Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Black Bayou

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was delete. There were a number of votes from new users, but they had some valid points which I have decided to consider. The argument for keeping is that the game is pretty old, yet the argument for deletion is that the game has never received a great deal of popularity and therefore fails the WP:WEB guidelines. On vote count from established users there is an overwhelming majority for deletion. On the matter of discretion I find the arguments by Quarl (only 175 members) and Radiant! convincing. Sjakkalle (Check!) 08:38, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Black Bayou

Delete article about an RPG played on AIM. Mindmatrix 20:52, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete per my other nominations of MMPORGs. Daniel Case 21:24, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as non-notable online game. Would only call it "MMORPG" if the first M stands for "Mini". —Quarl (talk) 2006-01-11 22:39Z

Keep This is an article about a game that was played on AOL since 1996, hosted by a company that went out of business and was turned over to those that wrote the game and continue to work on it and put long hours and hard work into. There are hundreds of people who have played this game and have put thousands of hours into it and deserve to have their accomplishments recorded. Does the pages about movies only remain because they had millions of dollars budget behind them or because people enjoyed them enough to want to immortalize the information online for those that are fans of it to read about? This topic has valuable information, some of which I didn't even know about until one of the original creators of the game came here and edited my partially incorrect information. I learned something from this topic and others will to unless you get it deleted.

As for it being a non-notable RPG. What is your classifcation of non-notable? Does it have to be a published RPG that makes money to qualify? Something free can't? Does it have to have hundreds of thousands of people playing it? There are message boards still hosted by AOL that have thousands of posts from this game when it was hosted on AOL. The problem was we wanted to expand the game and allow those who didn't have AOL any longer to continue to play. So we took it off of AOL and moved it to AIM rooms.

For proof here is the message boards where thousands of posts still remain from when it was on AOL. And before you say there's only a few...make sure you change your settings to the past 999 days, and even then you can't get all the way back to the 1998 posts. You can only get as far back as 2003 because of the way AOL changed their message boards. Black Bayou AOL Message Boards. HoldynWolf 22:26, 12 January 2006 (EST)

  • Comment: User's only contributions are to this article, this AFD, and Crossroads RPG. Stifle 09:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
    Comment: You're point about my only contributions being here are what? That this page should be deleted or considered for deletion cause I haven't participated in other topics? I just registered a week ago, never really knew about wikipedia before that. Decided that Black Bayou a game I loved to play deserved a place here for all the others that have played it in the years to be able to remember it. And with this AfD I haven't had time to go and look for other topics that I might know something about that's not beed added. I don't think all these comments you added are important in the consideration of whether this gets deleted or not. I think the facts about the page, not the users should be considered. HoldynWolf

Keep This article is a valuable article to the hundreds of people who have played this game over the years. It is a fact that this game existed and there are many people who might benefit or enjoy knowing that the game still exists. Who has the right to go around and delete a post because they were never personally involved with the game? This game is FAR from non-notable. Thousands of posts on AOL and 2 separate message boards with posts currently. Sakia Warner 22:43, 12 January 2006 (EST)

  • Comment: User's only edit. Stifle 09:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete - I've been watching this page with an open mind, but you guys just helped me a lot. Wikipedia's notability policy indicates that # of participants (web-specific standards) is a criteria and "hundreds" doesn't cut it. -Jcbarr 04:16, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment WP:N is not an established Wikipedia policy. It is still in the proposal stage. The relevant policies are WP:V and WP:CITE. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 22:21, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
      • The relevant accepted policy is WP:WEB. Also, despite disagreements over the precise wording of WP:N, the fact is that non-notability has been a plausible reason for deletion for over a year now. Radiant_>|< 02:51, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
        • Plausible is not a firm policy. As the community has decided, WP:N"There is currently no official policy on where the line of notability lies." Please see our comments below for talk on the Web portion and our verification of Hecklers and Antagonist, where we WP:CITE cited sources for the game. ~~ReporterSteven~~
    • Maybe Obscure to you I cannot give you an exact number of people who played this game. But I just checked the old AOL Message boards, which have been there since 1996 but with AOL's changes can only go back 999 days in the archive. One folder had over 5000 In-Character Posts. Stories written by people. Hundreds maybe thousands. At any given time there would be several hundred active CS's. Which means that they had updated in the last 60 days of their last approved CS. And hundreds more that were not active from time to time. Have you witnessed the game to decide if it's obscure? I know quite a few posts on the internet regarding Black Bayou. There's several reviews of it on Gaming Sites. This page may not be of interest to you or the others asking for it to be deleted, but to all those that games here, and there was many that have. I say hundreds, but I played the game starting in 1997 - 1998 and have taken breaks from time. What is to obscure? I saw a post about some dead guy on Wikipedia who I never knew existed, it had about two paragraphs. I would think that's obscure. Look at the edits on this page already and all the factual information put up about a game that was a very important piece of AOL in it's early years.HoldynWolf 12:45, 13 January 2006 (EST)
Yes, obscure to me and there's no excuse for more notability info being in this AfD page than there is on the actual article. You make a good case, but that should be documented (with citations) in the article if you want a positive vote outcome. -Jcbarr 12:49, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
This page was put up only a week ago. I haven't had time to get to it all and now I have to use my time to try and defend it (And admittidly very new to wikipedia, this was my first article and no so damn little about this deletion thing that I am trying to figure out how to save it. Not to mention it has been edited several times from what I originally put up there by other people. How about you give a page to mature into something before trying to kill it off before it has time to learn to walk? HoldynWolf

Keep This experience has been a part of AOL and the internet for as long as I can remember. It has outlasted the tabletop Vampire: The Masquerade. Yet another version of Dungeons and Dragons has come and gone during its time. It has spawned countless "mini" spin offs along the way, including one that matured, found a home on AOL and is still there. The futuristic breeds that didnt fit Bayou became a game all on its own called Crossroads. If nothing else, Bayou is notable for the length of it's survival in a world of games that thrive on the newest graphics engines. An all text game running for 10 years... and nobody making a profit off of it as motivation to keep it going. Find another game that can claim that. ~Dark Requiem~

  • Comment: User's only contribution. Stifle 10:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep -- A game that runs for 10 years msut have some notability; a game community that can surivive that long must have even more -- SockpuppetSamuelson 09:18, 12 January 2006 (UTC) (who has never played in a MMORPG in hisr life)
  • Keep -- 10 years of history consistently rated as the No. 1 game on AOL should NOT be deleted. If ever there was an open-source Role Playing Game, this is it. No one profits. No one makes money off of it. There's not even advertising revenue coming in off of its Web site. Just because people are out to delete all mentions of role playing games on Wikipedia is NOT an excuse to delete this entry. ~ReporterSteven~
    Comment: User's only edits are to this AfD, the article, Crossroads RPG, and related images. Stifle 10:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Comment::So what? I've used Wikipedia for YEARS and signed up in November 2005 PRIOR to this article being introduced. ~ReporterSteven~

  • Comment: The user ReporterSteven has edited other things 'anonymously' I looked into this when someone edited the Black Bayou page. He didn't log in and by his IP address I knew it was him. If you will check just the IP addresses that were edited with this, one had several other contributions under the IP. Not everyone remembers to log in with editing, as I have done several times in this AfD myself on accident.

Keep: This is not an AIM based game, take the time to read everything rather than latch on to one area. AIM is offered now for a wider variety of gamers and writers, some who chose not to pay the price for AOL just to enjoy a nightly game. True there are still AOL based boards and the posts go back to as early as 1997 on those boards. Black Bayou is not a fly by night game, it is not a MMORPH, it is a gaming community even if it is small. The game is over ten years old, it started in 1996 as a premium game before AOL changed from an hourly rate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Samantha Wolfe (talk • contribs) 02:24, 13 January 2006 (UTC).

  • Comment: User's only contributions are to this AFD. Stifle 10:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. Not notable and also unverifiable outside its own community. Stifle 09:53, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

unverifiable? The game has existed and has developed pages online including independent reviews, just check via Google. here ~ReporterSteven~

Here is a link to one review I found dated 2003 [1] HoldynWolf
  • blackbayou.net is the forum and has 175 total members; I see 23 posts on the messageboards.aol.com site. Not impressed. Can you show us some evidence of these "thousands of players" you speak of? —Quarl (talk) 2006-01-13 11:22Z
You need to go to settings and change it to go further back then 23 days. PLUS those first three things you see are just categories, once you open them up you see all the other folders. The folders on AOL.COM are OLD, they are the archive. The game moved off AOL. Change your view settings then you will see the thousands of posts. Stop looking at the surface and dig deeper in. HoldynWolf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.161.77.32 (talk • contribs)
Okay, you're probably right about the AOL forum (haven't checked). But is the 175 total members on blackbayou.net correct? —Quarl (talk) 2006-01-13 20:29Z
This is not just about the current community but also about the past community since 1996 that has been involved with Black Bayou and Antagonist Games. BlackBayou.net is a split of of blackbayou.com(different versions of the game are being played at both, and I don't believe there is anyone playing both versions at the current time so those numbers don't overlap the two games). Both those games use the Black Bayou Rules. BlackBayou.net split off in August of 2005. They have around that number since just August. BlackBayou.com has been around just a bit longer (They were originally those AOL Boards I mentioned that have 5000 posts since just 2003) but I know for a fact purged some names on blackbayou.com that were inactive or no longer had valid emails. As for the current totals being played by just these two games should not be the basis for deletion. There have been hundreds more that have played. This is about the history of Black Bayou, about what Black Bayou started as, became and now is. I had hoped to add more to this wikipedia but now I have had to spend much of my time in this discussion. Oh and Explorecrossroads.com (Crossroads RPG) is based off of the Black Bayou Rules. That's three forums that I know off the top of my head that uses these rules and there has been others in the past.HoldynWolf

Notability Re: notability, the page that has been cited is a "proposed Wikipedia policy, guideline, or process." The "proposal may still be in development" And "there is currently no official policy on where the line of notability lies." Notability is in the eye of the beholder. ~ReporterSteven~

  • Please see WP:WEB, which is the accepted guideline we should be referring to. Sure, it has existed for ten years, but so has my private RPG campaign and that's not notable either. According to google, the term "Black Bayou" more frequently refers to a variety of wilderness camps, as well as a Budweiser band. The creator Remy Thorne hardly googles at all, and I'm not too impressed by Hecklers Online either. Sorry, but this does fall below the bar of notability. Hence, Delete. Radiant_>|< 02:51, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
* Of course a normal Google listing is, try googling Black Bayou RPG and you turn up more than 300 hits. If all you type in is Magic , you won't just turn up the card game, you'll get lots of magic tricks. You need to be specific in your Google searches. ~~ReporterSteven~~
  • I know how Google works, thank you very much. From your link, I get 262 hits, which is hardly impressive for anything internet-related. My real name gets more hits than that. Compare eight million hits for this meme, for instance. A rule of thumb is hard to give but any internet-related subject below the five-digit mark is definitely not encyclopedic. Radiant_>|< 03:03, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
And I bet all those pages are just about you and there couldn't possibly be other people in the world with your same name. Hell Let's all look up Bob Smith and see how many pages you get, I bet they are all about one person. HoldynWolf
  • As a matter of fact yes, for my real name I get about 400 hits, all of which related to me. And unlike the Bayou, I'm not even internet-based. Bob Smith gets over a million hits. Radiant_>|< 19:01, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
  • What is your name so I can verify this claim? You need to provide proof to your claim please if you are using it as a basis for deletion.HoldynWolf
  • It is possible to have a real name that gets a lot of Google hits. Mine does because of what I do for work and there is only one other person out there who has my name a la Google. Let's stay on subject. ~~ReporterSteven~
  • If you hit the link, you should have gotten more than 300 ... And there's no need to be rude, my friend. You did hit the mark, though, there is no rule of thumb on an internet-related subject for how many hits it needs to get, is there? You really need to see the Wikipedia:Google test to realize that Google isn't the be-all end-all to notability.~~ReporterSteven~~
    • There have been several rules of thumb, and 300 hits falls below all of them. Frequently accepted is an Alexa rank of 10000 or better. Radiant_>|< 19:01, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
      • A rule of thumb is not a community-accepted rule. It's an opinion. As we've already explained in showing citations, a game that existed exclusively on AOL, that pre-dates Google, was part of the dot-com boom, does not have that current acception. But iT DID. We're talking about a game that had a high in circa 1996. However,Importance"There is evidence that a reasonable number of people are, were or might be concurrently interested in the subject" to the point where it was has been featured on the "Welcome Screen" on AOL where it was viewed by its Millions of subscribers. [2]User J Smith recommended this article be changed to RPG Games on AOL or something akin to that. I find that an acceptable compromise with keywords redirected to that article, basically merging things under that one article. And I welcome people willing to give us a way to succeed rather than tearing us down. Do you have a compromise that would work? Do you like his idea? He's a pretty established user. I think we might go ahead and make this change.~~ReporterSteven~~

Apparently new comers are not appreciated here, nor is new information. The page was not even given enough time to turn into anything. I have not had time this week to devote to trying to work on Black Bayou wikipedia entry as I have had to use what little time this week to defend this. I had heard nothing but good about wikipedia and that's why I came here to post about Black Bayou. A game that was part of Antagonist Games and their parent company Hecklers. Both Hecklers and Antagonist went out of business when AOL changed the way they would do their keywords and channels. Black Bayou continued on. This game was played by so many, long before the 'internet' was as popular as it is now. Back before .asp and java and all the other amazing mark up languages that rule the internet now. Back when you could create a simple page using just html tags. There is so little from back in 1996 about Black Bayou because it was all on AOL, in their keywords using their special coding. It was not internet based then, so there are no internet pages from then. Everything is from NOW since we just moved off of AOL. Hecklers and Antagonist only had their website for months before they went out of bussiness. They could not survive outside of AOL. I can't give you the proof you want because this was all on an old America Online that has changed. You are all trying to take away the chance for it to finally be brought off of AOL and documented on the internet. I am disgusted with wikipedia and their 'community' of members that for the most part I have seen through their 'users contributions' links only go in and say 'delete not notable enough' ... 'delete not important enough' ... 'delete we can't get enough google hits' ... 'delete RPG's aren't important.' Well you know what, fine. delete this and everything else. You can then have your wikipedia of pages about how you got everything deleted. I will make sure to document something some place else in the future.

It's a shame that something as old as this is not considered notable or important enough. It's a shame that American Online which along with several other large online services at the time it being forgotten. Black Bayou was a part of AOL through Antagonist Games and Hecklers Online. They helped fuel American Online, giving content people wanted to pay for. American Online didn't use webpages then, they used their own system. And now because of that, this page is at risk for deletion because I have no internet prrof.HoldynWolf

Here's something about Hecklers who owned Antagonist who ran Black Bayou:

Separately today, AOL Studios, the Internet's leading online content programmer, announced its Greenhouse Networks' business unit will provide original content through Netscape Netcaster. The agreement with Netscape includes the distribution of a number of current Greenhouse properties, including: The HUB, ASTRONET, Hecklers Online, and Extreme Fans, in addition to the forthcoming Entertainment Asylum, which are also scheduled to launch on America Online and the Internet later this month. This was taken from the link here http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease511.htmlHoldynWolf

And here's something else. You all want proof and links. I can give you some links to mention of Hecklers.

PR Newswire, July 28, 1998

SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Hecklers Online, Inc., the Internet's #1 humor site, announced today that it has entered into a co- branding content partnership with Playboy.com.

"It's great to be in bed with Playboy," said Hecklers Online's co-founder Sean Michael. "Playboy is one of the world's most compelling and influential brands. We're proud that Hecklers Online will help to continue Playboy's tradition of excellence."

From http://www.itselementary.net/virtual_online_casino_12-09-2003.html HoldynWolf


And another

Hecklers Entertainment Inc., best known for its comedy Web site http://www.Hecklers.com, is taking a gamble on its relationship with long-time supporter America Online. This one from http://www.bizjournals.com/birmingham/stories/2000/10/02/story6.htmlHoldynWolf


  • Hecklers went bust with the dot-com fallout and, thus, so went Black Bayou to the wayside. Thanks to the Library of Congress and the Way Back Machine, some of the Web content as far back as 1997 was saved here for Hecklers and as far back as 1998 here for Antagonist. Per the Web content information, this page needs only meet one of the criteria not to be deleted. "The content is distributed via a site which is both well known and independent of the creators, either through an online newspaper or magazine, an online publisher, or an online broadcaster." This game was created by an outfit so well-known that Playboy teamed up with them. Sure, the outfit may be bankrupt now, but does Wikipedia not talk about online outfits that went bankrupt? Wikipedia further states in Importance that "An article is "important" enough to be included in Wikipedia if any one of the following is true: There is evidence that a reasonable number of people are, were or might be concurrently interested in the subject (eg. it is at least well-known in a community ((that means everyone everywhere doesn't need to know what it is and we established that it has a history amid a corporation that has been written about in business journals ). Further, If an article is "important" according to the above then there's no reason to delete it on the basis of it being:
  1. of insufficient importance, fame or relevance, or
  2. currently small or a stub, or
  3. obscure.

(Detailed obscure topics hurt no-one because it's hard to find them by accident, and Wikipedia isn't paper.)" So you may find it doesn't have the relative fame of current "millions" and that it's "obscure" but that doesn't matter to importance. This is a random journal entry on a message board from some guy I don't even know recollecting about his days with Black Bayou cache here In his post, he states, " I've been RPing since about 1998 or so. Much later if you mean tabletop gaming. I started playing in the chats of AOL. First in free-form gaming rooms, then in Moderated chats with pages and pages of rules. (It was great!) One was a futuristic game called Crossroads and the other was a WoD themed game called Black Bayou. If I had AOL still I would still be playing BB. After graduation, I went to Community College and finally found some like-minded gamers.... Now its 2005, and still haven't played a game of Vampire ...." At one point, Black Bayou even spawned a small convention called [Bayou-con] Users have created "member Web sites" for their characters like this one and this oneand many, many others. These people are passionate about their characters. On this Web site titled AOL Watch, which criticizes AOL in general, it copied the Home Page of AOL. That is the VERY FIRST Welcome screen someone would see when they logged onto AOL. Millions of people saw this screen. [3] Thousands of people clicked on the link o go to Black Bayou. This is a copy of the text from the screen from some guy who hates AOL, from an established Web site, yet it states "Today's selection of actual messages from AOL's Exit and Welcome screens....

Not just another pretty screen name--Meet your neighbors@AOL ON The Move!

Meet your AstroMate...

Edgy roleplay. Mouth to Mouth. Vampires of the Black Bayou..." Right up there with a basic astrology in terms of importance. That's dang good exposure. I saw one of those links way back in the day. I clicked on it. So did many, many others. ~~ReporterSteven~~

Here are more from ant.com. Note some of the early ones and late ones come from the company that owned that web address before. http://ant.com. You should find archive of ant.com in the 1998 - 2002 range. HoldynWolf

KEEP if the scope is expanded to RPG games of AOL where the myriad other games can be talked about as well. I think this has a place on wikipedia, just not as it's own artical. (Signed: J.Smith) 08:54, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

  • I think that's a fair statement. Thank you for offering a POSITIVE statement offering a SOLUTION that helps us rather than dismissing this like some others who insist on arguing. I think this entry could easily be a called RPG Games on AOL or something akin to that with words such as Black Bayou redirected to this site. ~~ReporterSteven~~


[edit] Note

The edits by 69.161.77.32 Are me. I forget to log in, If you would look at the history you would see it's me marking them with my user name. For some reason it's not logging me in automatically anymore and I keep forgetting to check before I run to defend the black bayou page. Again any edits from 69.161.77.32 are me. HoldynWolf

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.