Napoleonic Wargame Club (NWC)

It has been a long established practice of the NWC to have the various webpages that constitute the visible image of our club scattered over numerous servers. I have always viewed this to be a major liability for several reasons, the main one being that any disgruntled webmaster could easily sabotage our club by suddenly leaving while taking the webpages under his control with him. A further disadvantage of this webpage storage method is that the webpages were not always kept current, as there was only one webmaster serving each of them.

Following an email discussion with some of the Club’s webmasters, and further discussions with Pierre Desruisseaux, I requested, upon Pierre’s recommendation, that Alex Cuva, the owner of the Wargame.ch website which houses our club, create a Username and Password that would allow NWC Webmasters access to the Wargame.ch Server. Alex readily agreed to provide such access and made the necessary arrangements last weekend. I have passed this information along to our Primary Army Webmasters (PAWs) as follows:

Anglo-Allied/Dutch Army – Marco Bijl
Austrian Army – Scott Ludwig
French Army – Al Kling
Prussian Army – Scott Ludwig
Russian Army – Alexander Zaytsev
Swedish Army – Scott Ludwig

Each of these gentlemen has agreed to upload the webpages currently located on their individual servers to the NWC Club Server. I have requested that this be accomplished by the end of this weekend. Alexander wins the prize for being the first officer to complete his upload of the Russian Army webpages. Thank you, Alexander!

In addition to the PAWs, we will assign Secondary Army Webmasters (SAWs) to act as reserve webmasters for each army to assist, or act in place of, the PAWs as required by real life demands. This will provide a redundancy to the administrative requirements of our army webpages which should allow us to keep them more consistently current for the membership than we sometimes have in the past. The focus of these webmasters will be on the armies to which they are assigned.

We will also assign a limited number of Club Webmasters that will handle the maintenance and responsibilities of all webpages lying outside of any of the club’s armies. In this area, we have already taken the initiative to repair the numerous broken links to the Club’s Newsletter Archives. I would encourage each of you to take a look at these publications as there is a lot of information, and some very humorous writings, that have been inaccessible for some time. For many of the longer standing members of our club, this will no doubt be a stroll down memory lane.

I think these changes to our administrative procedures are long overdue, and am very glad to be an integral part of finally making them a reality for our members. Specifically, this new system will provide:

1.) The security of all of the Club’s webpages on the Club’s server so that our club is guaranteed to retain access to our webpages regardless of the potentially hostile actions of any individual.

2.) A pool of talented webmasters that will share access to all of the Club’s webpages. This will reduce the workload on individual webmasters which should improve the efficiency of our operations. In essence, it should allow us to keep the army webpages consistently up to date.

These changes are the very essence of the teamwork under which I believe we should always strive to operate. We are a club of fellow gamers who share a common interest in Napoleonic warfare and history. This fact should always override any individual affiliations we have with the armies to which we are assigned. I am a very firm believer in the success of the team, and I see every member of our club as being a part of that team. I personally value the differences in our various armies, and greatly enjoy the role playing aspects and opportunities in our club, but would caution you all once again never to lose sight of the fact that our individual uniforms are fictitious. The only reality is the love for gaming that we all share. My first loyalty is to our club. Perhaps that is a function of my present position as this Club’s President, but I really think it is more of a reflection of the outlook I have on life. As I have stated many times in the past, I work for you, all of you. None of this is about me or you. All of this is about us. Let’s have fun, and improve our club, together. This is a very good step in that direction.

My sincere thanks to Pierre and Alex for agreeing to trust us with the access to the NWC section of the Wargame.ch server, and for their support of our vision of teamwork. I would also like to thank the various webmasters for their willingness to place their webpages on the Club's central server, and their transition from working as individuals on our websites, to working as a team. I extend my personal thanks to every member of the NWC as well, for without you, we are nothing. Our club, or any club for that matter, is only as good as the members of which it is comprised. Thank you for being exactly who you are, fellow gamers, misunderstood by the majority, but the very dearest people to my avid, wargaming heart.

[b]Great stuff and kudos to Pierre and Alex. [/b] Both have always come through for the betterment of all the clubs.

I could be a backup for Al, unless he has someone in mind.

_________________
Ernie Sands
1ère Brigade of 2ème Division de Grosse Cavalerie, Réserve de Cavalerie
de la Grande Armée
President, Colonial Campaigns Club

I think it's a very good idea. For the first time, I agree with a change you initiate.

Best regards

General Lamezec
IVème corps

The selection of the SAW in this case is up to John and Al as it is a purely LGA matter. I don't have any idea who they were thinking to assign to this role. I know they both read the forums, but you might want to follow up with an email to them expressing your interest.

The first step is to get everything pertinent to our club uploaded to the NWC Server. I have completed about half of my uploads, and should finish them tonight. Other than that, Alexander is the only other officer to have completed his initial uploads. I know Al is working on his, but he has to retrieve webpages from several different webmasters, so it would be expected to take a bit longer. Once we get the initial uploads completed, we will then have to make numerous revisions to the links so that the webpages will function with the NWC Server as their basis. This will take a bit of time, and is an area in which the SAWs for the armies can be very helpful.

We are already ahead of this curve relative to the Club webpage revisions. Fixing the newsletters was no small undertaking in itself. We are going to start scanning the NWC webpages to identify, and fix, the many other broken links that currently exist. A lot of work overall, but it will be of great benefit to our club once completed.

Very glad to hear that Yann, but in all honesty, I doubt you even know most of the changes that I have initiated and completed for the improvement of our club. I would be very surprised if you actually did. I cannot honestly remember the last time you posted prior to Chuck and Paco's resignation. Perhaps you have been reading the forum posts all along. I really could not say with any certainty.

Nice signature BTW. Have you recanted your passionate intention to leave the NWC?

OK, guys. I completed my uploads tonight and have restored all of the links to the Club Records. Check them out when you have time and let me know what I may have missed.

No answer required, I think. May be a little revenge for all the bad things I wrote about you ? If you have something to add, please, use the pm or the email, except of course, if you want to discuss a non personal point about the club. I wrote myself too much in the forum about you, please accept my apologizes for this reason.
The benefits of the club is so much important. A point, I think, in which we will be in agreement.

Nice signature too.

Regards

General Lamezec

PS : I sent you a message to open the discussion and close the personal differences we have.

Where did you get a copy of them from?

_________________
Generalfeldmarschall Scott Kronprinz "Vorwärts" Ludwig von Preußen
Kommandeur des Königlich-Preußischen Armee-Korps
Chief of Staff (CoS) of the Allied Coalition
Allied Coalition Webmaster & Club Website Support

You sent them to me along with several other club webpages that you no longer wished to maintain.

Oh ok I did send them along, couldn't recall whether I did or not....

_________________
Generalfeldmarschall Scott Kronprinz "Vorwärts" Ludwig von Preußen
Kommandeur des Königlich-Preußischen Armee-Korps
Chief of Staff (CoS) of the Allied Coalition
Allied Coalition Webmaster & Club Website Support

I never had any personal differences with you, Yann. My question pertaining to your intentions relative to your NWC membership was not revenge. I just needed some clarification for administrative purposes so that I would know how to properly handle your NWC accounts. You clearly did not leave the club as you had stated you were doing, and the creation of a new signature indicated to me that you intended to stay. I just wanted to be sure that was the truth of the matter, and not simply an assumption on my part.

Thank you for the compliment on my signature. The one I currently use was a gift from "Die Ratte" upon my election as the NWC President as a replacement for my Hanoverian unit signature.

Well, it is the end of the second weekend now, and nobody other than Alexander and I have loaded our websites onto the NWC Server. The initial phase of this is really as easy as logging in, dragging and dropping the files. The computer does the rest of the work. It takes somewhat longer to change the links to make the websites run off of the NWC Server files, but that is the second step in the process. The third step will be to establish the pool of webmasters to keep things continuously current.

If we cannot get past Step 1, we will never get to Step 3. Where are you fellows?

The LGA is moving on this and is coordinationg his stuff,
I have been in Contact wth Mark Adams he runs our main LGA site, he will take care of his stuff as time permits.

_________________

OK, as long as the phrase "as time permits" does not mean months or years....

The initial transfer is not very time consuming. All in all, this probably takes about ten minutes of time for the webmaster and whatever time the computer needs to transfer the files depending on the connection speed and quality of the hardware. It is really as simple as creating a folder (if needed) and dragging and dropping the files.

As I understand it, Mark adams is bogged down with real life stuff.

I cannot ask more of him than he is able to give,

_________________