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#28 FSC GUIDE To all those webmasters who do, this guide's for you. #29 RAINBOW PERSONALITY Colours are capable of elicting varying emotions within us; what do they say about our ruling characteristics? COLUMN ARCHIVE

When you have a site as big as Apolyton, you get lots of mails from visitors every day. In fact, the amount of mail you get is a good way to measure how good your site is. After such a long time doing TFGC2S and Apolyton I have a few interesting stories to tell about mails from visitors. Here are some recent examples:

CARRYING MESSAGES
Since we started the C:CTP section we get lots of mails with suggestions, comments, ideas and questions for CTP -- others meant for us, and others with requests to forward them to Activision. In almost all cases, people believe that we are experts or have inside information on the game that no-one else does. This doesn't mean, of course, that visitors should stop mailing us, rather that they shouldn't expect us to know everything.
Anyway, a recent mail from a fighter pilot contained a question about the design of the air carrier unit: "Did the designers intentionally configure the flight deck backwards?". The mail went on to explain how practically all air carriers today have right-side "islands" instead of left-side ones(as the unit in CTP had from what he saw in a screenshot). I didn't exactly understand what he was talking about, so I answered that I didn't know about it and that it wasn't very important to me. Just after sending my reply, I remembered that Lt. John of the CTP development team was in the army, probably in the navy (that's how he got his nick), so I forwarded the mail to him, thinking that he would be interested in that strange a question. Minutes later, I was recieving a copy of his reply in my mailbox saying that he had already noticed the problem (the screenshot was old) and that the unit was being redrawn!

MIDNIGHT UPGRADE
A few days ago, I upgraded the scripts for the CivII forums. For technical reasons it took a lot than I expected. I started at 10pm and finally everything was right by about 3am. In the meantime, the forums were unavailable to the public, so I got several mails about it. Almost all were simply and gently asking what was going on, and I responded to a couple of them when I had the time. There was though one bad exception. An angry mail which I recieved at about 1:30am (you can imagine my temper at the moment after fighting with the problem for 3.5 hours!) asking in a rather rude way what I was doing to the forums, how long it was going to take, and ending with the remark that the CTP forums didn't compensate him for the loss of the CivII forums (as if I should ask him before I made any changes to the forums, or as if I couldn't close them down for some hours in order to make an upgrade). It really made me wonder what the hell I was doing in the middle of the night, and if I should care so much if the threads were going to be lost or not... :)
Perhaps the mail wasn't as rude as I remember it (I deleleted it and didn't reply because of my temper at the moment), but watch what you mail me guys!

YO WAWD UP DAWG
The following mail was sent not to me, but to Kunal at SidGames. He forwarded it to me some time ago, just for the fun of it. I'm not going to make any comments...
"Yo wawd up dawg... Ma name is B-Bone and I'm a homey gee. I'd like to ask ya if yo all can make da strategy game portraying an African American as da hero. I play Civ s*** and they don't got no n****** as Emperor. Thanx yous from the bottomest of ma hearts, Siddy. Newark Represent!"

Well, these were some of experience from visitor mail. Good or bad, keep them coming!

The opinions expressed on this page do not necessarily reflect those of Apolyton CS or GameStats. They are just the personal opinions of the writer.