alan wake community infrastructure
Quite some things have changed concerning the structure of the online territory the Alan Wake community inhabits. AlanWAKE.net, home of the official Alan Wake forums, vanished in February, the URI was set to redirect to ↑http://www.alanwake.com/forum. The workload and effort to run a site of this size and complexity simply was too much for ADM, having an increasing study load at University sitting in his neck.
I started up AlanWake.net in the start of May 2005, it was the first Alan Wake fansite on the net and it drew it quite a good amount of traffic as well. Around half a month later it became the official fansite and the forums became the official forums.
  We had some good times and some great competitions here on the site, but unfortunately I must depart from my duties here.
It’s a similar story like with ↵MPHQ: In the end it depended on GutBomb’s work, time, and money—in one word: on one man’s dedication. Traffic and webspace is costly, and community sites of that magnitude need a lot of maintenance. Now Remedy has taken over the Alan Wake forums which now are hosted on Remedy’s very own server, which guarantees stability. Beyond community engagement corporate power is needed quite obviously. In the times of Max Payne the ↑3DRealms forums had this role of corporate-powered, reliable community forum. Quite early on in those days one of the most respected community members, Maddieman, became a Moderator there [he moderated at Frozmods and PayneReactor, too]. Now, after having sold the Max Payne franchise, Remedy can work on its own, and doesn’t need a publisher like 3DRealms/Rockstar for Alan Wake behind its back. Hence the hosting of the Alan Wake forums on a Remedy server—with Maddie as the administrator.
Many may have noticed a new site admin on the forums, Maddieman. Many of you may know who he is if you’ve ever been in the Max Payne community.
  He’s the guy responsible for the Katana mod(s) for Max Payne 1 and also the upcoming Matrix mod for MP1, The Real World. He’s an insanely good modder and I’m sure he’ll be just as good an admin as well […]
  The forums are in good shape here, they’re on a very stable server so we won’t have any issues there and they are now in the hands of a very trustworthy man.
MikaRMD:
I am equally happy to have Maddieman accept our invitation to administrate the forums. I’m sure you all will get to know him. And his coolness almost matches with ADM. Plus he is an insane mod guru. Our history with Maddieman goes way back to the launch of Max Payne 1 when Maddie was, I guess, the first to come up with Max Payne mod tutorials for all to see. It was a time, that was not Remedy’s finest hour since the official tutorials took a really long time to get done. It is thanks to Maddie and others who did a great job helping others – without rewards or somebody telling them to do this.
On April fool’s day ↑AlanWAKE.net has reappeared, still run by ADM, but in a new shape: a wordpress-powered blog, of course complete with RSS-feed.
AlanWAKECentral.com now is called and located at ↑http://www.alanwake.co.uk/
and still possesses its forums ↑http://www.alanwakeforums.com/.
Earlier I observed that ↵AlanWAKECentral very much looked alike AlanWAKE.Net—at the new address it has kept this resemblance and may well have taken over the function the original AlanWAKE.Net had within the community.
In a nutshell, the backbone of the Alan Wake community’s online infrastructure now looks like this [in alphabetical order]:
↑AlanWAKE.co.uk—full-fledged UK community portal
↑Alan-Wake.de—German full-fledged community portal
↑AlanWAKEForums—the official forums
↑AlanWAKEGame.com—emerging fansite
↑AlanWAKE.net—ADM’s blog
↑WakeReactor—↑PayneReactor‘s twin
↑Alan Wake ZONE—German emerging community portal
I updated my sidebar’s siteroll accordingly.
