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I have to confess that I’ve been spending oodles of time finetuning the web site used by my World of Warcraft guild The One. In comparison with some of the web sites for guilds also on the European server Thunderhorn, ours is beautiful to behold and very functional, with a public site and a Wiki/blog portal for the guild to build knowledge.
To support our efforts, last year I secured a non-profit license for Atlassian’s enterprise-level wiki/blogging software Confluence, and it’s on this end of the guild’s web site that I spend the most time. Over the last year, I’ve added polls, group chat, calendars, dynamic tabbed content, and many other features, plus upgraded the backend database and wiki software more times than I can shake a fist at.

One of the reasons that I chose the Atlassian Confluence software, instead of just a plain forum (as many other guilds use) or dedicated blog software, is because I wanted other guild members to be able to contribute links and content, as well as have a forum-like mechanism where people could post pictures or topics and others could easily respond. The forum-like mechanism works well. It’s been a little harder to get others to voluntarily contribute content because of technological barriers and other reasons (typical for any kind of collaborative project, actually), but it’s still been an interesting journey with some nice results. It’s also contributed nicely to my strong, continued interest in tools to foster community, started with electronic bulletin boards in the 1980s.
Behind the scenes is all kinds of web goodness that perhaps others don’t appreciate, from XHTML-compliant two- and three-column CSS layouts, to RSS feeds (and a way to create your own custom feeds), AJAX cross-browser WYSIWYG editing, Java servlets, IRC servers, Apache Tomcat servers, Velocity templating, modular plug-ins, and SOAP services. I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Is it fun? Yes! Is it time consuming? Oh yeah! Is it worthwhile working on The One @ WoWKindness Wiki? I think so and I hope others do too. Will other Thunderhorn World of Warcraft guilds be envious of our fine wiki and web site? We hope so, because … We are The One!

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