Zhongmou’s Archives: Home

4/2/05: Welcome back to Kongming’s Archives, everyone. I’m sure most of you, before long, figured out that Zhongmou’s Archives was an April Fool’s joke, though I certainly hope you got a grand laugh out of it. As for those of you that didn’t figure out—gotcha! For the sake of history and fun, the Zhongmou’s Archives page will remain online in our page archives section. You can also view the Scholars of Shen Zhou discussion thread here, along with the original news post. It doesn’t seem this prank was as popular as Pikachu’s Archives, but for most it certainly seemed more believable!

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4/1/05 (James): Site change to Zhongmou's Archives, and a Wu focus.
Greetings everyone,

I do have some news for you today, along with a bit of an update, though I suspect it may or may not be received well by a number of you. You may not know this, of course, but I have lately moved to another state and found myself with a number of new (but precious) responsibilities. This, combined with work, has made it nearly impossible to dedicate the time necessary in order to update Kongming’s Archives as I did in the past.

For some time now I have strived to work on various tools to make this site manageable, and while I have succeeded to a good degree—at least enough that I should be able to continue to provide some game coverage—it still leaves the issue of how time will be spent in the Novel and History section, which cannot be automated in such a convenient way. I have been discussing it for a while now, with several friends, and Lady Wu and me have finally settled on something: Zhongmou’s Archives.

What’s that? Kongming’s Archives was a home for everything, but unfortunately it required me to keep up with everything. There are other wonderful Three Kingdoms sites on the internet, one of which is focused primarily on Shu, the other of which seems to be excessively fond of Wei and Jin. I would have loved to make Shu my first focus as well, but nobody is covering Wu the way they should, and we’ve already got some authors and translators that do a wonderful job with his kingdom. The point of this, if you haven’t seen where I am going with the idea, is to focus on Wu content here, rather than content for all the three kingdoms. In this way we can allow other sites to pick up in areas where we fall short, while working hard to bring you Wu-related content that might one day rival Rafe de Crespigny’s Generals of the South.

We’ve also been struggling quite a bit with bandwidth bills and server traffic, so this is a doubly good mood. Taking the other kingdom biographies and content offline cuts the site by nearly 50%, and frees up bandwidth and time for our much more specialized effort. I know a number of you will probably miss the old content, so I may try to make it available online again in the near future for those of you that didn’t see this coming, but all I can offer is my apologies. Our Wu biographies are still available.

From this point on, Kongming’s Archives will now be known as Zhongmou’s Archives (Zhongmou is Sun Quan’s style name, just as Kongming is Zhuge Liang’s style name), and Scholars of Shen Zhou will be known as the Scholars of the Southlands (an update which will come later today or tomorrow). We haven’t yet decided what content changes will occur at Scholars of the Southlands. We will probably new domains down the road as well, but just so nobody loses us, kongming.net will most likely remain active (it isn’t too hard to maintain a domain, even for years).

At this point it is unknown if these changes will have any affect on SimRTK, but because nothing is yet final we’ll handle those announcements there, and here in a future update. Also of interest to those of you who enjoy the Sim games, we’ve been watching Heroes of Chaos for some time now, and have decided to purchase it as a subsidiary of Simulated RTK. We are looking forward to seeing what different directions we can take the two sites, and I assure everyone, the transition will be smooth.

I’ve attempted to bring in a great deal of the new site appearance with this update. If things don’t look different, please refresh your browser or click in your browser’s address bar and press ‘Enter’ to refresh the page. Hopefully many of you find the new theme to be very appropriate for the new content, and our new focus. It will take time to update the whole site and work the theme into the old content, but soon we’ll have updated all the instances of “Kongming’s Archives,” and there won’t be any dead links to the biographies and content we’re taking offline with this new site revision. In case you missed the note above, the Wu biographies we’ve decided to keep are listed here.

If you have any feedback to share, please let us know.

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