User talk:Ahpla

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Avanor Article
Hello Ahpla. I noticed your question about the missing article on Premeditated Chaos' page. I'd be very interested to read your article; if you can get a copy of it you might put it in your user space, e.g. User:Ahpla/Avannon instead of Avanon, to get feedback and review. I use User:PeterStJohn/ScratchPad for stuff that isn't ready for "publication". Please let me know at my chat.

That said, I looked a bit at Avanor and I can see some dificulties with notability. Compare this to Rogue, the glorious ancestor of a noble family of games leading up to say Vanguard (MMORPG) today. The former was a creative achievement that influenced countless engineering and computer science students in many ways and can be considered historic (we didn't have it on the PDP11 in 81, where I worked, but we did have it on the Fortune32:16 SysV micro in 83). The latter, Vanguard, may be forgotten in a few years, but SONY spent tens of millions on it, and hundreds of thousands of people are playing it now (including me, on the Woefeather server). These two games are notable for vary different reasons.

Avanon has a Sourceforge project, which is cool, but it doesn't look like much development, maintenance, or play is happening. Is Avanon the last gasp of an ancient line of ASCII Art games? That might itself be notable.Pete St.John 16:41, 22 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I tagged Avanor for deletion because it is a non-notable game. Wikipedia requires that all subjects included be notable in some crunchy, definable way. Notable in this case means worthy of being given a separate article on Wikipedia. The general standard which Wikipedians use to define notability is that the subject of the article has been "the subject of at least one substantial or multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other." More specifically, notability of software can also rest on that software being a part of a major OS distribution, or if that software is a major product of a notable developer. Avanor is neither, as far as I can see. Additionally, I couldn't see any notable sources that had written about Avanor. That means that it falls below the notability threshold of Wikipedia, hence the tag for a delete. Hopefully that explains my reasoning. Don't take it as a personal insult. Hundreds of things get deleted every day. If and when Avanor becomes notable as we define it, we'll write another article. &spades; P  M  C  &spades; 17:01, 22 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comments guys. PMC, I totally understand where you are coming from and now understand why the article was removed. Unfortunately Avanor isn't very popular, the latest release is pretty broken with major bugs and a ton of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors (some of which I have sent patches for, in vain). Development is dead and my latest emails to the development team have gone without reply. I doubt Avanor will ever pick up again now unless someone different takes over development.
 * Pete, Avanor definitely isn't the last of ASCII roguelikes. There are still loads out there being actively developed, and just because we haven't had a NetHack release for four years doesn't mean that it is dead either. I've had quick responses from the development team recently when I had a query regarding missing functionality. Also, I believe they are still fixing any new bugs which are discovered. Slash'EM development is very active and is moving along nicely. So yeah, don't worry about ASCII roguelikes yet, they aren't going away for a long time. If you have any doubts, check out #nethack and #slashem on Freenode. ahpla 17:32, 22 February 2007 (UTC)