Alla's has not lost it's utility, still use it daily. That said, I'm highly irritated that I have paid a sub for a site that is now solely relying on user input and volunteer admins for TBM and above with "swiss cheese" info. That said, I am thankful that people like Snailish and their counterparts are doing what they can. Thank you for taking your unpaid time to help. It was still a crappy bait and switch, and even more unfair for those that now donate time to update information, especially when I have paid the company to have premium access/content. Send $$ to the admin, even a stipend ffs! What a load of BS!
1 thing I found that helps with the "adds over taking the info/posts" is hitting the "X" up there in the address bar before the whole page loads. Temporary fix to something that I hope isn't permanent.
It's the thing that helps keep the site going. Running ad blockers, while incredibly convenient for us end users, hurts sites like Alla that rely on that revenue to keep the lights on. I'd recommend adding an exclusion for them in your ad blocker software.
They should just make it premium subs for EQ only. It's not like those of us that already pay 14.99/mo or more on multiple subs can't also shell out $30.00/year for a game database site that many of us play exclusively. As part of changing to fee-to-access only, they also agree to pay to staff the d@#% thing again. Right now I'm paying for...not much.
Its not the consumers responsibility if the standard they maintain is to offer a free content on their website. I would argue, the issue isn't even ads, its that they do a poor job of maintaining the EQ portion of their website the last few years, or haven't changed their marketing tactic with the moving times. They've relied on using the same business model for over 2 decades now, that is not going to work when there is more competition that eats up a chunk of the pie. It worked when they had a huge all of the pie in the early years since they were the only goto database website, but if you stagnate and use the same model for over 2 decades what did you expect was going to happen?
Not picking on Allakhazam specifically but all sites in general. Until such time that ads aren't a potential avenue for malware no one gets a pass from me.
Whenever I visited ZAM the ad on the right side of the screen would cover a portion of the content i was trying to read, very annoying. So, in order to read the info on the website I needed to add an "AdBlocker" to my browser.
And ... without Allakazam, EQ would not have been playable. It would be waaay too hard to discover all the items or how to do quests without third-party support, as the hints within the game are usually too arcane for one person to follow.
Without Zam, official sites like everlore and eqatlas would have taken over and evolved into something similar, (or maybe even further if they have combined it with eqplayers too). Its not like Zam single-handedly saved EQ from certain doom.... Which reminds me, now that characters are stored in a real database, wouldn't it be relatively simple to fix eqplayers...?
I have never understood why anybody would pay for zam, except that people just want to give their money away. You are essentially paying for something that is already available for free. You'll get far better item and mob info from Magelo and better tradeskill info from eqtraders. As others have said, eqresource popped up just as soon as zam started to slack (for TBM quests). Adblockers and very quick CSS modification (using your browser's dev tools) are both solutions to the zam ad problems (and they are problems, when they cover up content). I think the lack of info on either site is indicative of the general state of EQ. Old content, use zam. New content, use eqresource. Jeebus, don't pay for anything that is already free.
I try to stay away from alla's now due to the odd malware, or virus that comes leaking across from their ad's. I even had to email them, it was shut down from my antivirus programs. 2 because i thought it was 1 false positive review, na it was a rootkit virus. Later on they removed that ad, and it freed up the website. I dont like the amount of ad's it caused, but wasn't it years ago they sold the site? and all of it changed.
http://eqresource.com/ Great site, hope it stays this way http://destef.dyndns.org/spells/ good site too those are a couple i have bookmarked if you need more ask, lots can be supplied
I thought eqresource was being handled and maintained by one person. I'm not very comfortable with that. I've been involved with an iOS game where the same thing happened and their website went down one day never to appear again. It was the communities main source of information/communications. Not only that but as soon as eqresources started to get the least amount of traffic the requests for "donations" started. Donations or premium I don't remember. I haven't visited that site in ages. I've found during my time on the internet that once the request for donations start it's a slippery slope. **edit** After just visiting eqresources it looks like there is a request for a premium service as well as three ads on the front page alone. The quality looks like a little amateur as well. Like the old geocities websites from 1999. What happened to doing these things for free as a labor of love? Jeez
alla was also owned by 1 person from what i remember. eqresources = 1 of many sites. all could turn off the ip to everquest any day now, and archive the existing information. We just have to trust it wont happen. Nothing is stopping you to compile a work document of information from any site. (dont be lazy Just dont openly post it.
Because i cant edit, a wall of blank text. Ill respond, free is ok as long as you have sponsor donations to the cause. Eventually the site goes poof, or someone has sold it off. It also takes a ton of time, to work up a 100% accurate description of the zones. If the person keeps the IP rolling, a small donation from everyone or a premium $$ isnt a bad thing. Alla did it right from the start, and so did Magelo. What else can we say??? Want to help compile a wiki of information?? and post it for the cause. Keeping it free.
EQResource has 2 people handling it, this is probably too few still to cover *everything*. If one quit both would probably quit though. Also it has the least restrictive Premium membership of the EQ Related sites. There are costs to everything, whether real costs - domain, hosting, custom stuff that can't do yourself, etc, or Time costs - time spent creating content, creating features, maintaining everything, etc, that is dedicated to only this and no other hobby (that is likely vastly more fun). There is a reason that free pretty much never lasts. Expecting everything free is also a sad thing, it basically says the people that make the stuffs time is worthless and they should feel bad for wanting compensation for the time and effort they put in to something that people want and use. Some people have even mentioned not bothering to do content without guides since they value their time to do it themselves. If you want an insight into how long expansions takes to create guides, take all named and quests and multiply them by a minimum of 1 hour each (longer ones will go a few hours each) - if it is an HA for example raise this up to 5-10 hours each, if devs aren't generous and turn on 100% named chance, raise the time taken for named each. Now add in the hours of side things like Armor creation, Gear Tiers, tagging gear to expansions/missions/named. Before EQResource had its own Item Collector, it had to manually input all items and stats of gear. This data input took at least a full week to do by itself (5-8+ hour days). This was likely a massive waste of time, but to provide people with full gear plans on day 1 seemed like a cool thing to do, it was also the main way to add item drops to named and missions and such without being "blank come back later to see". TBM the "small expansion" took 200-300 hours to complete guides for. Consider how long it took in CotF, RoF, VoA, which were vastly bigger expansions. Even TDS another "small expansion" was overall bigger group wise (almost 2x more group content). And these are from expansions that kept "shrinking" over previous ones.
Reading about the trubs that Alla's has been having has made me for some reason really miss the old casters-realm pages even though its been gone for ages.
