Today UOToolbar.org has conducted its first ever interview... with the often rumoured, elusive Adam of UOForums.com. Adam is a long time player of Ultima Online, but also the administrator & publisher of UOForums.com.

UOForums.com is a popular forum for the UO community at large. The forum features not only a large, diverse membership of UO player from nearly every shard, but also UO Team members from EA Mythic, and other leaders & publishers from around the multiverse that is Ultima Online. On the forum you will find many boards about UO, game clients, how-to’s, guilds, player towns and much more.

Adam and the members are also well known for their great interviews of people in the UO community, now the tables have turned... and now it is Adam’s turn in the interview chair.

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Okay Adam... here is your moment in the hot seat! Time to shine the spotlight on the Admin Extraordinaire of UOForums.com.

Nok: Can you give the readers some background about yourself? Such as... your age, what part of the world you're from, and your family and work?

Adam: Sure, I'm 27 years old, I live in England. Work wise, my normal job is Computer support/technician. My other "job" is a webmaster for UOForums and web host for friends who host their sites on my server.

Nok: When not at your PC, what other kinds of hobbies and interests do you like to do for fun?

Adam: Not at the PC? What! Ok seriously, I'm either listening to music, watching a film, renovating my home or working out. And the usual in-between jobs like....housework, ugh.

Truth be told though, I spend most of my time at the PC because it's a gateway to my friends in the USA and of course, UOForums.

Nok: What film was your favourite this last summer? What film is your "guilty pleasure" (a film you really like, but wouldn't normally admit to liking)?

Adam: It'd be a tossup between Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean, but I'd probably choose Transformers, even if it was a bit cheesy. Both were great films though, I love films with loads of special FX.

Hmm guilty pleasure, I like a lot of films, but I think one film I could watch again, would be the new Chronicles of Narnia film. Fantastic film in my opinion.

Nok: What was the name and artist of the last CD you bought? And what are you listening to today?

Adam: I think the last music tracks I bought, was by a group called E.S Posthumus (http://www.esposthumus.com). The description from Wikipedia reads - "It is a form of epic classical that fuses intertwined drum beats with orchestral and electronic sounds". Quite an awesome sound.

I listen to a wide range of music throughout the day, but right now I’m listening to Beautiful South – Don’t marry her.

Nok: What is the name and author of the last book you read? What is your favourite book of all time?

Adam: Hmm, it's been almost 10 years since I actually read a book, but the last books I read were The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Code_%28book%29) and The Phoenix Lights by Dr Lynne Kitei (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Lights).

I'm very much interested in the whole UFO/Alien field, so the Phoenix lights is probably the book I enjoyed the most thus far. Note to self: Read more books.

Nok: If you could meet any one person living in the world today, and sit down for a discussion with them... who would that be and why?

Adam: Only one? Bah... I honestly can't think of a single person who I would want to meet in the famous /celebrity sense. If I had a choice, I'd want to meet my friend Chris in the USA; he's a great inspiration to me and has always been there when I needed him, even if he's thousands of miles away.

Nok: What was your very first computer? What was the first game that got you hooked on computer gaming? And what type of PC rig are you gaming on today?

Adam: Ah, my first computer was an Amstrad CPC 464, I can't remember what game, if any, I got addicted to on that particular machine. The one game I became uber addicted to on the Amiga however, was Settlers 1, my cousin and I used to play that multiplayer for hours on end.......ahh, those were the days.

Right now I'm running on a custom made PC I built a few years back, it has an AMD FX55 chip, with 2gb of DDR 400, 3200 memory, 256mb ATI Rage X800 Pro card, SoundBlaster Fatal1ty sound card. Seems to run all games I throw at it, even some of the more recent ones like Unreal Tournament 3, Eve Online, WoW, Oblivion etc... but not UOKR, no no, it doesn't like UOKR at all. *grins*

Nok: Do you play other (than UO) computer or console games? What are some of your favourite types and titles?

Adam: No console games, it's been a long time since I owned a console. The last console I personally owned was, from memory, the original play station and I was addicted to playing Doom with my cousin in multiplayer mode all day/night, hehe. I did enjoy the sonic the hedgehog series of games on the Sega systems though, they were good fun, as well as the Mario World Series.

Nok: What is the driving force behind you to keep UO Forums running?

Adam: The people, the community in general and the atmosphere. Whether people are talking about UO, aliens, politics or anything in between, the people who use UOForums are a great bunch. I am truly honoured that people enjoy and use UOForums.

Nok: Can you tell us the story about UOForums.com? Including... how long has UOForums.com been around, and how did the idea of UOForums.com come about? Are there other websites and forums that are a part of or associated with UOForums?

Adam: UOForums marked its 5th year anniversary this September, which...well, was quite a proud moment for both myself, my staff and the users. The forum was originally founded by a guy called Xalious, he was the original owner of both the forum and domain, and after a few months I bought the license off him and took over.

UOForums has had a ...colourful history, both good and bad, to no fault of anyone but myself, to be honest.....but I, the site, the staff and its users, came through it all and we're much better for it. I personally had a lot of maturing to do and it's no secret I wasn't the best "community leader", but I like to think I've improved and the forum is better off for it.

There are no other sites associated with UOForums, that I own at least, but we do host Whispering Rose Radio's forums, as well as the forum for JCtheBuilder's excellent UOGuide.com site.

For those interested, you can look at the changes that have taken place at UOForums through the Wayback Machine (it works for most sites).

Nok: Please talk about your average day in being the administrator of a large community forum... like the daily routines and tasks that need to be performed, how many hours a day do you dedicate to UOForums, and how the great UOForums.com staff team contributes to the running of the forum?

Adam: For the most part, there isn't much to do for me during the day as far as running UOForums, as everything is (*crosses fingers*) stable and automated, backups are automated, and they self delete when they reach a certain age.

But the first thing I usually do when I first log on, is to check the site is running ok, check my emails for any problems, concerns, complaints and the like. I then check the forums for private messages, any problematic posts/threads and any problems raised by staff in the staff area.
I check that the backups ran ok overnight and make sure the server is running ok in general.

The staff does an amazing job at keeping the boards up to date, especially the news team. Even though we have upwards of 500 active users posting throughout the day, we rarely get any problems, or have to deal with problem threads/posts, so that's a blessing in itself.

Nok: How about on the technical side... please describe some of the software & web applications, hosting and utilities that you use in building and maintaining a forum as large and busy as UOForums. How do you monetize UOForums to covers the expenses of running such a popular site/forum?

Adam: Sure, UOForums runs on a virtual dedicated server. The server itself is a... well, it's a powerful beast, it has 8X 2.6GHz Intel Xeon processors and a SCSI/SAS disk array. We have an equal share of the whole machine and we're guaranteed a minimum amount of memory, as well as a general performance guarantee.

On the software side, the forum itself runs on the commercial bulletin board software called vBulletin, which costs about $160 for a lifetime license, but is WELL worth the investment.
On the server backend, we run the standard setup as far as server core software goes, i.e. Apache, MySQL, PHP etc.

I run a custom backup script, which automatically backs up the forum database every 3 hours, saves it to the local machine, gzips the file, then ftp's that backup to a remote server for added "peace of mind", so to speak. The forum's files and database are also backed up once a day as an extra backup. Because the forum is a dynamic, ever changing element, regular backups, are a must, as the last time we had a crash on the server, we lost almost a day of posts, which is unacceptable.

As far as expenses go, I secured a good deal with our current host, so for the power the server has, we pay quite a cheap price. But as any webmaster knows, the larger the site becomes, the more expensive it becomes to maintain, both in server costs and licensing, but thankfully, due to an awesome community of people on UOForums, we have regular subscribers/forum sponsors who either donate every month via automated subscription, or one off payments now and again. We also have banners at the top of the forums, as well as text ads at the bottom of the forum.

Nok: What are some of your biggest challenges and rewards as the Administrator of UOForums?

Adam: The biggest challenge is trying to remain impartial to any arguments or disagreements, something I was never any good at, but I have improved in that area...honest! hehe

As I said previously though, we don't get many problems, so thankfully none of the staff are put into that position that often and even if they are, we all openly communicate with each other if one of us has a problem. It's rare for us to get a troublesome user and if we do, we usually send Bo, our resident forum admin/ bouncer after them.

I think the biggest reward for me personally, is hearing the compliments about the site, how it's run or about the community on it. It's a great feeling when you see users spontaneously making new threads/posts thanking us for a great site/community. People in general are far more likely to complain, than compliment, so it's always refreshing to read said posts.

Nok: What do you see in the future for UOForums.com? Do you have any plans in the works?

Adam: UOForums will always be around, even after UO dies, which will happen eventually. We're already discussing plans about the future of UOForums amongst our users and staff alike, I raised the question the other day as to what our users would like to see happen to the site if UO were to fold.

If UO were to fold, then we'd probably change the site's name to something generic, to cover a wide spectrum of games, or a select group, we're still undecided and I'm hoping it's early days, even if UO has been around for 10 years.

Nok: How long have you been playing Ultima Online? How did you get started in UO? What are your favourite things to do in-game? And who do you play with & on what shard?

Adam: I started UO just after Trammel came out, so not as long as most people. I originally started on Baja, because my cousin kept telling me about UO and kept pestering me to play, so I signed up and joined a guild with him. My first character class was a stereotypical warrior class (Swordsmanship, anat/tactics/healing, etc.). At the time, our favourite thing to do was killing earth elementals in Shame and dying to poison from scorpions (heh). As time went by, my favourite class of player by far, was the tamer, followed closely by the bard (provocation).

My character names weren't all that original, unfortunately, I used to take names from sci-fi related films, or space related items, so names like Atlas, Event Horizon, Deimos and Prometheus were my main character names. I spent many a time with a great friend, Snugglebug, provoking the nasty terathans in Terathan Keep and the orcs at the Orc keep near Cove.

I became bored with UO after AOS came out, like a lot of people I used to play with, so took a break, I decided to come back after 6 or so months to find someone had taken over my account. I must admit, that was quite a shock and somewhat upsetting given the history and time spent on it... EA could've cared less, as far as they were concerned, the new "owner" had paid for it for over 30 days, so I had no chance at getting it back. So, I haven't played since.

Nok: Time for the speed round... some quickie questions: 2D or KR? Fel or Tram? PvP or PvE/PvM? Luna or anti-Luna? Dwarf or gargoyle? Guinness or Murphy's?!

Adam:
• 2D for me, I can't actually get UOKR to run on my machine, so I can't really say much about it.
• I'm a stereotypical Trammie; I rarely went to Felucca, as I prefer my play time to be uninterrupted.
• Luna doesn't bother me, it's a good place to go if you have a lot of spare gold and need something quickly and I will admit, I used to be one of those Brit bank "banksitters", so I can't really criticise anyone at Luna for doing the same thing.
• Dwarf or Gargoyle....hmm, neither? Heh.
• Guinness or Murphy’s......I must confess, I've never tried either, hehe...so I couldn't tell ya.

Nok: Today there is a lot of debate & division about Kingdom Reborn. How do you feel about KR? What do you think are the biggest needs to be addressed in KR?

Adam: Ugh, well, I’ll try not to rant too much, but personally I don't like it. I could get the client to run for extended periods when it was still in "official" beta, but since it went "gold", one of the later patches just stops it from working on my PC, heh.

From all the people I've spoken with about it, most of them have some problem or major gripe with it, I hear the same complaints for the most part (bugs/crashing). For me, it was a major disappointment, UO had reached a massive milestone of 10 years and this was supposed to be THE client to attract new players, but in my honest opinion, it's an embarrassment.

Again this is just my opinion, nothing more, but it never should've been released as a finished product, even now it still needs a fair amount of work. We ran a poll asking people if they thought EA should've revamped the 2D client with high res graphics, instead of releasing UOKR, 77.50% said yes.

Nok: How would you describe the current state of Ultima Online, and the UO community? And as you look into the crystal ball, what do you see in the future for UO and its community?

Adam: Uncertain, would be the word I'd choose to describe UO's current state. A lot of the changes to UO over the last year or so are, in my opinion, negative to UO's future... The fan site program cancellation, EM program cancelled, the... poor job at overhauling the main page of the UO site, the "sharing" of a producer, rather than hiring a new one, the introduction of a new poorly done 2.5D client, the list just goes on.

As for UO's future? I see a game heavily reliant on micro transactions, which is a shame, EA doesn't really realise the true potential of this game nor does it understand the community of passionate supporters it has and I don't believe it ever will. If shareholders and profit weren't in the picture, then I'm sure UO would be thriving by now, heh.

Nok: As a leader and a publisher in the UO community, what three things do you believe needs to happen for Ultima Online to move forward?

Adam: The first thing they need to do is really put a solid effort into fixing and finalising UOKR.

Secondly? Put some love into the 2D client, either revamp it completely or at LEAST update it to be in line with more modern systems (increased resolution options would be a good start).

Thirdly, don't keep pushing people to use UOKR, not in its current state, make good use of the new survey tool, but allow people the option of putting in their own thoughts and comments... not just the pre select list of answers currently available.

Nok: On the flipside of the previous question, let's imagine for this interview... that EA Mythic announced tomorrow morning that you are the new producer of Ultima Online. What would be your first act as producer? And what would be your goals... in the first 30 days, then 6 months out, and the first year?

Adam: Gah, I could really ramble on this answer, but I'll try and keep it short, heh.

First thing I would do, would be to issue a "state of UO" document, list what the team IS working on, what the UO team's goals are, what estimated time frames there are, what's in store for the future, both near and far.

For the longer term, I'd make it mandatory for each UO team member to spend a minimum amount of time in game per week, a minimum time reading ALL forums for feedback and to make a noticeable presence on all forums to show that the team cares. If I were in the position to, I'd also take a serious look at the state of customer support in game, I'd hire a new full time event/scenario team, I'd also look seriously into opening a pre XXX shard (Be it AoS/UO:R, etc.) and get feedback via the in game survey tool on it.

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Thank you Adam... for an excellent interview and taking the time to talk to everyone about yourself, UOForums.com, & Ultima Online!

My apologies for the lack of formatting in the interview. I was having trouble with the editor.

Thanks to Adam for doing the interview, and to Bo & Queen Mum for all their help.

Elusive...psh
hehe
Thanks for doing the interview

Great interview!!

+1 Vote for Adam as the new UO Producer.

Good interview!

Nice to know more about Adam. Great interview!

That was awesome!! I loved reading that one because it was about you! *hugs Adam!*

And you like Sonic the Hedgehog O_O

-RMS Carpathia-

I can see a new forum about to open already

Hahaha quiet Dip! I am not that bad!

Wait, are you implying I AM that bad off? Pfft nonsense! Ask anyone here who knows me!

*goes and changes avatar*

-RMS Carpathia-