Actually, I was invited there and participated until I got really no time for it (which, alas, was pretty early). This came from working at the 13D and being in touch with Jason and Jenn and others DM admins. Nothing much to do with years spent at Wotmania, except they were aware of this background.

It seems I gave you the impression I was complaining about RAFO being left out, but I wasn't. I was merely trying to explain why IMO I think it was. Your assessment is pretty accurate, I think, and a lot of it has to do with bad timing too, that RAFO got set up as a primarily non WOT site at the same time the WOT sites (and their owners) were rather going into high gear for TGS. When RAFO opened, that left precious time to catch up. The RAFO admins missed most of it - JordanCon 2009, contacts with Tor and between the sites and so on. A lot of individuals from RAFO got the chance to be Storm Leaders, went to signings and all, though. There just wasn't much site presence from RAFO in the WOT community.

To answer your question, as far as I know the RAFO owner (and the people who helped him most set up the site) aren't huge WOT fans (some are casual fans, some aren't at all, or not anymore). The WOT MB admins are the big fans. The WOT MB admins of the time before Wotmania closed (Linda, me) were not involved in the transition, as we had gone elsewhere between the time Mike announced he was closing down, and the initiative to create RAFO started. Our new projects were more interesting to us, and extremely demanding in both work on the content and PR time, so we made no effort to be involved further here in any capacity except as occasional posters when the RAFO project surfaced. And yes, it left a kind of vaccuum on the WOT side of things here for a few months until the new MB opened and WOT admins among the old timers were chosen, mostly because no one on the MB stepped up to get involved.

I really couldn't say why the new admins don't get more involved outside the site. A question of interest, time, lack of contacts? I really have no idea.


Personally I had excellent contacts with Jason (and people from TL have always been friendly as well) while active at the 13D, and the reason I didn't get even more involved later in the inter-site stuff and missed getting to JordanCon and all has nothing to do with having been from Wotmania(I wasn't even around here anymore) and definitely nothing to do with feeling left out by anyone or anything. I merely stepped out of it all before it happened (for a much needed short break, which became permanent I realized later), mostly because it was all starting to eat up not only most of my free time, but eating up even my time that wasn't supposed to be free..




Well, I liked Mike well enough and have no opinion on the closing down of the site and the only thing I might hold him to account for a bit is that when he got disinterested in the series (years before closing down), but decided to keep the site open, he didn't really ensured Wotmania's place/legacy with his WOT MB admins. Mike didn't want us to speak as Wotmania to Tor (or even help us get ARCs from Tor so we could keep up the tradition of site reviews... MIke still got the ARC for the site, and skipped the review), the other webmasters etc. We could have done it on a personal basis (and I know now it would have been quite easy to do so, a simple matter of taking the initiative to make it happen, as we weren't much known outside the site), but we didn't, and this seems to have perpetuated itself with the new admins and RAFO.