: So what does everyone think? Anyone ready and willing to revive M.B.O?
As you know Nicholas, I'm ready for M.B.O to be revived.
To everyone else who does not know, I'm highly in favor of reinvigorating B.org and its close to flat-lined satellite sites such as M.B.O and PiD.B.O). Nicholas recently informed me of this thread in an email (I'm one of the folks toiling on MaraPiD too) and I feel that much of what I told him can be restated here.
Others have already said it, and I think it bears repeating: the Marathon community is far from dying. Furthermore, although one generation of Marathoners is fading and gradually moving away from the game, there is still an influx new blood into the community. As anyone who is a fan of Halo can tell you, Marathon plays a central part in the Bungie canon and has numerous ties to the newer game as well (hell, how many times can you find the Marathon logo in the game?). Also, due to the success of Halo, Marathon 2 was ported to the XBox 360 as a downloadable game, introducing it to younger gamers, many of whom have taken an interest in the series. If you need proof of this, simply search the Bungie.net forums. New gamers (as well as the old) want to see and have access to more information on the Marathon series. It just so happens that the best way to do this is to update and maintain M.B.O. in the same manner that Luis Wu and crew successfully run Halo.Bungie.Org.
Truncating M.B.O. seems to be a good option to me. By sidelining superfluous or unnecessary sections (such as Orbital Arm), one could, ideally, focus aspects of the site. Namely the Story page, the archives, this forum, and a general news (including scenario news) page. Pages with similar themes could be merged (i.e. the Orphanage, archives, physics model archives, and spoiler page would work as a single section), to help with both making the new M.B.O compact/easily navigable and to make updating/maintaining these sections all that easier. After all, regular updates are the key to bringing people back to M.B.O. as well as maintaining their interest in the site. The current lack of popularity, or even knowledge, of M.B.O. among the newer generation Marathoners I reference above stems, in part (if you were to ask me) from this lack of regular updates to keep the site interesting.
So, what do we do about making this idea a reality? Well, for one, as someone already stated, we need to decide on what direction M.B.O should go in and then write this information up and present in to Claude. Once done, if he likes what is presented to him, we need to ensure that either the current maintainers, or any new ones who take up the mantle, are capable of executing and then diligently updating the new site plan. I firmly believe that there is enough interest in Marathon currently to warrant such dedication. There is simply too much story, too many memories, too many great scenarios, and just too much fun for Marathon to die a slow death. Bring it back, we owe the series that much.
