![[Pro/chef]I can't believe this works...](https://preview.redd.it/gfxdqs00lx0h1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=5b91fc94cf57b3cbc2d81d9b68ae812a7183b86e)
Saw this idea from a reddit comment from a year ago. Its been cold lately for this season and building a new starter was a bit of a struggle bug.
Saw a comment about a guy in Scotland I think and how he heard to put it on his wifi router.
Damn it works so well!
Mix:
33g of day 13 starter, 120g 95° spring water, 150 g of whole wheat white flour mixed with bread flour.
You know that feeling when you drive past your old neighborhood and the house you grew up in is just... dark?
That's althanas.com right now.
For anyone who doesn't know, Althanas was a play-by-post RPG and collaborative writing community that launched in 2001 as a sister site to AllRPG.com. It wasn't like other RP forums. It had a full leveling system where your character's growth was tied directly to the quality of your writing. Judges scored your threads on a 10-category rubric. Story, character, mechanics, pacing, dialogue. You got feedback. Real feedback. Like a workshop that also had sword fights.
It had eight fully built world regions, lore wikis, tournaments, community quests, and thousands of completed stories written by people who genuinely cared about the craft.
I was one of those people.
I wrote there from 2001 to around 2010, most heavily from 2001 to 2006 before college and work did what college and work do to everything good. I wrote under the handle Sword-4-Hire, later cleaned up to Sword-For-Hire when I became a judge on the site. They said the For looked more professional. I chose to believe them.
I'm not just here to be nostalgic about a website the way you get nostalgic about a restaurant that closed.
I want to find whoever currently holds the domain or admin access.
The site isn't cleanly dead. It's more like it wandered off and forgot to tell anyone. The domain still resolves. There are about 45 Wayback Machine snapshots. The infrastructure is just... decaying steadily, the way old forums do when the last person holding the keys gets busy and life pulls them elsewhere.
I want to be the new steward.
Not to monetize it. Not to gut it and rebuild it as something unrecognizable. To stabilize it, preserve what's there, and see if there are enough surviving members to warrant bringing it back as a lean, low-overhead writing community. Because that judgment rubric system was genuinely ahead of its time. A forum that graded your craft and pushed you to get better? That doesn't exist in the same way anywhere else.
If you were ever a member, a judge, an admin, or you happen to know someone who ran the backend in its later years... please comment or DM.
The Discord linked in old FAQs is discord.gg/Ht6CPzGfee. If you're still in there, point me toward whoever's still sitting at the table.
Althanas shaped a lot of writers. Some of them probably don't even realize it anymore.
Let's see if we can find the door.