(I had a sudden, perverse urge to spell that "Phuture."  I've really never 
been seriously tempted to do that sort of thing, I'll have you know. 
Heck, I'm still slightly embarrassed about that Y in it.)

At any rate, Carl and I have been discussing the future of the Phoenyx and 
The Other Site.

We own another domain name (actually, we own an embarrassing number of 
domain names, but never mind that) that we expect to set up as another 
Wirebird site (that's the software, in case you've forgotten).  I'll call 
the new domain "The City" since it has an urban theme, though I don't 
think I'll push that as hard as, say, the early GeoCities... maybe more 
like Blog-City. (It's not a super-duper secret, but for now I'd as soon 
not put any Google-able links to it in my posts. So, an alias.)

Now, the Phoenyx is primarily about play-by-email, but it's large and 
contains multitudes.  Well, on a small scale anyway.  So it has (some by 
accident, some by design) lists/groups that fall under a number of 
categories.

Play-by-post games.

Game discussion (primarily the Fudge List).

Gamer blogs (Gamehawk has the ability for syndication/aggregation 
thereof).

Private or semi-private groups to support local (live) game groups 
(mostly on the order of "Is everybody okay with meeting at Carl's place 
this Sunday?" though I've sort of turned ours into more of a 
trebuchet-and-Lego themed linkblog)

The City doesn't have a vow of poverty, so it's possible to have it be
ad-supported, or have pay-for advanced features, but that's really not the 
primary goal or differentiation at the moment.

My inclination is something along the lines of this:

The Phoenyx:  Play-by-email groups and local-game groups... that is, 
self-contained groups that aren't necessarily part of a larger community.

The City:  Discussion groups and gamer blogs, with (one hopes) plenty of 
cross-pollination and generally more of a community.  The Fudge List would 
move here (I've promised everyone grandfathering regardless, but I think 
Carl plans on it), I'd move GAMERS (all five members...), Carl would move 
the Raven's Mutterings (or maybe just syndicate it, I dunno), and so on.

Carl's inclination has been more to move *everything* (again excepting the 
grandfathered stuff) to the City, and keep the Phoenyx as our personal 
domain.  I'm of decidedly mixed feelings about that... the Phoenyx is long 
overdue for a death-and-rebirth cycle, but that doesn't feel so much like 
rebirth).  But admittedly, we *do* have a lot of subdomains (or whatever 
the correct term is) like raven.phoenyx.net and nathan.phoenyx.net that 
are more-or-less personal stuff.  And while the Gamehawk version is a 
whole lot better about maintaining multiple related sites, we *would* 
still have a lot of doubled work, like two different web designs.

Oh, and hey:  it's December.  The Phoenyx is now officially twenty-one, 
and can drink alcohol here in the state of Kansas, and its car insurance 
rates go down slightly.

-- 
Karen J. Cravens  silver@phoenyx.net