A Brief History of the Vaults of Pandius Website
by Shawn Stanley from Threshold Magazine issue 27The first iteration of the website was little more than a collection of links. At the time, that seemed like the easiest solution to be able to access your bookmarks from wherever you happened to be on a computer. Hosting was a problem though, as it would remain for some time. The page of links was hosted thanks to a friend who had access through his father to part of the public website where his dad worked.
Back then, there were already websites collecting materials from the Mystara Mailing List (MML) — the most widely available platform for the Mystara community. There were also Mystara and Savage Coast/Red Steel Message Boards on AOL, but not being in the United States, they weren't an option.1 If I remember correctly, there were 3 websites collecting materials from the MML, but they weren't being as thorough as I thought a repository of information needed to be, so I decided to throw my hat in the ring and create my own site, which I humbly called the Mystara Home Page. The website was created on 27 June 1996, although it was only announced on the Mystara Mailing List on 6 July 1996. The site was hosted on GeoCities.
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/5304/2
As the material on the website grew3 I added a number of additional GeoCities websites and also a Tripod website to be able to contain everything, although the only access point remained through the main address. The multiple websites were becoming a bit unwieldy and the increasing number of popups and extraneous code added to pages by GeoCities was an annoyance. Most importantly, however, was a move by Yahoo-GeoCities in 1999 to give Yahoo rights to the intellectual property on websites contained on GeoCities sites.4 I took the site down on 2 July 1999 to ensure that this would not be an issue. The solution, however, was already being worked on.
The solution was offered by one of our community, Gordon McCormick, and the good people at slashnull.org, who hosted the website.5 For free. With full hosting services and everything. The website was announced on the MML on 7 July 1999. It might also be of interest to note that the Wayback Machine has several captures of this website from 12 October 1999 to 25 September 2004.
http://dnd.starflung.com
In 1999, Wizards of the Coast were identifying websites for each of the campaign worlds which were not the core campaign worlds being directly supported by the imminent 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The website was chosen as the official website for the Mystara setting on 15 December 1999.
During 2004 it became necessary to find a new home for the website, and another member of our community, Jenni A. M. Merrifield, together with her husband, offered to host the website.6 Again this was done for free. With full hosting services and everything. On 2 October 2004 the new website was announced.
http://www.mystaranet.jamm.com/vaults7
The website did not remain for long, and by this time, with the size of materials expanding and my willingness to impose on the goodwill of others dwindling, I decided to move the website onto a commercial service with its own domain name. On 15 May 2005 the new home of the website was made available.
Since then the website has continued along,8 with the tenth anniversary being commemorated in 2006.9 In April 2009 I started falling behind a little bit, only doing partial updates throughout the rest of 2009. There were no updates in 2010, and things only started back up slowly near the end of 2011 — it took until August 2014 until I had finished catching up with all of the places which I trawl for information. The update pages throughout the years, linked to from the main update page here http://pandius.com/lastup.html contain a record of what has been added when. Since about April 2002 this has been a more complete listing rather than a vague summary — although it is only more recently that there has been a logic to the order of things listed on the page. Now, with each update, the items at the top of the notice are the oldest items, progressing sequentially to the newest items at the bottom of the list.
The Name of the Website
At the beginning, as noted earlier, I humbly, and perhaps unimaginatively, called the website Mystara Home Page. At some stage before October 199910 the name changed slightly, to Mystara - The Dungeons and Dragons Homepage. The change was in order to obtain more appropriate and better placings in Internet search engines. However, the name itself was not very evocative.
In September 2000 I was having a private email correspondence with Travis Henry where the website was being discussed. He suggested that the name should be more concise, catchy and with a Mystara-specific connotation. He then put forward the idea of some sort of "Name the Site" contest for the MML and Mystara Message Board (MMB), but then went on to say:
In the meantime, here's a modular list of suggestions — though I think someone else might come up with something better:
Something like:
"Codex", "Scriptorium", "Vault(s)", "Archive(s)", "Annal(s)", "Chronicle(s)", "Legend(s)", or "Revelations"
followed by something like:
"of Mystara", "of the Immortals", "of Pandius", or "of the Old Ones"
Of these modular combinations, I like "Revelations of the Old Ones" and "Vaults of Pandius" the best.
I like "Revelations of the Old Ones" (shorthand: "RotOO") because it ties into the hint in the Gold Box that each DM is perhaps really an Old One of their own campaign. The title would then suggest that each article reveals how that DM (or Old One) envisions Mystara. I like "Vaults of Pandius" (shorthand: VoP or "the Vaults") because it ties into the fact that the "in character" Council of Mystara (p12, WotI: Book I) has its headquarters in the city of Pandius, and therefore its members surely keep much of Mystara's valuable items and lore in their personal and collective treasure vaults within in the city...just as you and the rest of the "out of character" Council of Mystara will keep much of the Mystara web-community's valuable lore in the "treasure vault" of the official site.
Also, I simply like the way "Vaults of Pandius" sounds when one speaks it aloud."
So, despite the egalitarian suggestion of a public contest, Travis won the contest before it was even started by putting forward a name which successfully captured my imagination and even foresaw the shorthand usage of the name into the future. Thank you Travis.
The Logo
In March 2000 I was approached by Michael Wiemholt with regard to the images on the website. Ultimately in 2001 he delivered the images still in use today on the website. In the 22 June update the ship image with the buttons on the side was introduced, and in the 17-18 September update the Vaults of Pandius logo with the moon, representing Matera, was introduced.
In 2008 Roger Girtman started a thread on The Piazza regarding a TSR style sigil for the Vaults of Pandius. Michele Caprita created a version as did Roger Girtman and Shane G. Though for some reason I didn't use it on the Vaults until 2 September 2013.
Statistics
With the move of the Vaults of Pandius onto a commercial hosting site I got access to a whole bunch of statistics capabilities with Awstats — more than I can readily compile easily. That being said, there are some statistics which are easy to compile over the period of time from 15 May 2005 to the present.
The first graph displays the number of pages and the number of hits for the Vaults of Pandius by month. The number of pages are HTML, PDF and similar files. The number of hits includes everything visited - primarily this includes image files.11
The second graph displays the number of visitors and the number of visits for the Vaults of Pandius by month. A unique visitor is a person or computer that has made at least 1 hit on at least 1 page on the website during the reported month. It is tracked by IP address. A visit encompasses all of the hits made by a unique visitor within the period of an hour.
The Future of the Vaults of Pandius
The Vaults of Pandius is a very old-school website, it is hand-coded HTML with the subsection pages being long lists of articles sorted only by date. The classification of the separate subsection pages is arbitrary and might not always be internally consistent, and since it has been 25 years that classification has probably evolved somewhat and not necessarily been applied fully across the board. On the other hand since it has all been done by only one person throughout that time there is a certain degree of consistency of classification. All of this is over-shadowed by the fact that website looks and feels old-school - there’s no usage of the Comic Sans font, no glitter or blinking text effects, no animated gifs, no automatic playing of audio files, or other features of early generation websites - but the website still feels somewhat stale and old-school. Even in 1999, when consideration was being given towards choosing the official website, this was a negative factor against the website. This has remained a factor and one which I have been unable to address - maintaining the existing website takes enough of its own time, and I don’t have the skills myself to implement the sort of website that I envisage. What I envisage is still largely the same as what I put forward and was developed in this thread on The Piazza: https://www.thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2906. In 2011, 2012 and 2013 Giampaolo Agosta and some of his students worked on a framework for a new website as well as on importing existing files into that system. A lot of work was done on this, a mammoth undertaking - though unfortunately nothing ultimately transpired from this.
Nevertheless, the Vaults of Pandius will continue to help to capture work that people do in the Mystara setting - regardless of the rules system, regardless of adherence to published materials or not; ideas for your games can come from any source. The setting is as strong now as it ever has been, if not moreso, and whatever resource that the Vaults of Pandius can provide to the community or your gaming group is the underlying idea for the site. The Vaults of Pandius captures materials from publicly available forums, but material can also be sent directly to me.
1The material from these boards has now been returned and is available on the Vaults of Pandius at http://pandius.com/aolboard.html.
2This address does not lead to a related website on the Wayback Machine or any of the other GeoCities clone sites that exist. Since the website was moved from this address in 1999, and I disassociated myself from this site and all of the other GeoCities sites that I had; as well as the Tripod site; the address was given to another GeoCities user. That website is what appears on the Wayback Machine and also on the other Geocities clone sites.
3As of 15 August 1999 the size of the website was 17 MB with 1,149 files.
4The news story pointed to during MML discussions at the time is still available on the Wayback Machine .https://web.archive.org/web/20000307181143/http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/20472.html.
5The Mystaran Almanacs, 3E project, and Reviews site were also hosted on starflung.com, just to help round out the awesome service that Gordon provided for us for so long. Those websites were: almanac.starflung.com, mystara3e.starflung.com/home.html, and reviews.dnd.starflung.com.
6The Mystaran Almanacs and 3E project pages were also moved to http://www.mystaranet.jamm.com/almanac and http://www.mystaranet.jamm.com/m3e respectively. The Mystaran Almanac ended up on the Vaults of Pandius at http://pandius.com/almanac/index.htm, while the 3E project is captured on the Wayback Machine, with 3 pages from 2005 at https://web.archive.org/web/2005*/http://www.mystaranet.jamm.com/m3e/pages/home.htm. There are 4 captures of the Vaults of Pandius on the Wayback Machine during this time appears to be no remaining captures of the Vaults of Pandius on the Wayback Machine from 26 March to 18 June 2005 at https://web.archive.org/web/2005*/http://www.mystaranet.jamm.com/vaults/html/HOME.html.
7This address does not lead to a related website on the Wayback Machine
.
8As of 14 January 2006 the size of the website was 151 MB with 5,720 files. As of 17 July 2018 the size of the website was 4.52 GB with 12,421 files. At the impending 27 June 2021 update the size of the website will be about 13.9 GB with over 37,000 files.
11For the Vaults of Pandius the following file formats are excluded from the page list - css js class gif jpg jpeg png bmp; though in practice for the Vaults of Pandius as there are very few css, js and class files the differential is a sign of traffic of image files.