Exilian: A History

[Jubal]

Herein shall lie the chronicles of Exilian...

GESTA EXILIANORON (TIMELINE/ANNALS)

2008
Mar 18: Exilian Founded. Pentagathus is M&B Admin, Jubal Head Admin, Marcus Tech Admin. First WBU begins.
Mar 30: Citizenship Established
Apr 07: Southern Realms mini-beta released
May 24: Private Clark ratified as Global Moderator
Jun 03: SOTK becomes first elected admin
Jul 19: Dripping D becomes a global moderator.
Aug 31: First Exilian Games begin with TWC, Exilian, and TW Heaven teams. Word Association thread also begins: Stormcloud with "Flying" is first post.
Sep 27: Private Clark becomes M&B admin. Pentagathus retains admin powers.
Oct 4: First draft of constitution created
Oct 11: Stormcloud beats CN2 7-3 to become a Magister Militae (Global Mod)
Oct 13: Pentagathus abuses his power to turn Exilian into Wibulnubniblia, banning Marcus temporarily and adding pornographic links to the site, and is removed, given the position of King of the Wibulnibs for posterity instead.
Oct 17: First Exilian Games ends with Exilian coming joint second (with TW Heaven) and TWC first.
Oct 27: Constitution ratified
Nov 15: Another abuse of remaining powers by Pentagathus. Powers removed again. Andalus beats DD 6-5 to take moderator post.
Dec 2: exilian.100mb.com site launched
Dec 20: Stormcloud becomes elected admin, beating Dripping D 6-4

2009
Jan 12: Dripping D returns to a moderator post, beating SOTK in the by-election 6-3
Jan 18: Warhammer TW Beta release
Jan 20: First WBU Ends, Jubal with 1000th post. WBU 2 starts.
Mar 30: Andalus re-elected as moderator with 7 votes, CN2 and Goldyrulz gain 2 apiece
Apr 18: Private Clark falls to a Vote of No Confidence
Apr 30: Darkstar becomes M&B Admin, Persian Invasion beta release
Jun 21: First full election season begins.
Jul 6:  Election ends. DD & BoyNinja are moderators, Stormcloud is re-elected as admin
Sept 6: Europe 1080 released
Sep 11: Comrade_General becomes RTW admin
Oct 15: BoyNinja becomes M&B admin
Dec 28: First Amendment to the constitution is ratified.

2010
Jan 24: Unchallenged election: Dimos is admin, Silver Wolf and DD are moderators
Feb 12: Final Southern Realms release
Jun 28 - July 4: Election, Dimos is unseated as admin by Silver Wolf, DD and LordRyan are moderators
Jul 6: "New Deal" passed allowing subforums and additions to the site as requested by members
Oct 31: Persian Invasion patch released
Nov 8: BoyNinja resigns as M&B admin
Dec 2: Warhammer TW campaign release

2011
Jan 15: Narnia TW mini-beta release
Jan 22: Phoenixguard ratified replacing BoyNinja as M&B admin. Discussion Collonade created
Jan 25: Election: Silver Wolf is re-elected as admin, Dripping D and IFMN are moderators
Feb 1: Second Amendment ratified, tribunes created
Feb 16: Silver Wolf resigns as admin
Feb 19: Debux and Calisthenis elected as first tribunes
Mar 13: By-Election, Son of the King returns to adminhood
Mar 20: JuBot released for the first time
Apr 15: Debux gets 1000th post of WBU 2. WBU 3 begins.
Apr 28-May 05: Forum conversion and move to exilian.co.uk
May 09: Triumph system established
Jun 08: First political party, Vive Exilian, founded by DD
Jun 12-25: Election; SOTK returned as Sebastokrator, DD and Nightangel as Spatharioi, Debux and Goldy as Tribounoi
Jul 30: Total War - Orcs and Humans released
Aug 20: Histories Begun
Dec 5: Malware attack begins; issue publicly announced.
Dec 8: Third Amendment passed, creating Basileus position
Dec 10: Forums for Internet Freedoms party (FIF) formed
Dec 15: Exilian Control and Heuristic Operations party (ECHO) formed.
Dec 23: User-end malware problem ends, main site taken down. Forum returns and is upgraded to SMF 2.0.
Dec 28: Elections belatedly begin

2012
Jan 5: Election results released. Jubal wins newly formed Basileus post for FIF, DD and NA are moderators (FIF and Independent respectively), SOTK wins a second term as Sebastokrator for FIF, and Ladyhawk and Death Nade become Tribunes (both as ECHO representatives).
Jan 14: Andalus given first official Exilian triumph, mostly for services to the poetry section.
Jan 16: Jubal gets 1000th post of WBUIII, WBU IV started.
Feb 27: Exilian website returns
Mar 02: Persian Invasion complete edition released
Mar 23: Marcus retires as site owner and Technikos
Mar 27: Adventures of Soros release
Apr 02: Narnia Total War release
Apr 06: Warhammer Total War release
Apr 12: Son of the King ratified as new Technikos
May 14: The Khan becomes new Sebastokrator in an uncontested by-election
Jun 02: Jubal and Comrade_General given triumphs
Jun 22: Election results: Comrade_General becomes Basileus (ECHO), Dripping D becomes Sebastokrator (FIF), Nightangel and Othko97 are Spatharioi and Death Nade and Ladyhawk are Tribounoi. Jubal is elected as Chartophylax of the new academy project. Independents win the election overall with 34% of the vote, FIF just behind on 33% and ECHO on 26%. Turnout was 14/15 citizens.
Aug 12: Admin reorganisation. M&B position changed to Community & Clerisy, RTW changed to Modding & Gaming
Aug 17: Academy officially opens, Son Of The King given triumph
Aug 27: Exilian Atheniad announced
Sep 10: Atheniad begins
Sep 24: By-election as Death Nade fails a vote of no confidence as Tribounos as a result of inactivity. The Khan becomes Tribounos.
Oct 11: comrade_general gets last post of WBU IV, WBU V started
Nov 11: Atheniad final results, narrow win for Exilian over TWC though most contested events between the two go to TWC.
Dec 26: Election results: Dimos (Independent) becomes new Basileus, Dripping D returned as Sebastokrator, Othko97 and Hobbit of Exilian are Spatharioi, the Tribounos election is to be re-run. FIF increase vote share to 45% with a much higher abstention rate of 26%, with ECHO's vote down to 17% and the independent vote down to just 11%. Turnout 10 citizens.

2013
Jan 02: Exilian Democratic Union (EDU) founded by Dimos
Mar 02: WHTW A Call To Arms version announced
Mar 18: Exilian's fifth birthday
Mar 31: Breaking of Patronage bill passed, allows citizens to leave families
Apr 05: Citizen Admission and Patronage Reform bill passed, allows members to apply for citizenship with or without a patron and with or without being apporached first.
Apr 08: Exilian gains public Facebook page
May 03: A Game of Colleges mod released
May 28: Formal resignation of Phoenixguard as Heteriarch
Jun 15: Election results: Jubal returns as Basileus, DD as Sebastokrator, Rob and Othko97 as Spatharioi and Scarlet and Pentagathus as Tribounoi. First return to staff of Pentagathus since 2008. FIF soars to over 60% of the vote, with weak performances by the newly founded EDU and ECHO. ECHO effectively disbands.
Jul 01: Domain name crisis, Exilian's domain name is not renewed as it is tied to an account owned by Marcus. Site only accessible via backup domain name.
Jul 03: Board reorganisation bill passed.
Jul 05: Fifth Amendment to the constitution passed.
Jul 06: Marcus renews domain name, site returns.
Aug 10: Mother of Dragons becomes new Heteriarch.
Sep 15: Return of Atlantis released
Sep 23: New roles for junior staff announced
Sep 28: Warhammer TW - A Call To Arms released
Sep 30: Exilian Twitter started
Nov 16: Rome Total Realism joins Exilian (for about 6 months)
Dec 10: Non-binary gender option added to profile fields

2014
Jan 12: Election results. CG (independent) Basileus, DD (FIF) Sebastokrator, The Khan (Ind) & Othko97 (FIF) Spatharioi, Scarlet (FIF) & Pentagathus (Ind) Tribounoi
Jan 31: WBU V ends, WBU VI begins
Mar 18: Battle for Antares IV mod released
Apr 09: New Adventures of Soros beta
May 25: Delta Games becomes first commercial affiliate of Exilian
Jun 30: IDE party founded
Jul 01: Exilian Choose Your Own Adventure project begins
Jul 09: Election results. The Khan (IDE) Basileus, DD (FIF) Sebastokrator, Pentagathus (Ind) & Othko97 (FIF) Spatharioi, Tom (IDE) & Armadillo (Ind) Tribounoi
Jul 13: No1 Croat Fan wins football World Cup sweepstake
Jul 17: Hetairos rules released
Jul 19: Pentagathus Party founded
Jul 26: First Exilian Convention in Cambridge, UK
Sep 01: Senet House & Secret Garden Fora open
Oct 13: Sixth Amendment to the constitution passed
Oct 16: Guns, Swords, and Steam sub-site opens, ForgeFyre ch. 1 starts.
Nov 07: Glaurung announced as Sakellarios

2015
Jan 06: Lizard succeeds Jubal as Chartophylax
Jan 12: Election results. Solid overall win for FIF with over half the vote (53%). SOTK (FIF) is Basileus, The Khan (IDE) Sebastokrator, Armadillo (FIF) and Dripping D (FIF) Spatharioi, Pentagathus (PP) and Tom (IDE) Tribounoi.
Jan 22: Word Association hits 10,000 words: word 10k is Jubal with "Treehouses"
Jan 26: Artisans' Gallery (Craft forum) opens
Feb 07: Sam Gamgee wins site contest for favourite Tolkien character
Apr 29: Exilian picks up several successes in TWC 2013 modding awards
Jun 17: Large changes to forum index, shortening and simplifying it, take effect.
Jul 05: Election results. Narrow overall win for FIF, on 38% with high abstention rate. Comrade_General (FIF) is Basileus, Othko97 (FIF) is Sebastokrator, Colossus (Independent) is Spatharios, Pentagathus (PP) and no1 croat fan (Independent) are Tribounoi. One Spatharios post remains unfilled.
Jul 11: ExiliCon 2015 takes place, far larger than the 2014 con with a full day of talks and numerous traders, gaming tables, etc.
Jul 22: Utherwald Press becomes second Exilian affiliate
Aug 10: Ars Tali joins Exilian as affiliate
Aug 15: ForgeFyre Chap. 2 starts being released.
Aug 25: Creative Hub opens
Sep 23: WHTW patch release
Nov 20: Exilian moves to WYSIWYG as standard post editor/writer
Nov 30: LIFE Demo release

2016
Jan 03: Middle-Earth General Election megagame finishes, results announced
Jan 17: Election results. FIF clear winners on 43%, IDE, PP, and Ind on 13% each. SaidaiSloth (FIF) is Basileus, Othko97 (FIF) still Sebastokrator, Gmd (IDE) is Spatharios, Pentagathus (PP) and no1 croat fan (Independent) are re-elected as Tribounoi. One Spath position vacant.
Jan 21: Caucasian Prosopography Project Alpha Release
Feb 07: Exilian hits 100,000 posts according to site post counter
Feb 14: First Cyril & Methodius day charity campaign raises £85 for Room to Read
Feb 18: Fox Box officially becomes affiliate
Apr 09: Valar Morghulis TW released
May 10: First "Updates from the Forge" released
Jul 03: RTR 8 team return to new hosted forum section
Jul 05: Election results. FIF narrowly win with 38% to 33% for Independents & 29 for IDE. Glaurung (IND) is Basileus, Othko97 (FIF) is Sebastokrator, GMD (IDE) is Spatharios, and The Khan (IDE) is Tribounos.
Jul 20: RTR 8 Beta II Released
Aug 13: Atheniad 2016 opens
Aug 21: Exilian Twitch channel opens
Sep 04: Atheniad 2016 ends. All medals (4 gold 4 silver) to Exilian, mainly due to lack of other teams.
Oct 22: ExiliCon 2016 in Cambridge, UK - similar size & venue to 2015 with a range of talks & traders
Dec 06: RTR 8 Beta III released
Dec 13: Phoenixguard becomes Megas Domestikos
Dec 23: Bigosaur subforum opens

2017
Jan 30: Valar Morghulis Ice and Fire edition released.
Jan 31: Glaurung & GMD remain as Basileus & Spatharios, both other elected posts vacant. Comrade_General given "permanent despot" title & steps off admin team.
Feb 05: Forum streamlining & condensing: Ambassadors' Residences close, Indie Alley formed of Indie Labs & Tinkers' Alley forums
May 24: Koobazaur's board closure reforms: further major "crunching" of top-level boards to decrease clutter
June 02: Exilian has a stand at UK Games Expo, Birmingham, UK
Jul 16: Election results: staff team unchanged, prior vacancies remain open. Jubal & Glaurung have voluntary ratification votes and both pass.
Jul 24: Exilian moves to new server with VidaHost, away from previous hosts GoDaddy
Sep 06: First Exilian Article published
Oct 03: Armadillo hacking attacks
Oct 04: Headliner release announcement
Oct 14: Frozen Skies kickstarter
Oct 18: Narnia Total War released
Nov 09: Exilian joins Mastodon
Nov 16: Lady Grey and Son of the King retire from staff
Dec 03: Empires of the Undergrowth release + Competition

2018
Jan 08: Ninth amendment passed, ToS changes implemented
Jan 27: Election results announced. Jubal is Basileus, Clockwork is Tribounos. GMD retires as Spath.
Mar 18: Exilian turns ten years old!
Apr 29: Anniversary creative competition results, won by Phoenixguard09
May 02: Word Association hits 20,000 words: word 20k is Jubal with "Beetle"
May 24: New post-GDPR privacy policy released
Jun 20: Frozen Skies released
Jul 05: Election results. Jubal & Tusky re-elected, no other candidates.
Aug 30: La Ciguapa steps down as Heteriarches Prokeruxis
Oct 13: First Exilian chain writing project complete & published
Dec 01: Major repeal of bills by the Plaza. Repeals the staff support & scrutiny bill, staff mandates bill, heraldry bill, and academy bill.
Dec 20: Tales from Windy Meadow released

2019
Jan 04: New Year Updates from the Forge (Issue 32) sees the newsletter shift to quarterly issues.
Jan 13: Creative Competition "Candle" results, won by Comrade_General with a candle painting.
Jan 17: Election results. All 3 permanent staff (Jubal, Glaurung, Lizard) ratified, Jubal & Tusky re-elected, no other candidates.
Jul 03: Election results. Jubal & Tusky re-elected, no other candidates.
Nov 01: RTW - Vanilla Extended released

2020
Jan 23: Election results. All 3 permanent staff (Jubal, Glaurung, Lizard) ratified, Jubal & Tusky re-elected, GMD becomes Spatharios again.
Jan 26: Exilian moves Mastodon account to mastodon.social
Mar 24: Comrade_General leaves Exilian, removes account permanently
Apr 04: Terms of Service change clarifies Exilian licensing & obligations regarding post deletion
Apr 28: External Staff Advertisements act passed, allows for easier external advertising of volunteer posts.
Apr 29: Leafly ratified by citizens and joins staff as Despotes Syntactes (Content Editor).
Jun 15: M&B 2: Bannerlord sections opened
Jul 03: Election results. Jubal, Tusky and GMD re-elected as Basileus, Sebastokrator & Spatharios respectively. Last mid-year election before the passage of the Tenth Amendment.
Aug 07: Exilian Chain-Writing Project released
Aug 19: First Exilian virtual pub - a monthly feature of the community thereafter
Oct 19: Epicinium released
Nov 07: Exilian Discord server opens
Nov 27: Coding Medieval Worlds workshop collaboration with University of Vienna announced

2021
Jan 26: Word Association hits 30,000 words: word 30k is Jubal with "Flying"
Jan 30: Election results. All 4 permanent staff (Jubal, Glaurung, Lizard, Leafly) ratified, Jubal, Tusky, GMD re-elected.
Mar 02: Creative Competition "Aurora" results released: Phoenixguard09 wins with his written piece 'Our Light'.
Feb 6-7: Coding Medieval Worlds workshop 1 takes place
May 30: Tenth Amendment passed, abolishing mid-year elections.
Nov 05: Tourney released by Tusky Games
Nov 17: Exilian policy against supporting NFT projects passed by citizens & published
Nov 23: Coding Medieval Worlds 2 announced

2022
Jan 09: Fenlander, Jubal's text-parser RPG in the medieval fens, released
Feb 05: Leafly resigns as Despotes Syntactes (Content Editor).
Feb 17: Election results. All 3 permanent staff (Jubal, Glaurung, Lizard) ratified, Jubal, Tusky, GMD re-elected. Spritelady becomes Tribounos.
Feb 19-20: Coding Medieval Worlds 2: Networks and Connections workshop takes place
Feb 27: Creative Competition 'Winter Sunset' Results. Won jointly by Medievalfantasyqueen with her piece 'Every Winter's Tale Needs Its Teller', and Spritelady with her piece 'The Khionaskadi'.
Sep 23: Roadwarden released by Aure
Sep 27: Rockpool, Jubal's rockpool creature TTRPG, released
Nov 13: Exilian moves mastodon account to indiepocalypse.social
Nov 12: Forum shoutbox removed.
Nov 19: Coding Medieval Worlds 3 announced

2023
Jan 28: Election results. Jubal and Glaurung ratified, Lizard not ratified as Technikos & steps down. GMD does not run for re-election: Jubal, Tusky and Spritelady re-elected unopposed as Basileus, Sebastokrator and Tribounos respectively.

REFERENCE SECTION/ SPECIFIC INFORMATION

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Posting stats on old site (up to May 2011):

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2011	6371 (To May)
May 2011	279
April 2011	1069
March 2011	1168
February 2011	2174
January 2011	1681
2010	6180
December 2010	272
November 2010	200
October 2010	143
September 2010	219
August 2010	333
July 2010	466
June 2010	1,278
May 2010	498
April 2010	695
March 2010	760
February 2010	797
January 2010	519
2009	12532
December 2009	515
November 2009	543
October 2009	818
September 2009	849
August 2009	1,140
July 2009	1,031
June 2009	1,342
May 2009	2,231
April 2009	1,106
March 2009	926
February 2009	1,235
January 2009	796
2008	10268
December 2008	839
November 2008	1,157
October 2008	2,613
September 2008	2,380
August 2008	1,146
July 2008	1,250
June 2008	425
May 2008	197
April 2008	202
March 2008	59

List of all staff to date - now in a separate thread. The old list below is out of date.

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ADMINISTRATORS
Comrade_General (RTW Despotes Sep 2009 - Aug 2012, Modding & Gaming Despotes Aug 2012-Present, Basileus Jun-Dec 2012)
Darkstar707 (M&B Admin April-October 2009)
DeepComet (M&B Heteriarch Oct 2009 - Jan 2011)
Dimos (Sebastokrator Jan 2010 - Jun 2010, Basileus Dec 2012 - Present)
Dripping D (Sebastokrator June 2012 - Present)
Jubal (Megadux March 2008-Present, Basileus (split from Megadux role) Jan-June 2012)
Marcus (Technikos March 2008-March 2012)
Pentagathus (M&B Admin March-Oct 2008)
Private Clark (M&B Admin Sep 27 2008 - April 2009)
Phoenixguard (M&B Heteriarch Jan 2011 - Aug 2012, Community & Clerisy Heteriarch Aug 2012 - Present)
Son Of The King (Sebastokrator June - Dec 08, March 2011- March 2012 Technikos April 2012 - Present)
Silver Wolf (Sebastokrator Jun 2010 - Feb 2011)
Stormcloud (Sebastokrator Dec 2008 - Jan 2010)
The Khan (Sebastokrator March - June 2012)

SPATHARIOI/MODERATORS
Andalus (Mar-Jul 2009)
DeepComet (Jul - Oct 2009)
Dripping D (Jul 19 2008 - Jun 2012)
Hobbit of Exilian (Dec 2012 - Present)
I Forgot My Name (Jan - Jun 2011)
LordRyan (Jul 2010 - Jan 2011)
Nightangel (Jun 2011 - Dec 2012)
Othko97 (Jun 2012 - Present)
Private Clark (May 24 - Sep 27 2008)
Silver Wolf (Jan - Jun 2010)

TRIBOUNOI
Calisthenis of Green Day (Feb - Jun 2011)
Death Nade (Jan - Sep 2012)
Debux (Feb 2011 - Jan 2012)
Goldyrulz (Jun 2011 - Jan 2012)
Ladyhawk (Jan 2012 - Present)
The Khan (Sep 2012 - Present)

THE HISTORY ACCORDING TO MARCUS

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When I started getting into modding RTW, one of the things I liked doing was downloading and augmenting small mods to the existing game. mostly it was reskins and new units, which steadily built up a version of RTW for me. I had looked at the mega mods like EB, RTR etc. and although they offered some good things, I didn't want everything they had to offer, so I mainly stuck with my hybrid RTW. As I got deeper into modding, I thought it would be a good idea to start a site for people to present mods and collaborate to combine them into their preferred combinations. In retrospect, it was a pretty dead end idea, and Mixed Mods became a small modding site, which expanded into Mount&Blade modding.

How did I set up my own site? Well, at the time, I didn't really have much of my own money, and I'm not even sure I had a bank account at the time. At HeavenGames, I met a person called Vampiric, among other names, and started talking and hanging out with him. He had his own server space and when he learned of my idea to build a mod site, he happily gave me the space to do that, and even set up the forum for me. He then stayed around as technician, while me and Jubal tottered around the world of forum running like toddlers. Vamp also helped me to build a site to accompany Mixed Mods, and it was really there that I learnt about making websites proper. Then all of a sudden, the hosting went down and Vamp was no where to be seen. Either he moved on, or something happened in real life, I don't know. At that point I lost interest and let MM sink, while focusing on real life etc.

A few months later Jubal contacted me, telling me he had restarted the site and renamed it Exilian, and even had some of the old guard with him. It was really due to his enthusiasm that I rejoined and took a staffing and technical role at Exilian. I got more and more into it, taking the staffing quite seriously, as I remember, and I'm sure Jubal had to rein me in from banning somebody on the grounds that if I did, we'd have no visitors. I dabbled in modding RTW and M&B for a while, but never really got deeply into it, so left those departments to Jubal and CG, focusing myself on the technical side of maintaining the forum and the associated site I had built with it. At this point I had my own hosting space, so had my own playground to play in, and had various little projects I was working on, none of which I finished. I guess I'm just that kind of guy. Exilian however was more serious, as it had other people using it, contributing and appreciating the work I did. In time, the limitations of Invisionfree/Zetaboards got too restrictive for me, so I set about preparing the forum to move to a forum on my own hosting. Unfortunately, there are no official tools that can transfer Zetaboards data to SMF, so I found a third party tool that would download all the information to my computer in database format, at which point I could re upload it to SMF. Accounts, threads, forums and posts would all be preserved, not bad considering the major lack of compatibility between platforms. Seems the middle man has some use after all. Unfortunately I had missed the fact that we had several private passworded forums, which the software couldn't access data from for obvious reasons, so merely skipped them. Not too much of a problem as those forums could have their stuff transferred manually, even if it was a bit tedious. The changing of the forums for me was an interesting time, a test, if you will, of whether I could actually do it without major cock ups, and as things settled down, it seemed I could.

However, not long after, I was losing interest again, as my real life activities changed and I lost interest in web development and technical computing in general. I also saw that my hosting was leeching from my bank account, and although the money going out was small, if I had little interest in maintaining Exilian, what point was there in me paying for it? It was at that point that I decided to resign, and hand over technical duties, ownership and thus payment, to Exilian.

The nice thing with this particular case is that, although it has all the hallmarks of me having a lack of commitment and easily losing interest, I felt good about what I had done, as Exilian had taken on a life of its own and could survive and thrive quite happily without my inattentive stewardship. Now you've probably been reading this and thinking,  'what, we were nothing more than an idle experiment?!?' and probably thinking of me as a pretty armadilloty person. But as I have said, it's not the case here. To me, this is not something I have abandoned and left to die, but something I have worked on for years, and now wish to move on from. I love this place, the people here, the hijinks, and the mods and other content, and wish it to continue. But I also knew it couldn't really go anywhere fast with an inattentive site owner who didn't want to continue and pay the bills, so I stood aside to let others with more enthusiasm fill the void, and here it is, still going strong.

Despite all I've said, I love this place, and enjoy coming back once in a while to see how the place is doing, and it's doing fine. This is mainly due to Jubal doing most of the work, even when I was on board, and pressing forward to build the community, which has shown results. Bravo, Jubal, and bravo to all the staff here that keep the place running day by day, you're great!

[Jubal]

THE HISTORY ACCORDING TO JUBAL

PART 1 - GENESIS OF A COMMUNITY

Chapter 1: Mixed Mods

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My story - and Exilian's - started with a site called Mixed Mods. I joined Total War Center on the last day of 2006, and helped Marcus with creating a dismounted unit of Praetorian cavalrymen as part of my early forays into modding RTW. On Feb 18, I got the following PM:

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Hi Jubal, Marcus here, fancy joining my forum? If you do, see if you can bring a couple of others in as well.

Cheers,

Marcus Orentius

And thus it began. I fairly quickly got Warhammer: Total War hosted having started working on it, and became a global moderator for the Mixed Mods site.

I shall here provide a description of the governance and foci of MM:
The site was based around Rome: Total War modding almost entirely. A few of us had M&B, and I'd started some initial tinkering around with it, but it was total war modding that defined the site. Marcus' work was mostly in dismounting units - Scythians especially - and making minimods; I was mostly ploughing on with Warhammer: TW. I made a few other minimods such as Cities Alive and Walls of Jericho which are still available to this day, though.

There were four "houses" of higher level members (who might've been called citizens but I can't remember) on MM: Marcus, as the admin, had one, Dray/Vampire, the tech guy, had one, I had one and so did (I think) Mars. The "citizens" had no statutory rights whatsoever, I think they might've had their own forum but that was about it. We had a Workshop Booze Up thread, certainly, but the site's activity was entirely modding related. There was a wiki called Communipedia, a rather joking attachment to the site.

As for the members, several modders who would later become integral to Exilian were already around: Son Of The King was in my house, Private Clark was (I think) in that of Marcus. There was also a rather quiet member called stormcloud who posted in the WHTW section on occasion.

So that was MM (I'll add more later if I remember more). I was there for about a year - but then, things suddenly went wrong.

Chapter 2: The Blackout and the founding of Exilian

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Mixed Mods disappeared in early March, 2008. It did so more or less without warning; we had had a site, we now did not have a site. And most of the "we" weren't easy to get hold of. Fortunately, via TWC and MSN, contact with Marcus was re-established. We tried for a week or so to contact Vampire, but to no avail. Eventually, I decided it would be best to pull people together on a temporary forum until we could get mixed mods back. I see the fact that you're probably reading this on that temporary forum the best part of half a decade (at least) later as a reasonable justification for that decision. The first post went as follows:

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Mixed Mods is down. TWC overrun by n00bs and M2TW players (who I'm jealous of for having a newer game than me). The internet is therefore by a long leap of logic in crisis.

THis is where we  fight back. This is where we stand. This is Exilian.


In other words, this is a temporary (perhaps to become semi-permantent) forum for homesick users of mixed mods, but with more of a focus on M&B.

As the post indicates, I designed the forum with M&B more in mind, giving it an equally sized section to Rome: Total War. The dark blue and black colour scheme dates from this point, too (the motto "He walked through the darkness, and so saw the light" was inscribed beneath the title if I remember correctly, though I may just be misremembering). I named the forum "Exilian" in reference to the fact that its members were exiled from Mixed Mods.

Or at least, some were. Son of the King, Marcus, Mars, and Private Clark were continuations, as well as Stormcloud, who moved from quietly hanging around the Warhammer Total War board to propping up and then dominating the new Boozer, complete with new Workshop Booze up. There were new faces too though, particularly some from my school; the first twenty members included Pentagathus and Dripping D, both school-friends of mine who were in different ways to be major forces in shaping the Exilian to come.

Chapter 3: The birth of the citizenry

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The thing I shall deal with in this chapter is the birth of the citizenry, Exilian's body of voters, and how their rights came to be. It's probably one of the most important things in the history of our site, as the peculiarities of our system have undeniably shaped the way our site is to be run. To look at its genesis, I will turn back to Total War Center. As my first forum, it was this place, then in the latter days of its more republican stage, that initially showed me how such a system could work. The idea that moderators and some staff should be elected seemed always to be a fairly sensible one to me - so long as the citizenry could be reasonably representative of the site it gave a very direct, powerful mechanism for feedback between staff and the people they were staffing for. It also could engage people with issues of how to run the site and how it was staffed, preventing a major divide growing up between an insular nucleus of staffers and the wider forumites I was, therefore, convinced that giving some representation to our members could only be a force for good. I do not yet think I have been proven wrong.

Ironically, just as the citizenry was established on Exilian (March 2008) and our first Sebastokrator (then, if I recall, simply the Protector of the People) elected (Son of the King, June 08, beating Private Clark and Dripping D), TWC's democracy was beginning to wither. As our citizens were given rights by the staff, TWC's voted theirs away; I suppose the key difference was that the Curia on Total War Center had always at heart been a way for the community to make its voice heard against site owners, so when an owner from the community (Imb39) took over it was felt that its function was lost. The Hidden Plaza was, on the other hand, right from the outset specifically designed to give members a voice at all levels of staff.

This was the initial declaration of the citizenship:

Spoiler

Citizenship of the forums is extended to all members with 50+ posts, or modders who have made a valuabel contribution, or members who have excellent quality of conributions.

Citizens may, in this forums, propose and vote on changes to the forums, in terms of skins, new subforums, chages to the Terms of Service, and so on.

The Citizens also provide the Moderators and vote on who should get the honour of the name Tzakone and the red lettering. Tzakones get 3 month terms in office.

Admins are as follows;
1 head admin (Jubal)
1 TW Admin
1 M&B Admin (Pentathagnus)
1 Admin for the Citizens (elected by popular vote for a term of 6 months).

This was, if you like, the proto-constitution for the early days, though the real deal was not long to follow. My work as head of administration was for the most part involved in thinking how all of this should work - should there be judges for moderation appeals? Who should be allowed to appoint junior staff? By May I had a basic framework of 1 elected admin, 3 nonelected (TW/M&B/Root), and two elected moderators (by then Magister Militae, with the Tzakone title being used for junior moderation staff). Son of the King became the first elected administrator on June 10, as "Plaza Admin" or Protector of the People.

A constitution was a somewhat inevitable step after that, and the initial draft was posted on the fourth of October; the basic framework is still what we use today.
http://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=186.msg5733#msg5733
Some interesting points of note include the addition of Tribunes; these were removed again by the first amendment, not becoming a fully fledged part of staff until 2011. The principle of citizenship being a gift made by the citizenry was established at this point, as was the idea that citizens having the right to vote on changes was a fundamental and inalienable part of citizenship, not touchable by the administrators.

Some other initial political activities should probably be mentioned here. Firstly, the creation of guilds, still just about in operation today, for RTW and M&B specialists. These I had intended to be much stronger parts of the citizenry, but since their creation they have had little practical effect. Other early votes included the creation of the Discussion and Debate forum and a decision to abandon trying to keep up with M2TW's modding community; these certainly shaped our course, pushing us towards breadth and community rather than trying to run a race with the other big TW modding sites.

Our initial four person admin team, of course - SOTK, Penty, Marcus and myself - was soon to undergo its first major change, and one of our first big projects as a site was about to get underway.

PART 2 - THE ARCHAIC EXILIAN

Part 4: The Exilian Games

Spoiler

This will be a short chapter, and happened simultaneously with part 5. I decided to try organising some sort of competitive event between different sites, and since it was the Bejing Olympics that year I went for a RTW focussed rip-off. A lot of the events didn't even get entered, but such was life; we went round to other (mostly TW) sites to try and call up teams for an inter-site contest. A stadium forum was set up as were sign-ups for the events.

We were remarkably successful (which made several later failed attempts in 2009 and 2010 more disappointing). Three teams entered. RTW Heaven had a team of five (Andalus, Sembrius, Selifator, Gallowglass and Stormer), TWC a team of 6 (Prince of Macedon, The Last Legion of Rome, Reeve, Xavier Dragnesi, Made-In-The-UK and GeneralChaos), and we had four (Myself, CN2, Private Clark, Son of the King).

Once the games began, the relative experience of the TWC team really began to tell. Prince of Macedon in particular scooped up a seriously large tally of medals, with Exilian mostly languishing and picking up wallies (aka medals we'd earned by virtue of lack of competition). It was nevertheless very good fun, and I think an important part of the site's early days - it also showed that we could organise projects that size and successfully pull it off, which was comforting to know and emboldened us a bit for the future.

A summary of the results is provided here:

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Medals: (NB Medals were done as 20pts for gold, 10 for silver, 5 for bronze)

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TWC
RANK - One
Gold - 5 (100pts)
Silver -2 (20pts)
Bronze - 1 (5pts)
Total - 8 (125pts)

EXILIAN
RANK - Two
Gold -2 (40pts)
Silver -5 (50pts)
Bronze - 4 (20pts)
Total - 11 (110pts)

RTWH
RANK - Two
Gold -4 (80pts)
Silver -3 (30pts)
Bronze - 0 (0pts)
Total - 3 (110pts)

Top Medallists:
Prince of Macedon - 3 gold, 2 silver, 2 bronze (TWC)
Andalus - 4 gold (TWH)

Events:

Spoiler

10,000 - RTW 1.5
G: Prince of Macedon (TWC)
S: Sembrius (TWH)
B: Private Clark (Exilian), The Last Legion of Rome (TWC)

10,000 - BI 1.6
G: Prince of Macedon (TWC)
S: Selifator (TWH)
B: Xavier Dragnesi (TWC)

20,000 doubles - RTW 1.5
G: Son Of The King/CN2 (Exilian) AND The Last Legion of Rome/Xavier Dragnesi (TWC)
S: Made in the UK/Reeve (TWC)

20,000 singles - RTW 1.5
G: The Last Legion of Rome (TWC)
S: Son of the King (Exilian)

Last stand - RTW 1.5
G: Prince of Macedon (TWC)
S: CN2 (Exilian)
B: Jubal (Exilian)

Flight! - RTW 1.5
G: CN2 (Exilian)
S: Jubal (Exilian)

Screenshot Contest - RTW 1.5 shots ONLY
G: Andalus (TWH)
S: Jubal (Exilian)
B: Prince of Macedon (TWC)

Open Screenshot Contest - RTW, any mod/expansion allowed
G: Andalus (TWH)
S: Prince of Macedon (TWC)
B: Jubal (Exilian)

Funny Screenshot Contest - RTW 1.5 shots ONLY
G: Andalus (TWH)
S: Prince of Macedon (TWC)
B: Jubal (Exilian)

Short Story
G: Andalus (TWH)
S: Gallowglass (TWH)
B: Prince of Macedon (TWC)

Chapter 5: Wibbulnubniblia

Spoiler

So, Wibbulnubniblia. It's become totally inherent to Exilian's mythology, and the story of how it came about is pretty simple and involves an admin, too much cider, and general retrospective hilarity. Pentagathus had been our first M&B admin, but due to inactivity had been reshuffled out of that role with Private Clark being offered the job in the PM below:

Spoiler

Your term as Tzakone has run out (probably some time ago).

However, as opposed to removing you and putting you up for vote again, I'm considering reshuffling the Admin roles. Would you like to be Mount and Blade admin? I'll shuffle Penty into some practically nonexistent entirely nonfuntional admin role of his own to keep him happy (he barely ever comes on anyway), and put you in M&B admin. The M&B section (and the RTW too) baadly need kicks up the rear to get them moving, we can keep things running in the boozer but I want to get on with the real business of Exilian.

Please reply soon,

Jubal

PC was instated on Sep 27 - but Pentagathus was left with full admin powers.

Penty essentially decided to undertake some trolling of other members of the site in late September, with sig editing being first reported by Stormcloud on 22 September. On October 13, however, possibly influenced by cider, he changed the title of the site to Wibbulnubniblia, edited links to certain unsavoury sites into people's signatures. He also banned Marcus for a while, who upon being restored banned Pentagathus right back (I have some colourful archived correspondence from consultations upon this). The solution proposed by Jubal at the time, rather than an outright ban, was to give Pentagathus his own hidden area of the forum, named Wibbulnubniblia, where he could rule as King of the Wibulnibs in whatever fashion he pleased. The one rule of Wibulnubniblia, in honour of the banning of Marcus, was that there were to be No Marcuses Allowed.

Unfortunately, some powers were left with Penty, and a second shock site attack on November 15 caused a further diminution of his powers, finally restricting him from being able to edit people's signatures at all. Stormcloud called a vote in the admin section:

Spoiler

I have had enough, it's bad enough on the rest of the internet, but this place is usually civil, except when our dear Penty starts to put links to shock sites in peoples sigs, that is just wrong, and it will hardly help any attempt for the recruiters, I propose the removal of any and all Pentagathuss' mod powers and just let him have his little realm

He is currently on a 30 day ban cause I am not in even the slightest of moods to be attending to sabotaged signatures

With the result that Pentagathus served a ban and attacks ultimately ceased. Wibulnubniblia lasted as long as the Zetaboards site, finally disappearing when we ported the forum in mid 2011.

Chapter 6: A Democratic Website (Oct 2008-Dec 2009)

Spoiler

On October 27, 2008, the Exilian Constitution was recognised and put into force. The early forum was a hubbub of poorly-timed by-elections; Stormcloud took over from Private Clark at the start of October, with Dripping D losing his re-election vote to Andalus at the end of the month - though not without teething problems of electoral misdemeanours, such as this PM from stormcloud about DD's unorthodox tactics:

Spoiler

Hey, DD is abusing his mod powers to add vote for him in sigs. I hae banned him for a day (sounds harsh but I need the time to make sure they're all gone)

When the actual voting starts be sure to demote him to a citizen, just so he can't do it when we get into the swing of things

Dripping D again failed to get elected in December before finally returning to staff in January and holding his role against Silver Wolf in April. Electoral malpractice aside, the elections were becoming an expected part of Exilian's work and functioning, and the system largely began to settle down. In a foreshadowing of what was to come, all posts had elections held at the same time in June; the First Amendment, implementing the current system of 6 month terms for all posts, was passed at the end of 2009. Elections and ratifications and votes on staff were becoming an expected process; Private Clark disappeared in April and fell to a vote of No Confidence, with the external candidate Darkstar707 taking his place. Later that year, in what proved a more important shift in the long term, comrade_general was ratified as Marcus' successor in the RTW brief, with Marcus becoming the first official tech admin.

This period has relatively little legislation; a recruitment staff was created and later abolished, another early experiment, and the rank names changed, rapidly at first but later slowing to something close to their final form. There were few large events; a second Exilian Games failed to materialise, and ideas for recruitment and activity began becoming the focus of the political agenda, where they were to effectively remain. The front-end site was also something of a focus of activity at this time, with a variety of site name changes (from .net to the current .co.uk) and Marcus in particular working on getting a better infrastructure in place. On the forum, my thoughts turned increasingly to diversification as despite our RTW and M&B modding going ahead we were failing to compete with TaleWorlds and mbx on one front and TWC/TWH/The Org on the other. The storytelling area was expanded and a poetry section started, and then in October the street of the clerisy was founded, giving offtopic areas a whole new section of the site.

Activity was to continue being an issue, however. At the end of 2009 posting counts had slipped back down to a mere 500 or so a month from over a thousand in the summer.

Chapter 7: Into The Workshop(2010)

Spoiler

2010 was the core of what I think of as "archaic" Exilian. It was a quiet year, as can be seen from a brief trawl of post count data or the site archives. We were very much a modding site then, with our "diversification" still at a pretty early stage. I was busy using the site for its purpose in many ways - as a modding workshop. The year saw the releases of Southern Realms and Warhammer Total War, and also Dimos' Europe 1080 among other projects.

The first half of the year saw the election (by ratification vote) of Dimos as Sebastokrator, introducing one of the most colourful characters in Exilian's politics and a not infrequent sparring partner for me in debates in the plaza. His term of office was relatively uneventful, though for a taste the reader should be alerted to do the extremely workmanlike sounding  "Block flash videos from signatures?" bill, in which the then-Sebastokrator invoked both Plato and Aristotle in his opposition to the motion. Dimos was one of a few more literal exiles we harboured in this period, especially those who had fallen foul of the admins at the TaleWorlds forums (for the creators of Mount & Blade) along with folk such as Colonel_Ryan. There were some negative perceptions attached to this, as was rammed home to me by one user, Myran Songbow, who sent a long and detailed PM after falling foul of a somewhat erratic piece of moderation on the part of Dimos himself.

In terms of wider site admin, February saw Marcus start work on building an SMF forum that Exilian could move onto at some stage, setting the stage well in advance for the large upheavals of 2011.

The mid-year elections were an interesting contest, with Dimos proposing a wide-ranging manifesto promising a simplified constitution, more staff ranks to form a "cabinet", and acting to form a larger base of legislators. He ran in a three-way race with Colonel Ryan and Silver Wolf - the latter's wider popularity proved to be too much, and Dimos was heavily defeated, coming third with just 14.3% of the vote compared to Silver Wolf's 64.3%. Dimos' manifesto nonetheless probably had a continued impact; it's the first reference I think I can find to someone suggesting political parties as a means of grouping people together behind common manifestos (which is ironic, given Dimos' later campaigns to abolish that very system).

The later part of the year contained almost nothing by way of... well, anything much. October was Exilian's lowest posting month since 2008, and indeed the only time since 2008 that we dipped below 200 posts in a month. To make matters worse, BoyNinja dropped off staff late in the year, after around a year in the post of M&B admin. But times were changing...

Chapter 8: A New Hurrah (Jan-May 2011)

Spoiler

The start of 2011 was a period of renewed activity on the forum. New faces began to emerge from the woodwork - a certain Phoenixguard09, an ambitious if only briefly serving Calisthenis - and others were disappearing (at least briefly), Boyninja having recently stepped down and Silver Wolf resigning his post in February.

The January elections were a tightly fought contest, and the first to feature a joint ticket, with Goldyrulez and Dripping D joining forces to form the "Crimson Coalition" that collectively gained around half the vote, though only succeeded in getting Dripping D elected as Spatharios, with extremely narrow wins for Silver Wolf as Sebastokrator and I Forgot My Name who put together a surprise debate performance (aka actually having a manifesto) to pull ahead and win the other Spatharios post. There was also notable acrimony over misuse of moderation powers to edit other people's signatures or posts, especially by GMD who was removed from staff shortly before the election (although not disqualified from running, and he still gained seven votes for a Spatharios post, just missing out on tying with IFMN). The staff changes continued, with Phoenixguard being ratified as M&B admin.

February saw the second amendment to the constitution passed, which was broadly very popular, with the main quibbles being around spelling and grammar checking the document and the name colour for the new rank created - the Tribunes. I was determined that there ought to be a further check & balance on the staff, and this seemed the best way to do it. In retrospect it perhaps didn't serve us well to create a pair from the beginning, and led to staffing being a stretch numerically in future elections, but nonetheless that was how it panned out, with Calisthenis and Debux being the first incumbents.

A few members worked on the changes in this period. Calisthenis, whilst he had only a fairly short stretch of time as an active member, had quite an impact on the site: his citizen admission bill formalised the admission process, creating a separate forum for it and creating the principle that both proposer and candidate had to say why they wanted the admission to take place. It was also apparently him who pushed for purple as the colour of the Tribounoi, which remained the case ever since.

Dimos made his own contribution in the form of the heavily argued name change bill, which including amendments and subsequent bills ended up with a marathon twelve polls to vote bits of the whole thing through. This resulted in the Sebastokrator Popularos becoming the Sebastokrator, the option of Heteriarch or Despot for permanent admins, and the Belisariae becoming Megas Domestikoi. It also introduced the idea of Tzakones becoming Hekatontarchoi, which failed at this point but was passed within a constitutional amendment later in the year. There were two especially notable fights on this bill: around the titles of the Heteriarchs/Despots, with one office holder (Phoenix) wanting them changed and the other (CG) wanting them to remain, hence the compromise solution, which disgruntled Dimos and the pro-Heteriarch lobby who had won the initial ballot. The other flashpoint was over the title of Megadux, with Dimos pushing hard for it to be amended to Basileus, which I strongly opposed and successfully won my case on.

Yet more elections were on the horizon, with a tight by-election for Sebastokrator between Son of the King and Dimos, which the former won by a single vote. Moves were made to support the creation of political parties, too, including the opening of the Discussion Collonnade; by May the run of democratic hubbub had reached its zenith, however, with two ideas that did not then get off the ground. The first of these was my suggestion that I should be elected, which very much failed to happen (the Bhutanese Monarch's Syndrome hitting in rather notably), and the other was a move to AV, which faltered mainly on technical grounds.

Outside all that, modding continued, and new members appeared - Doomchild and Nightangel (later Captain Carthage) being notable additions from this period. In the event, though, these changes only signalled more change on the horizon. Whilst this chapter was titled "A New Hurrah", it was the last hurrah for our board software, and perhaps the end of the "old Exilian" in many ways. The next 12 months were to see a lot more changes yet, as we'd finally decided to move the whole board.

PART 3: STRUGGLE AND CHANGE

Part 9: On the Move (April-June 2011)

Spoiler

Moving Exilian around had been on the cards for a long while before April 2011. Marcus had started making an SMF 2.0 RC2 test site as early as Feb 2010, according to PMs from that time. It was over a year from then to when we finally got it sorted, largely on the initiative of Marcus, who on April 10, 2011, mentioned to me on MSN that he'd found a collection script to scrape up posts from Zetaboards ready for conversion onto SMF.

On April 28, we released the news that conversion was impending. Marcus did the hard work - using the collection script to scrape all the posts from Zetaboards, ready to be dumped into the new site. My role in the process was then to re-classify the citizens to member groups, repair the admin teams' permissions, and so on and so forth. Getting the front-end site and forum onto the same server was an obvious thing to do, not least because finally exilian.co.uk/forum was the forum web address, as it has remained (bar tweaks to the www and http security) ever since.

There were numerous hiccups, however. The script couldn't "see" the Zetaboards personal message system, so PMs weren't transferred, and nor were things in hidden or pass-coded boards that the script couldn't get to. Some parts of posts were missing and had to be shunted/edited across manually, too. The new board lacked passworded sub-forums, and opening old forums in order to move posts over led to at least one unhappy modder quitting the site.

Part 10: New country for old men (June-Dec 2011)

Spoiler

With the board move done, life, well, continued. We'd lost some modding activity as a result of the change, but in general it didn't seem to affect posting stats significantly.

The June 2011 elections were still happily competitive: the Crimson Coalition had transformed into "Vive Exilian!" which contested all the posts available, though with a lower resulting percentage of the vote than the Crimson Coalition had received in early 2011. The primary reason for this was that the Khan, their candidate for Sebastokrator, lost 8-0 to SOTK, running then as an independent. DD and Goldy topped the ballot for Spath and Seb respectively, however, each with an independent candidate coming second and gaining the other post (Nightangel as Spatharios, Debux as Sebastokrator).

Over the next few months, some further minor tweaks happened - a motion to set up a YouTube channel passed successfully, for example, and the shoutbox was eventually re-instated after some petitioning. The main innovation (and a very major one) in this period was the Third Amendment, however, which among other more minor changes created the title I'd fought earlier in the year to avoid holding myself, that of Basileus - and created it as a separate administrative post, to be regularly elected. This was, I think, one of the major steps towards Exilian becoming the genuinely communally owned site that I wanted it to be, and established the principle that the headship of the administration team was firmly in the gift of the citizens rather than being attributed to an arbitrary "site owner". When announcing my plan for the new amendment, I explicitly stated that I would run in the forthcoming (January) election, with a view to handing it over in June. The amendment passed 9-0-0, and Exilian's future course continued to steer towards democracy.

In the general life of the forum, TW: Orcs and Humans was released, our YouTube channel was duly opened, and - on a personal note - my avatar changed to its current form of a pangolin in October, having previously been a trireme from the start of Exilian to this point.

Part 11: Exilian goes to war (Dec 2011-Mar 2012)

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"So we are at war, gentlemen."

It was not long before we were reminded, bitterly, of the difficulties of running our own board system. With the above words, comrade_general opened the 19th December war council meeting on MSN after our site was suddenly, badly hit by a malware attack. The first reference I can find is a PM from Marcus to me on Dec 01, seemingly responding to one of mine letting him know that malware warnings had appeared.

It was Dec 05 when we made a public announcement about the issue; there was an htaccess redirect being repeatedly applied to the site, which returned even after being deleted. Marcus' first plan was to remove the newsposting php script, which had, as he said, "gaping holes in it" - but this turned out not to fix the problem, and on Dec 8 we removed it and cleaned up only to find it returning as fast. Our enemy in the war was clearly a bot - it was returning the files to their infected state faster than a human could conceivably have done.

Dec 19, when we requested the Google review and found that the bot was still coming back, was the crucial day, and we had a war council meeting on MSN. In truth, the war council was the secondary MSN conversation: Marcus and I were discussing the heavy technical details separately. I theorised after some research that Zenphoto, a gallery system, may have been the vulnerability - and I suspect that was correct, though other theories such as an httpd.config virus were still being followed up weeks later as we attempted to get GoDaddy to check for problems at their end (with, of course no success). Marcus and I also planned out ideas for the upcoming elections as we worked, whilst the war council rambled on amusingly - the conversations were not so much crucial as amounting to moral support. We worked to get Exilian back because it was, collectively, ours, which is quite an important motivator.

On Dec 19-21, most elements of the site were uninstalled/reinstalled: Exilian's theme was wiped, and most of its mods, and it was a good deal of work to repair it all again. Worse, google and many people's browsers had cached some of the problems, so we had to go through a slow process of getting the site reinstated on search engines. We did upgrade to SMF 2.0 at this point, though, the forum software series that we were to use thereafter (still using it in 2017, at time of writing this). Reinstalling items and chasing up emails and so on took us well into January, and there seemed to be some patching-up via our own htaccess file that was covering over some underlying problem even at that point, though for most intents and purposes the issues were over and we had, to enough of an extent, won. I think we probably were quite bruised by the malware attack - it messed up a month or so of posting and forum time, and it was testament to the strength of our core community back then that we bounced back as well as we did in the first half of 2012.

This chapter extends a little, forward to March, for one more addition that seems appropriate to put here - namely, Marcus' resignation. The war was the last major part of site governance in which he had an active hand, and by this point he'd decided to move on. He announced his decision to the admins on March 22nd, and to the rest of the site on March 23rd, a meeting where we agreed to my own plan for Exilian's future governance - but that is a tale for the next chapter. For here, I think it suffices to point out that without Marcus, I might never have got as involved in RTW modding as I did (and nor might CG or SOTK), and we'd have had no Mixed Mods, and no Mixed Mods would have meant no Exilian. There are many people mentioned in these histories without whom Exilian would have been a great deal poorer - but few without whom it would have been unimaginable. Marcus is most definitely one of those few.

PART 4: A NEW ATHENS

Part 12: Of Kings and Coin (Jubal/1, Jan-Jun 2012)

Spoiler

This and subsequent chapters of this history will mostly be written along the lines of six-month periods of governance, as these give nice & obvious stopping points and elections have been fairly regular since this point. We shift back from March to the election that was happening during the crisis, which was one of the most competitive in Exilian's history, and had two clear competing parties: VE having been effectively disintegrated, the new parties were comrade_general's Exilian Control and Heuristic Operations party, the "pro-staff" ECHO, and my own Forums for Internet Freedoms, the liberal "pro-citizens" FIF. FIF has kind of been the dominant party on Exilian ever since, but mostly in that it has tended to act as a mechanism for me to declare and push forward pro-democracy plans, something I've generally been successful in doing given my continual position at the heart of the staff team.

Dripping D (now FIF) and Nightangel (still Ind) retained their Spath positions comfortably, whilst Death Nade and Ladyhawk both won Tribounos posts for ECHO when neither incumbent stood again. SOTK re-stood as Sebastokrator, beating Dimos as an independent candidate six votes to four. The election for the Basileus was surprisingly competitive; I won, but with a minority of the vote: four votes to CG's three, with two votes for Dimos' pro-democracy platform and one for Doomchild, standing for the Neo-communist Internet Union (the only time this party ever existed or stood a candidate, which is a great pity). Nonetheless, I'd run as pledged, and had become the first Basileus of Exilian.

I had a general legislative programme worked out in my head - the aim was to keep pushing for greater democracy and transparency. There were also legal changes since mid-2011 now we controlled our own infrastructure - as such a Terms of Service change bill was one of my first measures as Basileus, along with a Constitutional Transparency Bill which made the constitution easily available for consultation by members rather than just citizens (moving it out to Q&S, from the Plaza where it had been previously). In May we also passed an Academy Creation Bill, setting up a new e-learning section, one of Exilian's many ventures for which my high hopes were never ultimately realised.

Marcus leaving (announced March 23) definitely changed the game, and paved the way for another round of significant changes - having given the citizenry control of the site's leadership, I decided to take an even more radical step and attempt to give them control over the site's finances, effectively making Exilian a legally existent entity. This would be one of my policy goals for quite some time to come, as it took a great deal of time to implement - but the course was set at this point, when I got the necessary agreement to pursue the plan. SOTK agreed to take over as Technikos, and double up as finance officer. The fourth amendment, described as covering "Finance and Aims", added the necessary constitutional provisions for the two of us to open a bank account, and a Ratification of Banking Choice act selected Unity, a bank specialising in nonprofits, as our banking provider. We subsequently failed to actually open the account, though I believe I got as far as filling in some paperwork and mailing it to SOTK before the process stalled. The Khan won election unopposed as Sebastokrator, though was to only hold the position for a few months. These changes had little effect at the time, but they were to ultimately dominate aspects of Exilian's governance and planning for years to come.

This was a very busy period in terms of releases of mods, site development, and other projects, as well as the bustle around changing how the site was to be run. The front-end website, rebuilt by Son of the King, returned in February, with new pages for many mods, which were being released at a decent rate. CG finally completed and released Persian Invasion at the start of March, and both Narnia Total War (the 0.8 Campaign Beta, on April 02 and Warhammer Total War (1.0 Campaign Release, April 06) saw their own releases. Adventures of Soros, too, was released on March 27 - a standalone text-adventure that helped keep alive my interest in the possibility of making my own games, and which in its own small way thereby helped Exilian wind down a path toward supporting more game development, an area into which it would later expand considerably. One other cultural development came with this post:

Also... comparing today's saints: Saint Valentine was killed in Rome, left so little record of his achievements there may have been several of him or none of him, and probably didn't have anything to do with the 14th of February or any particular association with romance. Saints Cyril and Methodius invented an alphabet that's the basis of communication across large parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia to this day, wrote one of the first true slavic legal codes, and Cyril very probably DID die on the 14th of February. Let's celebrate Cyril and Methodius' day! 

And thus was one of Exilian's traditions born!

Part 13: Athens (Comrade_General/1, Jun-Dec 2012)

Spoiler

As I had said I would the previous year, I declined to run for re-election as Basileus, making way for CG to step up to the role. As the only obvious contender, he won it unopposed for ECHO. Dripping D finally gave up his seat as Spatharios by running as well for Sebastokrator, defeating the incumbent Khan. ECHO retained both Trib posts, on something of a fluke: Death Nade was beaten by two other contenders (and was later replaced by The Khan after being one of the few Exilian staffers ever to fall to a Vote of No Confidence), but both won higher placed posts as well. Othko97 (SOTK's younger brother) and Nightangel were successful in being re-elected as independent Spatharioi. I myself was up for a different vote - for Chartophylax, overall head of the Exilian Academy, my latest pet project.

Academy classes formally opened in August 2012. My idea was to create a wide ranging e-learning project where we could recruit interesting and interested people to share knowledge via semi-taught courses. I started my own course on fantasy world-building, which did get sign ups: I think mainly I'd underestimated how much work producing all my planned material was going to be, and then I started university at the end of Sep 2012, which greatly slowed down any plans I might have had to further expand things. A course by Lizard, on OO programming, similarly rather slowed down, with slightly lower interest levels. As such, despite a promising start the Academy rapidly lost steam.

The Exilian Atheniad also happened, renamed from Exilian Games in part to avoid confusion with our home-brewed PC games (which were also referred to by that title) but also because it encapsulated part of my own mental mythos of Exilian - being an Atheniad to evoke the proverbial home of learning and democracy, as opposed to an Olympiad for Olympia. Looking back, the historical shenanigans in justifying that name are somewhat wince-worthy, but it happened nonetheless. This was the last of the three such events to date where we got a decent sized non-Exilian team, from TWC. Most events were short on participants, but we did get 13 events successfully completed. TWC hammered us across the board in gaming events, whereas they put forward very few competitors for non-gaming events - they got 6 golds to our 1 in gaming, we got 6 to their 0 in non-gaming. The Games also included a bizarre nine minute long opening ceremony, a collaboration between myself as video editor and games organiser (including a three minute speech of mine that I still refuse to watch back to this day), Nightangel as announcer, and Comrade_General as Basileus: we even had real fireworks, in a gloriously bizarre home-botched mess of a YouTube video (contained in the spoiler tag below):

Spoiler

There were fewer major announcements than there had been in early 2012. An Adventures of Soros preview happened, and a little Civilisation II mod called War of Realms which I put together, but few major mod releases. Work on such things was still continuing, but posting stats overall were sliding downwards toward the end of the year, towards the Big Dip of 2013. We were hit by a general DDoS attack on Sep 12, but this was at server level and had little impact on us overall.

In constitutional matters, the main debate was regarding applications for citizenship - should members be allowed to apply for citizenship, or should they have to wait for a patron to approach them? In a long debate in August, Othko and I were in favour of allowing applications, whereas Ladyhawk, Silver Wolf and Phoenixguard generally came down against such a system. Comrade_general ultimately came down in tentative opposition to applications, which put the idea on hold - temporarily. More importantly, we finally expanded the remits of the two general permanent staff - the M&B admin post, or Heteriarch (then PG), became responsible for the Clerisy & Community, whereas the RTW admin (CG) became more widely responsible for modding and gaming. An bill to create a general reviews section failed, whereas one to create a billboard for advertising other sites passed (though the billboard was little used, and was removed in 2013). The citizenship debate was re-ignited by Dimos again in December, who was very clearly becoming the "radical democrat" voice among the citizens and was pushing for voting to be opened to all members, or with some form of activity-only trigger on voting. There was no way of reasonably working some of his proposals, but I saw this advocacy as a potential route for returning to my plans for a system where applications were possible, which now took the position of a compromise option. This was the stage upon which the next elections were set...

Part 14: The EDU (Dimos, Jan-Jun 2013)

Spoiler

The December 2012 elections were probably the most solidly debated that we ever had. Dimos stood on an "Independent Democrats" ticket with a manifesto promising powers to put  referendum questions to the full forum membership, the creation of organised "recruitment teams", and an elected financial officer. FIF's offer had some similarities, though focussed on encouraging members to find new members in their face-to-face contacts rather than strengthening our online links, and on increasing staff effectiveness. The lack of a FIF candidate for Basileus meant that the well-prepared and debate-ready Dimos ticket was only opposed by ECHO's Hobbit_Of_Exilian, who failed to campaign. Dimos managed to win several people over, whilst other FIF and ECHO voters mostly abstained - in the end, HoE won no votes at all, Dimos five, and there were a record five abstentions. Down the ticket, FIF did well, as Dripping D won election with a solid 70% of the vote, and Othko topped both the Spath and Trib ballots for the party.

With posting rates continuing to drop, Dimos' term of office got off to a difficult start and was somewhat fractious throughout. Silver Wolf among others was vocally frustrated with Dimos' first major action being an attempt to push for a new system of rank depiction via a set of user-bars he'd made, and I think with the debates and over-focus on the Hidden Plaza, which I'm sure I was responsible for as well. I was, however, keen to get on with recruiting where possible, as posting dropped to new lows in February, and somewhat positioned FIF as the "get on with the job" bloc.

In March, I finally brought forward two important motions on patronage. The Breaking of Patronage bill was the first of these, allowed people to leave citizen houses of which they were currently a member. Its successor, the Citizen Admission and Patronage Reform (CAPR) bill, was my response to Dimos' continued opposition to citizen houses and was an attempt to resolve the different positions on patronage; it finally moved us to a position where people could apply for citizenship. The CAPR only had two votes in favour - but the remainder were abstentions, and thus it still passed and remains the rule to this day. May saw the "culling bill" which removed long-inactive citizens. SaidaiSloth (then known as Hobbit_of_Exilian) attempted to resign during this period as his life was getting in the way, but he ultimately remained in post as nobody ever moved it to a vote. More importantly, Phoenixguard actually did resign (announcing it in a thread entitled "The End of an Erratic Era").

By June, somewhat frustrated at Dimos' lack of drafting input into his own legislative programme, I had decided that I should try and get the ship back on an even keel - I thus resolved that I would stand again for Basileus myself.

Part 15: Votes, Pentagathus, And Everything (Jubal/2, Jun-Dec 2013)

Spoiler

The mid-2013 elections, despite the weak activity in the first part of the year, saw high turnout. There was surprisingly little debate. Rob stood as an independent Spatharios candidate with a decent manifesto, and Pentagathus stood for literally every post. The key vote was that for Basileus, which saw myself, Pentagathus and Dimos squaring off. FIF ran on a platform of re-starting the academy project, using Facebook and ModDB to help promote our mods, and providing more guides for staff and citizens. Dimos continued to push for better democratic oversight of our finances, and claimed recent bills were a good start towards improving site activity. In the end, the contest was fairly easily resolved: I thumped home with twelve votes to Dimos' one. DD's margin for remaining as Sebastokrator was not much smaller. Hobbit_of_Exilian, who'd decided to re-stand as Spatharios, was unseated by Rob: Othko retained the other seat, whilst Scarlet won the lion's share of the vote as a FIF candidate for Tribounos, joined by Pentagathus who did get the one reward from his campaign.

A side-note should be added here on the Vote Pentagathus For Everything campaign, which was one of the most colourful that Exilian has seen to date. The general tone of this campaign can be seen from its introduction post:

Spoiler

Greetings ladies and girlymen of Exilian.
Many moons and winters ago I used to wield most formidable administrative powers over the slack jawed peasantry of Exilian, and all would agree I was a just, fair, honourable, effective and truly committed to the duty of knowing what was best for the bumbling citizens of that time. Alas, the Mightily Malevolent Marcus threatened our freedoms, our cake and our very existence. Undeterred, I did battle with this dread foe and eventually did cast him out of our fair lands. But I was wearied from my great victory and my other laborious labours, so I retired to my homelands of Wibulnubniblia to rest.
And finally, I hath returnedeth.
So why vote me for everything? Because its much more efficient. Need to call an admin meeting? No, I can just talk to myself. Need to bicker and argue about petty decisions? No, I can decide for you. Need to pay for every admin post? No, I'll need only one wage packet.

So really ladies and girlymen, there is no need to choose who to vote for. Just vote Pentagathus. Say no to making worry decisions, I shall lead you all with grace towards a better future.

With the elections over, I pushed ahead with FIF's manifesto and with trying to regularise various of our staff and constitutional practices. This started with the fifth amendment, which weakened and broadened the financial provisions from the fourth in order to take account of the fact that Comrade_General was largely funding the site directly. I also pushed ahead with the board reorganisations planned in the FIF manifesto - the first of many attempts at simplifying the main site index. Both measures passed easily. August saw a flurry of additional discussions and motions: formalising the process of administrators getting automatic patricianship, granting the Sebastokrator a power of cloture on bills that were passing easily, creating additional minor roles for things like the press office that could be assigned to the junior staff, and the recognition of parties bill, which permitted parties to have subforums in the Discussion Colonnade area and stipulated a permanent forum that should be open for independent candidates. Dimos opposed the lattermost of these, but all the motions passed without particular issue.

We also of course had the issue of finding a replacement for Phoenixguard as Heteriarch to grapple with. In the event, the decision was simplified by only having one applicant, Mother of Dragons (later known as Lady Grey) - she'd found us by the simple principle of being Son of the King's then-girlfriend (and subsequently his wife since 2015). Her application was accepted by ten votes to zero.

Later in the year, we had one of the more controversial motions of the time - the Other Genders Recognition bill. My intention was to add an "other" option on profiles for gender, to help the system account a little better for non-binary folk. CG and Rob argued at the time that this was unnecessary, whereas SOTK argued for removing the gender field altogether as a preferable option. After an options poll in which it won by one vote, we moved SOTK's option to a vote, something CG and Rob still both opposed, though the bill still passed with six votes in favour to two against and three abstentions. Looking back at the debate, I probably got a bit more fighty than was helpful; I think I genuinely hadn't appreciated that people would oppose the measure, and having close non-binary friends for the first time around then I was somewhat prickly on their behalf. With the motion having passed, I then (somewhat using the objections to removing the field altogether as cover) tabled an amendment bill which returned the gender field to existence... with my proposed third option added. This passed 7-0 with one abstention, once again nudging my preferred option through the debates and discussions of the plaza.

Part 16: The Modding Renaissance (Comrade_General/2, Jan-Jun 2014)

Spoiler

I dithered over whether or not to stand again for Basileus, before deciding not to - but there was a decent amount of interest from others. ECHO had folded up after a disappointing result in the previous election, which led to a rise in independent candidates standing. All posts were contested, and turnout was high at 23 voters. Comrade_General was a late entrant to the race for Basileus, being the last of the candidates to declare: as the most heavyweight and experienced candidate standing, though, he sailed past a rather divided opposition, winning eleven votes (his nearest challenger being FIF's Dripping D, on five: Dimos accrued just three for the EDU). One amusing feature was The Khan changing his name to A Khan in order to appear higher on the ballot papers: this did him little good.

The site was getting some of its highest monthly post counts to date, with several months well over 2000 posts. The small number of plaza bills was mirrored by a very high number of announcements. This included a lot of stuff from Silmarillion Total War and Rome Total Realism - the latter in part responsible for the uber-high post counts - but more from outside the modding world too. My tabletop adventure game Hetairos joined the site,  Lizard's Delta Games Studio came on board, a new Adventures of Soros beta was released, and the Choose Your Own Adventure was started up. As Exilian passed its sixth birthday, and made a frontpage announcement for Cyril and Methodius day, things were looking busy and bright.

There was little plaza activity in the first half of 2014 - discussions of creating affiliated status for game developers signalled the way things were going, but there was relatively little in terms of staff activity and site restructuring. Perhaps the most important feature of this period, though, was Exilian getting ready to break the fourth wall for the first time, for discussions and planning had started for Exilian to do its first real-world convention...

PART 5: BEYOND THE WALL

Part 17: Beyond the Wall (ExiliCon 2014)

Spoiler

ExiliCon 2014 was possibly one of the smallest and strangest conventions that has ever taken place in human history. Its furthest travelled member had come from midwestern America, and there were... about twenty people present? I knew nothing about organising real-world events of that type, and it was all done in rather haphazard fashion in a small Unitarian church hall booked a bit out of the centre of Cambridge. We had two whole rooms, one of which had a handful of stands in, and the other of which had some chairs for a talks strand. I was running everything which didn't help, and the small numbers meant that when the storytelling and poetry happened everyone sort of bundled into the side-hall rather than having two ongoing strands meaningfully. We had very few stalls per se, with more of the space being given over to games of Hetairos, historical boardgames, and quite a lot of lego.

Despite this, I have quite fond memories of the event, and it brought together a lot of Exilians in a way that maybe the larger subsequent conventions didn't quite, as well as introducing some new people to the community, notably Flamekebab whose Fox Box updates were a feature of Exilian for some time after, Florp who after 2020 became one of our meetup regulars, and even more notably than them the senior treasurer of the university society I helped run at the time, who is likely better known to readers of this history as Glaurung. Exilian members present included Comrade_General, Dripping D/Gen_Glory, No1 Croat Fan, Clockwork, and Lizard.

Part 18: Of Khans and Dragon-hoards (Khan, Jun-Dec 2014)

Spoiler

Neither CG or I planned to stand in the June election, which threw the race rather more open. The Khan, having been on staff for some time, probably started out as the best known, though Pentagathus, despite his colourful electoral history, could point to both having previously served as an admin and having been Tribounos for several months without blowing anything up. The lesser known Armadillo (later SaidaiSloth) was something of a dark horse candidate, but failed to break through. The election was closer than one might have expected, with The Khan being elected on eleven votes to Pentagathus' nine.

Immediately after the election, there were a few discussions regarding electoral practice - people running for too many positions had caused some problems whereby a lot of votes were wasted as those people had won "higher ranking" positions. The Khan put forward his own bill to allow people to state their party affiliation on user profiles, which passed easily. He also pushed for trialling of Breeze, a mod to allow comments on user profiles - together, these formed something of an "Exilian as social network" vision: the Breeze motion, too, passed, but was never implemented due to technical problems, and the Khan did not push much more legislation, though it's an interesting might-have-been. He did create the christmas and hallowe'en versions of the site logo that are still being used at the time of writing (2018), and made earnest attempts to work on better advertising for the site, as post counts were sliding from where they had been in the first half of the year.

Maybe the largest constitutional advances in this period, however, came around September, when Glaurung (mentioned in the previous chapter) had become a citizen and then decided to poke around and work out how things worked. Having been treasurer for a number of other societies, he decided to push forward with looking toward finding us a solution to the continual ad-hoc problem of Exilian's finances, something that I was very happy to support (and which met with widespread approval). One constitutional amendment later (with some debate around free speech rules and their phrasing, but none around the core changes involved), the office of Sakellarios (treasurer) had been created, and Glaurung duly became Exilian's first (and to date, only) holder of that post.

This was followed by a Terms of Service review in November, partly triggered (or at least spurred on) by an exceedingly heated debate on the Israel/Palestine issue and some other arguments in the debate area. The review wound on for some time, more due to inaction than any contentiousness of subject matter, but the result was to tighten up the wording of the document and more carefully codify the penalties for breaking the ToS. The draft bills were published in December, though it would be several months until they were fully sorted. December also saw a bill on bank account selection and one formally adopting support for net neutrality passed - Exilian and the real world, it seemed, were interacting more than ever.

Part 19: The Indies Arrive (SOTK, Jan-Jun 2015)

Spoiler

Son of the King, our tech officer, decided to take a turn in the driving seat, and ran unopposed. The Khan, having managed his time in office well, was able to step down a peg to become Sebastokrator, finally knocking FIF's Dripping D out of the post (the latter not helped by Othko97 also running, meaning that whilst FIF candidates got seven votes enough to equal The Khan, they were split four and three between two candidates). I also finally stepped down as Chartophylax, as another (alas, again abortive) attempt was made to re-start the Exilian Academy, this time under Lizard as a new Chartophylax.

A bill for procedures to resolve tied votes was put forward by Glaurung and passed in February, and April saw the final results of the ToS reforms I'd planned, all of which were duly passed without much opposition. An overhaul of the Staff Mandates Bill, which provided for a public information and press officer to be appointed from among the junior staff, was passed shortly before the June election. Board changes were a more serious focus of effort, alongside the ToS reforms: Mother of Dragons (later Lady Grey), our Heteriarch, put forward a motion to open a craft section, the Artisans' Gallery, which passed. Meanwhile, I'd put forward motions to open a world languages forum and a specific area for indie game developers (the Indie Laboratory, which later became the Indie Alley). The result of this was that the board index was getting dauntingly long, as pointed out to Glaurung and I by Flamekebab (who we were then working with on things for ExiliCon 2015). The solution was to condense a lot of the near-dead gaming discussion areas and move them down into the offtopic area - this put the project development areas at the top of the index, and also meant that 0AD and Mount & Blade significantly lost prominence in the forum's architecture, as they had done some time before in its activity.

Part 21: (ExiliCon 2015)

Spoiler

ExiliCon 2015 was probably in some ways the most robustly organised of the three conventions we did in the 2010s. Flamekebab in particular provided some excellent heavy-duty tech support, which is why the '15 con actually has very good professional sounding footage on the recordings, which cannot be said for its 2016 successor.

The event was again in Cambridge but moved to the St Andrews Street Baptist Church, which offered more space, and a significant increase in size. This time it had a less anarchic feel, and indeed more of a local feel - we had for example the local bookshop, Heffers, and a range of the geek & good from the area with projects like the fantasy webseries Ren and the audiodrama Don't Worry, It's Only The End of the World. There weren't enough people through the door, undeniably, and this was the main complaint in trader and attendee feedback, but the people who were there seemed to enjoy it, and indeed I have a couple of emails from the time from a former teacher of mine, Nick Widdeson (who also taught DD/GG, Croat, GMD, and Penty: given he ran our school wargames club his influence on this site should not be underestimated) telling me how much a couple of his 2015 pupils had enjoyed coming to the event.

Perhaps the most notable newcomer to the community from 2015's event was Stephen "Stormwell" Hughes, like myself a Norfolk native who turned up alongside his partner, the auther VJ Bartlett, and whose Utherwald Press posts were a reliable regularity from the until about 2022. I'm pretty sure this was also where Exilian (and I) first encountered a certain Dr. James Holloway, who was a pretty prominent feature of the community's orbit after that (especially via his Monster Man podcast which has at least had a considerable influence on my own work.).

Part 21: (Comrade_General/3, Jun-Dec 2015)

Spoiler

Comrade_General, now running under a FIF banner (his third affiliation in three runs), returned for another shot at being Basileus. Othko97 meanwhile was the clear front-runner for Sebastokrator, running against No1 Croat Fan as an independent. There were one too few candidates for the positions, which was perhaps a sign of how things were going: in April, posting dropped below 1000 in a month for the first time since April 2013. CG and Othko romped home with large majorities of the vote.

In minor legislative achievements, the FIF manifesto included a staff transparency bill to ensure that the Plaza got reports of staff meetings, and I busied myself with consulting on and then passing that. In September, we suspended the existence of the Academy again via a new bill, and gave Megas Domestikoi access to staff discussions to increase transparency and benefit from their input. The "Creative Hub" also opened, as a catch-all discussion area for creative project management and similar.

The major thrust of discussion, though it produced little immediate action, was how to deal with the problem of sliding post counts, a perennial issue for Exilian and one which we would keep facing. My hope was to develop Exilian toward supporting small and independent game developers more - SaidaiSloth argued on the other hand for a complete overhaul of forum software, which did at least spur me to work out what could be done better with what we had, though no alternatives were trialled in the end. We moved to a WYSIWG editor, and in December I began drafting ideas for a new condensation of front-end boards, in the hope that a simpler index would spur activity and at least make the place feel busier.

Part 22: Sloths and Stresses (SaidaiSloth, Jan-Jun 2016)

Spoiler

Armadillo, now renamed SaidaiSloth, had run for staff a few times before, but was nonetheless something of a surprise as the unopposed candidate for Basileus. Othko was, equally, unopposed for Sebastokrator, and the staff team was again one member short. The core community was shrinking, which was a real concern. Saidai called for increased member recruitment, and being unopposed he was pretty swiftly elected.

Other developments in this period included a Plain English Bill, which stipulated that there should be easier plain english versions of staff titles available, and discussions on citizenship (and the fact that most of our citizens were very long-standing members with few new citizens coming in), social media logins (which were trialled but never rolled out), and staff roles. A constitutional amendment in March dealt with various aspects of these, including inserting plain English into parts of the constitution, and reducing the number of Spatharioi and Tribounoi to one apiece from the previous two, in recognition of the low workload those staff members had.

The staff roles discussion was probably the most contentious. One of the difficulties we were getting to, by the first half of 2016, was that of a somewhat inactive staff team - the relatively large number of permanent in-post admins were often lacking in activity as much as the rest of the members, and I decided that what was needed - perhaps riskily - was more measures to ensure staff were reporting back to the citizens and perhaps even encourage staff turnover. The result was the staff support and scrutiny bill, which introduced the (subsequently controversial) measure to require confidence votes in staff who had failed to post in a certain amount of time, or who had failed to file their staff report without leave. This is still in place as of early 2018, though its application has been rather patchy.

Part 23: (ExiliCon 2016)

Spoiler

ExiliCon 2016 was the last of the run of cons we did in the 2010s. It was once again in Cambridge's St Andrews Street Baptist Church, and this time was in October rather than the middle of summer, in an attempt to dodge the general run of midsummer events in Cambridge - which I'm not sure was successful, as there's always a lot on in Cambridge, but even so. Besides myself and Glaurung, James Holloway did a lot of assistance with advertising and flyering and Zafira (a friend - I'm just going to assume that's what her Exilian username would be if she had one) did an immense amount of on-the-day support work.

Once again we had a full range of traders, game testers, and a room with a talks/events setup right the way through the day. Lizard ran a cultural exchange stall, regulars like Utherwald Press and Ryuuza art returned as did the Ren webseries team, and we even had Exilian's Bigosaur all the way from Serbia and running playtests of Son of a Witch throughout the day. Perhaps the highlight of the was a free-wheeling, last minute slot filling discussion between James Holloway and storyteller Chip Colquhoun on history and creativity which seemed to be very widely enjoyed. Exilian members who turned up also included Anonyman.

2016 had fantastic people and speakers attending, but for all that... I did feel afterwards that it failed. Mainly, I failed at the advertising side of it, and arguably also at delegation. I was once again doing too big a job which I didn't have the know-how to do, and that meant the footfall wasn't there, which inevitably left stallholders dissatisfied. We didn't even get most of them to fill in the feedback form. "I think," said TTRPG runner and cooler-GM-than-I'll ever-be Grant Howitt to me, "that you need to work out what you want this event to be." I wasn't sure I had an answer to it, any more than I've ever quite had an answer for what Exilian is trying to be. If I wanted to be highfalutin' I'd say that it's hard to describe something unique in terms of other things, if I wanted to be self-deprecating I'd say it's because my ideas have never perfectly cohered, and if I wanted to be honest I'd say it's a bit of both.

Part 24: Dragons And Flames (Glaurung/1, Jun-Dec 2016)

Spoiler

The June 2016 election was the first to have a decreased total of posts - four, rather than six. Glaurung, who had now served for some time as Sakellarios, was certainly the most senior staff member who had not yet been the site's chair, and was unopposed. Othko did another term as Sebastokrator, GMD became Spatharios for IDE and no1 croat fan served as an independent Tribounos.

The Staff Support and Scrutiny bill was triggered on two occasions in this six-month period, with confidence votes in both SOTK and Othko97: both of them succeeded in retaining confidence, but this certainly prompted a discussion on the merits of the bill itself (though without any actual legislation being brought forward to change matters). The only other legislative activity was some amendments to the heraldry bill.

This was definitely a tense period on staff and the site generally, I think perhaps in large part because the real world was getting pretty tense too - the combined effects of Brexit in England and the election of Trump in America led to something of a polarising effect, with some members (including myself) getting into repeated and heated debates. This sapped the energy out of the site generally, I think - I certainly found it tiring and found it harder to concentrate on the things Exilian needed doing, and I'm sure that being in the midst of a bunch of cross people didn't help the atmosphere for anyone else.

PART 6: BRAVE NEW WORLDS?

Part 25: The 2017 Crash (Glaurung/2, Jan-Jun 2017)

Spoiler

The tensions among core members of Exilian finally reached a breaking point in January, which culminated in Comrade_General stepping down from the staff team and disappearing from among the site's regulars. One of the corollaries of this was that post counts plummeted. The election in January only had two candidates for four posts - a grim situation.

Nonetheless, we soldiered on, perhaps in my case mainly because I didn't really know what else to do. The active staff team mainly consisted of myself and Glaurung, though SOTK and Lady Grey were still in post. In terms of the Plaza, votes and voters were few: a constitutional amendment put forward by Glaurung and myself in late January to add annual ratification to Heteriarch posts failed to reach the required three-quarters supermajority, though with a majority in favour. A bill to remove the gap between commerical and hobbyist game dev areas passed,a s did a bill to allow Megas Domestikoi more access to staff powers if delegated them.

After January, some new logothete appointments led to a few useful things - a fixed database backup system, and auto-scaling images on the forum - but did not really plug the gap in staffing, which was our new challenge. Whilst our post counts had dropped by two thirds, to the point where we were struggling to maintain 300 posts a month, the remaining activity was much more focussed towards the game development sections, which seemed to hardly notice the evaporation of the old "core community" post counts. Further board condensations were perhaps an inevitability, and Koobazaur's board condensing bill (actually introduced by me, but on the basis of the eponymous member's suggestions) decreased the number of top level boards yet again.

The perhaps positive side to all of this was that it allowed for something of a re-assessment of where Exilian was going and what it was here to do. I started mentally developing (yet another) a new strategy idea, with two main planks: the first, which owes its time to this period, was that we should provide more in the way of interesting information and inspiration, both to build up our public profile and as an end in themselves. The Articles Section motion passed in May and gave a green light for me to start looking into this more seriously. The second strand really developed in later 2017, and involved Exilian's relationship with the open internet.

Part 26: The Armadillo War (Glaurung/3, Jun-Dec 2017)

Spoiler

The June elections of 2017 saw no change in staff team - Glaurung continued at the helm, and the ship continued on through its rather shallow waters.

One of the genuinely pretty big changes for the site was a change for me: I moved to Vienna in August of 2017, and that radically realigned what I could and couldn't do. No ExiliCons beckoned in the future (and I was quite burned out from how bad I felt about the 2016 event), and so conversely I had to start rethinking what I was doing with Exilian. On the other hand, this rebalance in how I was looking at things was probably a help for me personally: Exilian was now a sort of safer area to retreat to when exploring an often bewildering new culture and environment and embarking on a very major new departure for my own life. Of course, I had no idea exactly how long it would take or what else was going to drop on us along the way at that point.

October, meanwhile, saw a different threat - the Armadillo War. Essentially, we got hacked, almost certainly via a security hole in a social media logins mod which I'd installed but never actually activated. The security hole became very noticeable when I logged into the site one day and found the database was conspicuously missing. Just everything shredded/gone via some kind of SQL injection. Now, we do have backups, but nonetheless it was a pretty worrying situation until we were reasonably sure that the mod removal had fixed the issue. Posts lost included around 1000 words worth of Exilian: A History, in a particular irony for writing this section. The attacker was named the Armadillo for reasons I'm not quite sure, excepting the obvious forum swear replacement code.

Toward the end of the year, the staff team had some more genuinely large changes - SOTK and Lady Grey both stepped down, their real lives finally proving rather too much to balance alongside Exilian staffing. Lizard returned to staff in place of SOTK, and discussions started happening in earnest on the subject of reorganising staff more properly. The old order of having a Community & Clerisy and a Gaming & Modding admin was clearly gone.

Part 27: Anniversary (Jubal/3, Jan-Jun 2018)

Spoiler

I returned to the helm of the site in January 2018. My election campaign had been to some extent the result of working out what sort of brave new world I wanted for Exilian - or wanted to avoid for it - in a world that felt pretty hostile to the sort of place Exilian wanted to be. Not that I'd really needed to campaign hard - I was unopposed - but felt people should know where I stood and where I wanted to go. And that place was a sense of mission: Exilian had objectives. The ninth amendment, which had passed in December, had removed four of our objectives:

- Promote the creation and releases of our own free, independent and community-made games and software.
- Help with and facilitate modifying games owned and used by its citizens and members
- Give help, advice and a place to talk about said games
- Help with and facilitate other projects and creations undertaken by its members

And added a new three to repalce them:

- Promote and support independent and hobbyist creative and academic projects of all kinds, especially those created by its members and citizens
- Provide resources and support to help individuals, especially its members and citizens, with independent and hobbyist creative endeavours
- Inform and inspire both members of Exilian and members of the public about creative and academic topics, especially those that are less well explored or known

In other words, our aims were now public as much as private, and had been updated to show that this wasn't really a modding community any more. Perhaps even more critically, the objectives line no longer read "Exilian website and forum exists to" but just "Exilian exists to". This was the new idea: we had a forum, but we were a community and an organisation with goals. How good we'd be at achieving them, of course, was a more technical matter. Nonetheless, this approach shaped a lot that we did at the time and indeed afterwards: one example being binning Google Analytics, and an increasing scepticism towards allowing technologies and corporations that didn't align with how we wanted Exilian to be.

In February 2018, Exilian turned ten years old. Honestly it was a vast surprise to me that the site ever got to that point. In a precarious world, having a mission is doubly difficult because you don't know how much you'll be able to attempt it and how much you'll be needing to survive against the odds, and Exilian's history had been no different. Nonetheless, with an anniversary special competition (won by Phoenixguard), and bonus articles including Exilian: The Two Llamas Theory, here we were celebrating. It was for that competition - though I was rather far off completing it in time - that I'd started writing a new little computer game, hacking around the robot programming engine from my game LIFE into a generic map system for an RPG - which would come to be entitled The Exile Princes, and become a major project of mine for years to come.

This six-month period also included my trip to the USA including a stay with Comrade_General after he returned tenatively to the site for a while, and much of Caradìlis' stay and posting on Exilian, she really being our first member who'd come from the Austrian milieu in which I now found myself.

We had some earnest but ultimately rather unsuccessful attempts at building up the staff team in early 2018, including appointing new content, membership development, and social media officers, none of whom lasted: our best find was probably our second social media officer, La Ciguapa, but unfortunately she too only managed to remain in post for a few months. Building the infrastructure to support one's ideals is always the harder part than having the ideals to begin with.

Part 28: Candlelight (Jubal/4, Jul-Dec 2018)

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I was re-elected with minimal fanfare in mid-2018 for my fourth six month term as Basileus.

My continued attempts to bring people onto the team did include temporarily appointing Spritelady as junior staff - we knew each other in-person from my time in Birmingham and remained close friends afterwards, leading to her association with the community. Other than that, though, there was little change: nonetheless, newsletters were published, articles written, and in general this was a quietly productive few months for the site. We also did a good deal of

At the end of the year, I started what would become something of a tradition (if not a totally regular one) of winter creative competitions, with our Candle competition. The image of the candle in the wind and darkness has always been something I've associated a bit with Exilian, from the name: in very early versions of the site back in like 2008, the motto "He walked through the darkness, and so saw the light" (an imagined 12th tablet from an abridgement of the Epic of Gilgamesh I had when I was young) had been emblazoned at the top of the site below the banner. The candle theme was a nice revisit of that moment, at least (and probably only) for me.

Part 29: Ill Winds Grow Stronger(Jubal/5, Jan-Jun 2019)

Spoiler

In the first half of 2019, CG drifted away from Exilian again, more amicably than the previous time, heading out to explore more parts of the world. Post counts on the forum once again were sliding as Cara also started to drift away a bit, and I was starting to feel more pressure from doctoral work, wanting Exilian to have some fresh faces at the top, and continuing in post because we couldn't find them.

That's not to say nothing was happening of course - a look at the Updates from the Forge issues I was writing includes Thalanor's Cogito Colony, Ierne's Aviarium (one of the site's more notable new faces from this period), my own Mountain Leopards webcomic and travelogue about Klagenfurt, Aure's Roadwarden,  Empires of the Undergrowth, and more besides. But it was ticking along rather slowly, and one of the troubles we were certainly having was devs not getting out of the areas where they wanted to advertise their own thing in order to build more of a functional community.

By June, we were having a perennial staff debate about activity, and considering what to do: could we simplify things constitutionally, or in the design of the forum, to better encourage activity? Glaurung correctly described the problem at the time as a resource trap - not having the people needed to find new people. June 2019 did see the arrival of a new face in the form of dubsartur, who had found us via Mastodon, one of the early indications that it would end up being a significant part of our social media infrastructure in years to come.

Part 30: Digging In (Jubal/6, Jul-Dec 2019)

Spoiler

The latter half of 2019 was broadly quiet and uneventful. Real-world issues were keeping me, and most other possible driving forces that could have gotten Exilian to do much, decidedly out of commission. My re-election bid - if one can call it that, had the explicit pitch of "I've somehow tooth-and-nail dragged Exilian through existing for over a decade and I'm standing because I intend to keep on doing so." I got re-elected unopposed anyway, but it felt a far cry from the more idealistic hopes I'd been pushing forward in 2018. Probably my biggest pieces on the site in this period were three large travelogues - one covering my three months in Frankfurt, one my long-awaited first trip to Georgia, and the third for a trip to Bordeaux in December.

This continued what was probably the best period to date (by some metrics) for indie game dev on Exilian, with news articles from Heuss!, Tourney, Mostly Intense Monster Defence, Heralds of the Order, Eternal Hope, The Chains that Bound Me, and Void Eclipse, though the fact that at the time of writing I had forgotten the existence of the vast majority of those games reiterates the problem noted in Part 29: people posted, but didn't stay.

The years between the convention seasons of the mid-2010s and 2020 were odd ones, very mobile and with a lot of people coming and going. I was caught, in some ways, between trying to reinvent Exilian and working out how to grit my teeth and keep it alive. None of this, however, was a patch on the much sharper breaks that were to come in the first half of 2020.

PART 7: EXILIAN IN THE PLAGUE TIME

Part 31: Breaking Points (Jubal/7, Jan-Jun 2020)

Spoiler

It's fair to say that at the start of 2020 most people in the entire actual world did not have a terribly good idea of how the coming years would turn out. I got re-elected largely on a platform of "well nobody else is doing it," and that felt like that. A kickstarter for Ren series 2 failed early in the year, which was a pity, and

It was March when everything changed. I went to Carthage at the start of the month, fulfilling a long desire to visit the heart of the culture that had inspired (albeit erroneously on my part) my Exilian username. As I got off the plane, there was a thermal camera to spot anyone coming in with a high temperature, a symptom of Covid-19, a disease we were starting to hear about more and more on the news. Once back in Austria, by Exilian Day (March 18), my world had effectively shut itself down. March and April saw a small bump in posting as a result, but I think everyone was more shellshocked than anything.

That wasn't the only breaking point: in late March, Comrade_General deleted his account and more firmly broke ties with us, prompted by some moderation decisions made over comments he'd put in a US election related thread.

Part 32: The Plague Days (Jubal/8, Jul-Dec 2020)

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Part 33: (Jubal/9, Jan-Jun 2021)

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Part 34: (Jubal/9, Jul-Dec 2021)

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Part 35: (Jubal/10, Jan-Jun 2022)

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Part 36: (Jubal/10, Jul-Dec 2022)

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[comrade_general]

That's some good record keeping there, Joob. Have you been keeping tabs on all this or did you do some back-research?

[Jubal]

I've been right through the completed votes and Hidden Plaza back-archives, and a lot of the Announcements as well. I'll write it up as a full chronicle soon.

[Silver Wolf]

My name is written in the pages of history!

I shall shed a tear of joy...

Spoiler

[debux]

You should totally add markers from when I change my sig.

Anyhow, great job, although I wonder how many points you'd get for this (which by the way, I should be updating one of these days)

[Gen_Glory]

all I see is

DD re-elected



6 terms in office 

[Captain Carthage]

We could put in place term limits, but we don't have enough people.

[Phoenixguard09]

Oh. My. God.



My name's on there...

Hey Jubal, reckon we can put the Wibbulniblia games on there? Possibly even how I put off the sequel for half a year?

[Dimos]

what about the new name-DEAL ?  AIN'T that so important? 

[Cuddly Khan]

I think you should add when people joined to this. Just the active people though.

[Ladyhawk]

Thats pretty cool Jubal

[Jubal]

Added a few of our more important modding achievements, I may have overly focussed on mine since I can remember them so if there are others please say. 

[Phoenixguard09]

3rd Amendment to the Exilian Constitution: Passed 9-0 on December 8th.

[stormcloud]

New part of history, Stormcloud returns after years, there was much rejoicing