We might want to consider migrating the site, and that might take some serious man-hours to do. At the very least, I would encourage my fellow admins to log in to the admin panel and save/download yourself a backup of the wiki. I saved one for myself tonight, but if wikidot expires we may have trouble trying to reconnect elsewhere. Having a copy in your back pocket seems like a good precaution.

I sent one email to moc.todikiw|selas#moc.todikiw|selas on January 19th when I noticed the problem, and one to moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus on the 21st, and one to moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap#moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap on the 26th.

I have not yet received a response from any of them, so I sent a second email to each of them on January 28th. I made sure the latest email expressed that the radio silence was worrying me, and that I'd appreciate a response even if it was just a quick "we're looking into the problem".

As of this morning (Thursday, January 30th) I haven't heard back from any of those addresses. The moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap#moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap one bounced both attempts, despite being the contact info listed for them on PayPal.

Does anyone know a better way to reach the billing and processing team at wikidot?

I really like wikidot. I really want to give wikidot my money. I'd just like to also get the upgrade that I paid for. Any suggestions?

Knoxville, TN. (And working on it!)

** What do you do as your day job?**

Unemployed. The most interesting job I've ever had was antique book restoration, though.

** What RPGs do you play?**

GURPS most anything. I ran a long GURPS Vampire game and some world jumping games.

** What kind of contributions did you make/do you plan to make to the wiki?**

I really love the concept of the wiki, I hope to be able to add the occasional interesting page, or at least produce useful edits.

** How did you find the wiki?**

Mr. Hubert posting on the SJGames forums.

Hello everyone, just wanted to introduce myself and say hi. This project looks really interesting and I appreciate all the work everyone has put into it.

Our little project is very close to reaching 2000 content pages, and I hope we will reach that number this weekend - so you are just in time for the celebrations! ;)

I'd tell you, but I'm pretty much ashamed at the lameness of the area I live. Other than the supposedly haunted house down the road, there are no famous or even notable things around here.

• What do you do as your day job?

Working at a relatively fancy restaurant while I work on college to be a graphic designer.

• What RPGs do you play?

D&D 3.5 mostly. It was the first game that got my attention and it just keeps delivering. I play a few other games on the side, but I still prefer the one I've been doing for the past ten years.

• What kind of contributions did you make/do you plan to make to the wiki?

Honestly, I don't know what I'll be able to contribute, but whenever I find something, I plan to add it. I think I'll be particularly useful in the Mythological Characters section, though.

• How did you find the wiki?

It was in the "You May Like These Other Wikis" thing at the bottom of my screen once, so I guess you could just call it luck.

Simplicity

"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to DIE!!!"
— A. Goldfinger

Perhaps sometime you chanced to read
Melodramatic narrative
Of villainy and dastard deed
As full of plot-holes as a sieve
The Hero's trapped in Evil's Lair;
The Villain vows to seal his doom.
He does not kill him then and there;
Instead he simply leaves the room!
What sort of overweening sap
By hubris blind or on a whim
Would make a complicated trap
Instead of simply shooting him?
It happens that long, long ago
There really was just such a man;
He sought to kill his direst foe
But used an over-cunning plan.
He learned life's sad and tragic quirk
Sometimes the death-trap does not work.

Nero, the Roman emperor,
Had a domineering mother.
Nagged him 'til his nerves were sore
And he wished his Mom to smother.
So Nero hired an artisan
To rig her ceiling to collapse
And crush her flat as marzipan
Next time she took one of her naps.
When that lethal architecture
Fell just like a cataclysm,
She was out, ('tis my conjecture)
Sitting on the euphemism.
Outside the bedroom she did lurk
And so the death-trap did not work.

The next plan that Nero approved,
Was to construct a special boat;
It had a plug, which when removed
Would cause the ship to cease to float.
And so with nothing else to lose
He placed his unsuspecting mater
Off upon this deadly cruise
In which the waves would inundate her.
He thought the plan out through and through;
He knew this trap just could not fail;
But he forgot to tell the crew
That they were not supposed to bail.
In vain they labored through the dark
Against the leak which would immerse
Them all — they could not save the barque
But did save all the passengers.
They worked the pumps and did not shirk;
And so the death-trap did not work.

The Mother paddled safe to shore,
Her toga drenched and draped with kelp.
She saw a guard there, armed for war
And asked him for a little help.
The man knew well the emp'ror's dream
To see no more his Mom alive,
And so the guard devised a scheme
To see to it she'd not survive.
He saw no need for all the fuss,
For subtle snares and gadgets dumb;
He simply drew his gladius
And punctured her duodenum.
He did the dame in with his dirk;
Because a death-trap would not work.

The Moral of this doggerel
Is clearly plain for all to see:
The plan that you think is really swell
May fail through it's complexity.
Then friends will laugh at you and smirk:
"I KNEW that death-trap would not work!"

— Kurt Wilcken, (c) 2004

Congratulations, Herr Doktor Hubert! Does it feel good to not correct me? :)

Actually, yes - it does.

(The real story is that the comedian, Dan Coffey, originally called himself "Mister Science", but another performer doing straight science demonstrations for kids threatened to sue him. So he changed his character's name to "Dr. Science".)

Ask Dr. Science! He knows more than you do!

However, if someone else calls me "Herr Doktor Hubert", I am no longer obliged to correct them.

• I live in Seattle.
  • Prior to that I lived in Albuquerque and before that Minneapolis.

• I no longer have a day job. We moved out here when my wife scored a really good job, and now I'm essentially a kept man.
  • Prior to the move, I managed a game store in Albuquerque. During that time, I was a level two Magic:The Gathering judge, but have ironically let my certification lapse after moving to the heart of Magic: The Gathering territory.

• I'm currently running a Deadlands Reloaded campaign for 5 players,
• and a solo Trail of Cthulhu campaign for my wife.
• I also have a weekly group I get together with that does one-shots and short-shots, so I play a lot of different games.

I've been GMing for several decades, and have tried quite a few different systems and settings. If I listed games in the order of how much I've run them, it'd be:

• Amber DRPG
• old-school D&D
• 7th Sea
• d6 Star Wars

I've also got a fair amount of experience with Continuum and Cyberpunk 2020. Lately, my tastes have been turning towards mechanical elegance, so in the future I'll probably be converting other games to Gumshoe, F#, or Wushu, depending on the needs of the type of story/setting I'm running.

Because of the campaigns I'm currently running, I started my contributions here with

• Western Characters
• Cosmic Horror Tropes

and then gradually diversified into

• Time Travel Tropes
• con games
• various science topics - see astrophysics for links
• Post Apocalyptic Decay

Etc, etc. I'm sure there'll be more soon enough.

• I first learned about arcanawiki via a mention at White Wolf's Scion forums, where I used to be a frequent contributor. I ran a Scion campaign for around a year and a half, but frustration with the mechanics was making me bitter and jaded, :) so I wrapped it up.

I live in Santa Cruz, which I haven't written up—but I did join to make an entry for Santa Carla, which in part was based on the Cruz. So that sort of counts.

I'm a grad student by day (sometimes also by night), which pays lousy but beats looking for a real job. On the bright side, I get poorly-monitored internet access all day; on the other hand, I'm often too busy to enjoy it.

I've played a scattering of RPGs: D&D and several offshoots like True20 and Mutants & Masterminds; some indie games like Universalis and With Great Power; some "misc" weirdness like Amber DRPG and Jadeclaw. I'm running a Mutants & Masterminds game (set in Santa Carla, because why avoid being cheesy with superheroes?), though it'll probably be wrapping up soon as the academic year starts.

Contribution-wise, my bloated folder of gaming bookmarks has a subsection labeled "cool real world stuff" that I hope to eventually share via articles here. Next up is probably the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, if someone else doesn't get around to it first.

I saw the thread about this wiki on RPGnet, and I've long been of the opinion that real world history and weirdness is better for gaming than any fantasy setting I could create on my own, so I think the concept of this place is really neat. I'm a novice to wiki contributions, so hopefully I won't mess up too much. :)

Okay. Introduction, Take Two:

• I live in the City of Sheboygan in the Enchanted Land-O-Cheese (also known as Wisconsin. As you can tell from all the red links, I haven't gotten around to making an entry for any of this yet.
• I tell people that in my Secret Identity I'm a Ninja Cartoonist. I real life I work in a factory where I make parts for SUV's and worry about the state of the auto industry.
• These days I mostly run GURPS. I've also run and enjoyed Champions, Castle Falkenstein, Teenagers From Outer Space and (of course) AD&D (still haven't gotten around to upgrading from 2nd ed). I'm currently running:
  • Saturday Morning Travelling Rock 'n' Roll Band — a light, silly game based on cartoons like Josie and the Pussicats
  • A solo game with my wife set in a D&D-style heroic fantasy world
• So far I've posted the Hodag article and a couple of the tall-tale Mythological Critters; the bio of P.T. Barnum and some local interest articles. Future articles will probably be eclectic and random.
• I read about it in jhubert's post on the Steve Jackson Games Forum.

• I currently live in Aachen in Germany, although I was born in Erlangen, where I lived for most of my life.
• I'm currently trying to do my PhD in the field of Computational Materials Science (simulating the growth of crystals on the computer). Originally, I studied physics.
• RPGs I am currently involved in:
  • I'm currently GMing a long-running weekly Exalted campaign, which has the usual amount of high-powered drama you'd expect.
  • I also recently participated in a Dark Heresy adventure with my old gaming group (which I visit - along with my parents - every six weeks or so).
  • I plan to run a D&D 4E one-shot in August, since I want to get more familiar with the system.
    • And the reason for that is that I'm trying to write a D&D setting: Urbis - A World of Cities. The basic idea of this setting is that a "typical fantasy world" evolved to see its own magical industrial evolution. Give it a try - and play a game of "spot the tropes" while you are at it. ;)
• I started the wiki, so I'm largely responsible for the overall structure. I'm especially proud of the timeline and the all-new Tropes section. I plan to steadily add to both sections in the future, while not neglecting the other sections either.

• Where do you live (and have you already created a wiki entry for your home town)?
• What do you do as your day job?
• What RPGs do you play?
• What kind of contributions did you make/do you plan to make to the wiki?
• How did you find the wiki?