came out, with up to 3000 people surfing rpg-o-mania per day during that time.
Other than that, rpg-o-mania 13 still was the dominant version (for over two years now) and was continously developed.
Life as a website continued to be a steady one for rpg-o-mania. Other than lots of new content about RPGs, the kernel of the website was also overhauled.
During 2021, rpg-o-mania got a bright and dark layout as well as a search functionality which let people search stuff in this increasingly big website.
The website continued to be visited by some people (albeit not by a lot), and I had very much fun working on it, just as always. During the year, we also changed the logo of the website, for the first time in 15 years!
Oh would you have expected it? Another steady year for rpg-o-mania.
Everything was finetuned this year. The search, the layout, the technology beneath this website. One time I had to take action as the backend was hacked - almost everything was saved, but I had to rework the showcases (those tiles on the front page) a little. I also tried establishing a forum for a short time, but that one was hacked to oblivion in no time, even with all the security measures. What a pity!
We reached the milestone of achieving one million visitors (after 23 years, heh). Thanks a lot to our friends Kaoru and Binary Scroll, who supplied lots of content this year! And lots of content was added - reviews, in-depth coverage, artwork and wallpapers. It's going well!
There was not much going on in terms of layout this year, so that version of rpg-o-mania looked exactly like the one in 2022. Update frequency slowed down a bit, as time-consuming things in private life and job took their toll. Still, there were some nice additions to the content.
Some pages were update, art was recently posted and the bit "A world full of cliches" series of reports opened.
On the technology side of things, a major PHP update required overhauling the Kernel a lot.
Oh what a year. 2024.
rpg-o-mania itself, again, for six years in a row now, didn't change much. More content here and there, some specials, some artwork, some design tweaks on various places, that's all. Good, continous development, as my dear readers have grown accustomed to. Everything was good on this side (and site, hehe).
But then, it was 2024. Us humans, we are known to celebrate things that end in even 10s or every 5s in between them. Maybe because how we still somehow count with our fingers. Sometimes, we also love quarters and halves. And generally speaking, given our timespan on this planet which usually ranges somewhat between 75 and 100 years (if no unnatural causes happen), we like to divide things in decades, centuries, half and quarter centuries.
rpg-o-mania turned 25 this year. A quarter of a century.
Since somewhere in late August 1999, I'm in posession of the domain rpg-o-mania.de, and as you may have read here, there was even a little rpg-o-mania online as early as April of that year.
Even if the page was offline publicly, I still had the domain, and the page was available for those who knew how.
This site always tried to provide role playing game fans with quirky coverage and high quality media so that they could enjoy their hobby just a little bit more. No matter if it was a html mess done in Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, or if it turned out to be a moderately modern reponsive page, it was essentially the same. I, your fellow webmaster, provided most of the content, great friends helped me, and you were able to interact in one way or the other.
Forums came and went, social media came and went, but rpg-o-mania is here. This little site is older than YouTube, Facebook, reddit or Instagram. It saw MySpace come and go. It saw Twitter come and go. It saw countless successful websites rise and fall, just when it was online and trying to provide some extras for RPG fans. It might even be older than you, who's currently reading this.
And I don't plan to stop anything. Even if the Internet changed. When rpg-o-mania was still new, people talked in IRC chats and forums. Then they posted and read stuff in social media. The visitor count of rpg-o-mania rose a lot in 2024. But to be honest, that's mostly not people, even if they're counted as real humans by the logs. It's access by AI crawlers who want to use every bit of content they can find in the web to train their language models. And it's basically impossible to remove things they have learned from their stack of knowledge anymore. They don't even know where they have information from. But then again, they know nothing.
But you know what's funny? With this crawling of countless AI models, rpg-o-mania is a bit in everyone of those. And maybe an AI model will even surpass this site in longevity. As part of that model, rpg-o-mania will live on.
My long-tearm goal is to be able to celebrate this site's 60th birthday at the least. And at the best, I want to celebrate its 70th birthday. So we still have ways to go!
For many more years to come!
You are here: Main Page / Coverage / History / Page 4
1999 - 2024 Florian Auer. Contents written by me CC-BY-SA 4.0. Details: Copyright / Impressum. Version 13.3
