After reading blog entries from Vaskor and Baldwin about fansites “opening up” I decided I’d write a blog entry explaining my thoughts on it. Now as it is, fansites do their own work, and work REALLY hard to get noticed, then another fansite will come along, decide they can do it better, and improve on it, thats the law of anything on the internet, it can be improved. A lot of people believe in “Open Source”, now I dont know about Draynor, or RuneHQ or Rsbandb, but I am not going to just give away code that I spent weeks working on to be polite, so another fansite can come around and get the credit for it (cough Leetscape). Now I’ll admit that some fansites do like to share information, I talk to Nico (owner of Draynor) almost daily about a variety of subjects from coding to iPhone apps. And of course if I asked him for coding advice he’d be happy to help me, but do you think he’d really give up his code, work that he spent years perfecting just because we’re friends? No, and I agree with him on that, its something he deserves the credit for 100%.
Now some people may be saying, well what about NPC database’s, why should I create my own when X fansite has every detail about every monster, now on that point I can agree, having a way to export that data would be quite helpful to most fansites, provided they give credit to the users, AND original fansite.
But truthfully, I can not see why everyone is so “up in arms” about fansite communication now, perhaps trying to look better to JaGeX since they are opening up to fansites. This was not a concern a year ago, or even a few months ago. Fansite communication has never been a big issue, until now, and I still see no reason to bring it up. If one of RuneAddict’s affiliates requested to use some of our information, aka tracking data, or something we can provide, I would have no problem allowing it, as long as we got credit.
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