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<h1>What's next for the Lurker's Guide?</h1>
<p>As the series has drawn to a close, I've received a lot of E-mail wonderingwhat the future holds for the Lurker's Guide.  Here are some answers.
<p><b>Will the Lurker's Guide disappear?</b>
<p>Nope!  I have no plans to ever take the site down.  Of course, twenty yearsfrom now it won't be updated too often, but the existing material will, barringdisaster, be available for you to download to your contact-lens Web browser and read while your car drives you to work.
<p><b>Any plans to publish the site in book form or on CD-ROM?</b>
<p>I'm willing to entertain offers to that effect, but I'm not actively seekinganything at this time.  For one thing, the site is still an unfinished work,as you'll see below.
<p>If the Guide is published in some form, most or all of the proceeds will goto charity, since so much of the material here is the product of other folkson the net.  It wouldn't be fair to the Guide's countless contributors for meto make a profit from the sale of their work.
<p>The ideal format in my mind, by the way, would be a DVD-ROM (so the hypertextlinks still work) with the script for each episode included alongside thesynopsis, and with video clips of various scenes.  Obviously that only fliesif the authors of the episodes want it to.
<p><b>Will it ever be updated again?</b>
<p>First of all, I've accumulated a substantial backlog of suggestions for guidepages over the years.  It'll take quite some time to go through them all andadd them to the Guide as needed.
<p>Leaving aside the backlog and any upcoming movie(s), there'retwo significant things left to add: background pages for season five and, moreimportantly, a new section on each guide page to discuss foreshadowing and theeventual answers to the episode's unanswered questions (e.g. the guide page for<a href="/lurk/guide/053.html">"Point of No Return"</a>will discuss when and how Lady Morella's prophecies came true.)I intentionally avoided doing that kind of thing while the series was stillin progress.
<p>I have a stack of E-mail along those lines to go through as a first cut; thenat some point I'll actively solicit suggestions.
<p>And of course all that material will be split off into its own section at thebottom of each page, or maybe even placed on entirely separate pages, so asnot to spoil upcoming episodes for viewers who're watching the series for thefirst time.
<p>Finally, the Guide is chock full of text I'm not entirely happy with.  If abook or DVD/CD publishing deal should happen, I'll want to go back and touchup a lot of old material.
<p><b>The big one... will the Guide cover Crusade?</b>
<p>If I can find the time to write the software to handle it, yes.
<p>The original Guide is almost exclusively a hand-edited affair.  I have a littlebit of automation to handle the page headers/footers and the datestamping ofmaterial on the episode pages, but the actual text of the Guide is all rawHTML I maintain using a text editor.  I read the suggestions in my mailbox andwrite the material on the guide pages based on them.  I edit the synopses asthey come in, add links to the Poll 5 results, add new entries to the What'sNew page, and so forth.
<p>In short, it takes a heck of a lot of time and energy.  And now, knowing fullwell what I'm in for (I didn't at first) I'm pretty sure I won't be able tokeep doing this for another five years.
<p>So the two options are to decide the Guide won't cover Crusade, or to buildsomething new, and hopefully better, that takes less effort to maintain.
<p>Version 2 of the Lurker's Guide, if it happens, will look something like this.
<p>The episode guide pages will be similar in appearance to the current ones.  Butinstead of flat Web pages, they'll all be discussion areas, to which anyonecan add new material at will.  My role will be to go through the newsubmissions as they come in and decide which ones I would have included in theGuide if I were still maintaining it by hand.  I'll mark those messages asmoderator-approved and delete the inevitable flames, trolls, duplicates, and"testing, 1 2 3" entries.  I may also appoint other moderators to help out.
<p>When you enter the Guide, at first you'll only see the moderator-approvedentries for each episode, a view similar to what you get today.  But with theclick of a button you'll be able to expand the guide page to include all thediscussion, approved and otherwise, and you'll be able to add your ownthoughts.
<p>In addition, synopsis writers and other such contributors will be able toupload their work directly to the site without going through my mailbox.
<p>How is this better than the existing site?  In a few ways.
<ul>
<li>Credit where credit is due.  Right now the people who send in submissionsfor the guide pages typically don't get credit for them.  The new setup willlist the author of each tidbit (though probably only in the non-moderatedview).
<li>Instant feedback.  The pages will get updated even if I'm busy at work anddon't have time to go through my mail.
<li>Greater diversity of opinions and speculation.  One consequence of everythinggoing through me is that I throw out a lot of material I don't think isrelevant, including speculations I don't think are likely to pan out.  Whileon balance I think that helps the Guide more than it hurts, there are nodoubt lots of readers who would prefer to see all the speculation, no matterhow outlandish.  By switching between the moderated view and the discussionview, you'll get the best of both worlds.
<li>Uniqueness.  The Guide has spawned a lot of imitators (which is just fine byme, I should add -- the more the merrier).If it's successful, this will raise the bar a bit and put B5out ahead of the pack in terms of fan sites.  I haven't seen any TV-showsites quite like what I have in mind.
<li>I'll be able to get something resembling a healthy amount of sleep.
</ul>
<p>What I've described isn't a trivial undertaking.  It's a fairly complexWeb-based database application, in fact.  Luckily that's more or less what Ido for a living, so given the time it's all quite doable.
<p>Crusade's delay until June is a blessing for me in some ways, since it meansthere's some chance of getting all this stuff up and running, should I decideto do it after all.
<p>I'll keep the What's New page updated as things progress, so you can followthe development there.
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<h5>Last update:November 30, 1998
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