The Ultima Dragons on Facebook: 900 Members and Counting!

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As of around twelve hours ago, the Ultima Dragons Facebook group welcomed its 900th member.

Okay, okay, okay…it’s not as amazing as the thousands-upon-thousands of registered Ultima Dragons listed at UDIC.org, on the rosters there. But even so…it’s a notable milestone, and a sign that the group is healthy and growing. Certainly, there is plenty of healthy — that’s the word I’m going to use, so shut it — discussion to be found within the group!

And as Iceblade points out, we are but 100 members — 98 as of this writing, actually — short of a legion of Dragons. So there’s that.

30 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:

    What’s significant about this is that of the registrations proper (old UDIC) the majority of them are probably old as hell, whereas with the Facebook registrations these are people with enough love in their hearts for Ultima to have taken action on it recently. Something else to consider is that a lot of Ultima fans (I’m speculating, of course), either don’t use/like Facebook or haven’t taken the time because they’ve already become Dragons through the classic site (like myself, for example). So that number, 900, signifies something much larger.

  2. Iceblade says:

    Hmm…. Apparently, this milestone has required Facebook to take down the site for fireproofing.

    • Iceblade says:

      Wait a second… the hacker group claiming responsibility are known as the Lizard Squad… strange coincidence (well almost since Dragons aren’t lizards.

    • Sanctimonia says:

      I’ve heard of the Lizard Squad attack (I think they were initially incorrectly associated with the NK attackers), but are you serious? And what’s “fireproofing”? I feel like this has gone over my head… Could be the beer…or just me.

  3. Stirring Dragon says:

    It’s really a shame there is not another way to keep in touch with the Dragons beside Facebook.

    In my opinion a private forum venue would work much better for a group like this. Then individual Dragons can start new threads of interest, etc.. A much better format for a community of this caliber. They can then leave some forums public such as General Info and Ultima Game Hints, etc… to attract old and new members and then just make the rest of the forums private for group members only to post in. The Dragons should control and moderate their own content and not give that over to Facebook.

    I really can’t image there isn’t a Dragon among them that can’t setup a server running FluxBB or similar pretty quickly. They could even use the same server that currently hosts the UDIC site, wherever that may exist.

    (Wait, did I just volunteer myself for something like this? Well, if there is interest and if someone from the group has a server to host the forum on, I’m willing to offer my services to help set it up)

    • Iceblade says:

      We have tried to have a forum here in the past, but nobody used it.

      If you have any suggestions for an improvement of activity for such a forum, we are open to hearing.

      • Sergorn says:

        Well all due respect to Kenneth, I think all the forum solutions used here… kinda sucked in the end, which is why they were never used. The lack of any integration of said forums with the news and comments is also an issue.

        And originally there was a PHPBB forum here (or at Aiera rather) and there WERE some discussions there. But there was various security and hack issue as I recall, as it often happened with PHPBB so that went to hell.

        And the forum as it is now well… still same issue to me, it barely feels like a proper forum at all.

        Oh well…

      • WtF Dragon says:

        I really want to turn on comment integration, which Vanilla supports…but that could potentially mean losing the thousands of comments already on the site.

        Vanilla are working on a solution that’ll allow comments to be imported, but…that may be a ways off. I may try and experiment with integration myself, if I can find time for it. But that’s a trick in and of itself, isn’t it?

    • Sanctimonia says:

      I’ve have a Comcast “business class” Internet account (not bundled; I have no television or phone service) for the last five years or so at the same physical location (my home) and static IP address (173.15.223.130) with a dedicated server I built myself (quad-core, 6 TB software RAID 5, 30-minute UPS) registered at eightvirtues.com. It’s not a hosted solution, as the server sits in my office behind my router forwarding from my WAN IP address as I see fit. Dropbox could serve as a backup solution (a free account is 2 GB, surprisingly), and someone else could moderate or configure the software/layout/forums/users. I don’t have the most reliable solution, but it is the most powerful (1 MiB/s sustained upstream and unlimited CPU time/cores) and the most configurable.

      The trick would be that only Dragons could post, at least in certain forums. It would have to import/parse/monitor Dragon registrations from other sites or have independent registration. I don’t suggest the latter, as we already have two and need only one.

      Perhaps it could be configured to let Dragons post, but unregistered posts would still be allowed under the pseudonym of “Guest Dragon” while allowing signatures. I know WtF Dragon has forums here under his control, though hosted.

      Maybe a bot that runs a perpetual Google Hangout for Dragons to join…

      • Stirring Dragon says:

        Yeah I think for it to work it would have to be viewed as it’s own place with a dedicated URL, not forums under another location. I agree another login would suck, it would be nice if Dragons could use existing names and logins from UDIC.org

        What I really would like to see is for the Dragon Facebook group to vote on completely migrating to a forum setting and then just using Facebook as nothing more then a jumping point to the forum. It wouldn’t make sense to add another hangout place for the group and break it up. They would have to vote and decide if they would like a forum setting better. Does Facebook even have polls?

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Facebook has polls.

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Some forum solutions – Vanilla, for example – support the use of third-party logins: Facebook, Twitter, etc.

        Not a perfect solution, but certainly a way around the “one more login” objection.

        Y’all are welcome to use the forums here, of course. But if you wanna build your own, I’ll do what I can to make them known.

        But: best start a poll on the FB group.

      • Sanctimonia says:

        @Stirring Dragon

        I checked some available domain names and the obvious ones are taken:

        ultimadragons.com
        udic.com
        dragonsden.com

        These are available, though:

        dragonlydiscussion.com
        dragonforums.com
        ultimatalk.com
        namejobbye.com

        There are always the Usenet newsgroups as mentioned on udic.org… Just fire up that NNTP client and start some flame wars! I miss those days…

      • WtF Dragon says:

        NAMEJOBBYE.COM is available??????

      • Sanctimonia says:

        LOL, not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but according to name.com it is:

        https://www.name.com/domain/search/?domain=namejobbye.com

        Incredibly, hoeofdestruction.com, putitonthetable.com and cryofthecorn.com are also available. Go figure!

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Must…not…hit up…domain…registrar…

      • Sanctimonia says:

        It gets better. This one’s available too:

        ultimafuckyeah.com

      • WtF Dragon says:

        That’s more of a Tumblr name…

      • Sanctimonia says:

        Its sister site could be teamavatarworldpolice.com (also available), dedicated to the movie of the same name (someone needs to make that). The similarities between the Avatar’s shenanigans and U.S. foreign policy are striking. I wonder if Richard did that on purpose or if it was fate.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      Well, there is a forum here…

  4. Stirring Dragon says:

    @wtf

    Yeah this place is crying out for a (good) forum. Having discussions like this in comments is pretty painful. It’s very hard to track conversions this way as I’m sure we are all aware of.

    My suggestion is to set up phpBB using the ultimacodex.com domain, so we could all just go to ultimacodex.com/forum.

    You can check out the http://www.lemon64.com/forum/ as an example of a phpBB forum. It’s very clean and had nice features.

    I would much rather prefer a forum like this hosted on Ultima Codex then anywhere else because Kenneth does such a great job at keeping up on all things Ultima. It just makes sense that it should be here.

    I’m sure If you build it, the Dragons will come.

    • WtF Dragon says:

      I’ve actually used phpBB in the past, and…well, it was very, very difficult to stay on top of all the spam and other bot-related garbage that went on. I’d like to think (hope?) that they’ve hardened their code in the intervening years, but I’m also hesitant to go back.

      Not that I’m not above TRYING, mind you. I’m using Vanilla right now, but I’m not wedded to it by any means.

      In the end, what I need is a forum solution that bridges well with WordPress. Vanilla isn’t quite that, though it comes close in a few respects (damn but I wish I could integrate it with comments without losing all extant comments). If that’s phpBB, I’m game to give it a look…but I’ll take all the advice in the world as to how best to harden the heck out of it.

      • Stirring Dragon says:

        Ah, I wasn’t aware of all the spam stuff. Yeah whatever solution you can come up with, it has to be both easy for people to use and also not a pain for you to moderate.

        I can’t seem to find this vanilla forum you mention anywhere here? Why don’t you just hook it up at ultimacodex.com/forum and see what happens?

      • WtF Dragon says:

        Try /forums 😉

  5. Stirring Dragon says:

    @WtF
    Yeah, ultimacodex.com/forums just brings up an blank page for me.