I hate asking this, but here it goes.

I’m really struggling to keep the site up to date. There has been just an incredible amount of Ultima fan project news in recent months, which is both surprising to see and a welcome trend. There has also been, as one would expect, a lot of Shroud of the Avatar-related news in recent months, and there will doubtless be still yet more to come in the near future.

Let’s take Shroud of the Avatar as the example here. Yes, I keep up with the news related to e.g. its early releases and weekly updates, but there’s a lot that falls by the wayside too. Things like the Pen of the Avatar sessions…I just can’t always find time to report on these, or do much more than make sure there’s an event calendar entry for them on the sidebar. There’s all sorts of neat stuff that percolates up on the Shroud forums as well, some of which is worth a mention here…but I just can’t find time for that.

Or, rather, I could potentially find time for that, but then other projects would suffer. Indeed, Ultima Return is already suffering, and there’s more that I have on the go that is in similar peril.

But even if I did find time for that, there’s also something of a backlog. Typically, now, it takes me at least a couple of days to report on development news from most fan projects, unless we’re talking about something major…like, say, a Beautiful Britannia release (and no, there hasn’t been one of those recently).

In 2012 and into early 2013, the news load was rather more manageable, in part because I had the likes of Dungy and Deckard helping me out. But real life, as it so often does, intervened for both of them; Deckard has had several circumstances change in his offline life which now consume his attention, and Dungy is doing his medical residency…and so no longer has time even for consistent sleep, much less posting news here.

True, Browncoat Jayson does an excellent job maintaining The Digital Lycaeum, and Fenyx et. al. keep The Codex of Ultima Wisdom running quite nicely. But that still leaves a lot of news to be covered…and more, as well. There are numerous project entries that need to be moved over from Old Aiera, and I also haven’t finished setting up some of the subdomains that the Codex needs to have operational in the near future.

So…what I’m asking, primarily, is if anyone out there has the time and the desire to help out here at the Codex. Whether that’s migrating project entries from Old Aiera to an appropriate subdomain here or covering the news so that I can free myself up to do those other things, I’d love it if one, two, or more people stepped forward to help out.

But equally, please don’t put your hand up (as it were) if you’re not sure this is something you’ll commit to and stick with for a goodly while. Like…until Shroud of the Avatar is released, at least.

And if that last point wasn’t too off-putting, hit up the contact form or leave a comment here; I’ll get in touch.