End of a Journey
By: CereCere
Well it's been one heck of a ride.
As of today The Worst Sailormoon Pages Ever officially becomes a static site. What this means is all of the pages on the site will remain online and accessible for as long as possible, but there are no plans to update the site in the future. We will still update the links to recommended pages in the archives, and may mention the occasional news item on the updates page.
The big exceptions to this will be Page Tips and The Help Desk. The Desk has always operated independently from this site and will continue to do so. We will also continue to be on the staff of the Help Desk with the Small Lady and the Busters. As for Page Tips, it's going to be redeveloped and expanded into a new site, which will come part of The Help Desk. In the coming weeks Page Tips will be given a new home, old sections will be updated, new sections will be added and a new layout will be developed. So this announcement doesn't mean we're going to disappear. You can watch this site and the Desk for details on Page Tip's reopening.
Now before I go on any further I must apologize to those who have been awaiting the vote for SMPCA6. The vote will not be taking place due to a lack of finalists. There were many great nominations sent in, but not enough to fill each category. To those who took the time to place a nomination, I thank you again for sending it in.
As the Administrator of this site, this was a very tough decision to make. It took months to finally make up my mind to do it. There were several factors that led to this, including how much the web has changed this year, but more importantly how much our lives have changed over the past year. From my last rant you know the dilemma we faced during the summer. While trying to figure out how to handle that, I was also trying to come up with some ideas to revitalize the site. Something that would still allow it to update almost as often as it once did, but with less work due to the less time we had for it. While ideas came and went, the site wasn't being updated, it wasn't being worked on. That's when I came to the realization...
I didn't miss it anymore.
Up to at least 9 months ago, I missed working on this site if I went for a week or two without doing any work on it. When I say that, I don't mean just reviewing and other visible site updates. It use to be an almost daily routine for me to check our email, reply, sort and view nominations and talk with the others about the site. That was my favourite part of being the Admin for the AQ. When I wasn't doing that it felt like something was missing. Since then I've gained new interests, and a lot of new responsibilities that has been filling my spare time. So last month I decided to contact the other AQ, let them know how I felt, and the others agreed. It was time to let it go.
I remember when I was asked to join this site. I was actually the fourth to join back then. It was the other three who came up with the concept for the site and asked me to join so they could round out the Quartet. I wasn't sure what to make of it all, wondering why they asked me. If you go back to our first reviews you'll see I didn't write very much, simply because I wasn't sure what I should say or do with this thing! Well within four months that all changed. The original Ves left after only two months, and the site quickly became so popular that was too much for the other AQ. At the time, they had other websites and projects to maintain, I didn't. So I gradually took over all the responsibilities of administrating the site. I wasn't asked to do it, nor did I ask, I just saw things that needed to be done to keep the site running, so I started "filling in" for the others.
So, it's been six years, did the site do what it was supposed to do? Did it help to raise the standards of SM sites? Did it help people avoid bad sites, while also helping them find good ones? I'd like to think it did. We might not have influenced every SM website creator out there, but judging by the amount of sites that link us and mentioned us, we certainly stirred things up enough to help some owners push themselves to create better sites. We caught only a few thieves in our reviews, but we stopped many more by raising awareness about the wrongs of stealing content and bandwidth. The amount of views the archive section generates shows how many people use our archives to quickly find good pages. Some do like going there just to look at how bad sites can be to get a few laughs, but they are still reading the reviews, and learning what makes up a bad site. They then pass that information on to others. Will all this stop because we are closing? No, I don't think so. This site will still be here, for people to see, but there are other reasons. One is another unforeseen influence we had on the web, the several other WPRs that formed since our opening.
On behalf of the rest of the AQ and myself, I would like to thank everyone that has ever visited this site, everyone who has ever sent us an email (except those damn spammers), everyone that has ever nominated a site, and everyone who has ever sent in a Lemures Article. I have always said what made this site work, wasn't really the four of us, it was all the people who visited. That may sound corny, but without people to give us something to work from like nominations, we would have never survived this long.
I would also like to single out a few people to thank. Thanks to Ben Goodger, who was a sounding post for many ideas back in the early days of this site. Thanks to the Small Lady for all her help, advice, and allowing us to join her in developing her Help Desk idea. Thanks to Brian Bork for creating the great fanart that is a special part of our front page. Also thanks to anyone else I've regularly chatted with through IMs and email with as CereCere over the years.
Of course my final thank you goes to all the AQ members both past and present for all the time and work they put into this site and for putting up with my nagging! I especially like to thank JunJun for putting up with me the longest!
I will still be checking the AQ's email on a fairly regular basis, so if anyone has any questions or comments, please feel free to drop us a line.
Now for those of you who read this all the way to the end, we have a special treat for you... click here
February 16th, 2003
As usual any comment made on this page is that of "The Amazoness
Quartet" or one of its members. Tripod has nothing to do with our opinions,
etc, lalala...