Although AncientWorlds has been offline for some time now, work has begun to relaunch the community in a fourth incarnation with state-of-the-art web application infrastructure. Some features have already been ported to the new system, such as The Daily Index, now called Boards Central. Many other features are working with the notable exception of Homesite editing, which is not finished yet. A new Chat application is ready for beta testing. Before sending out an invite to existing members of the community to jump in, we thought we should also finish the new ComPanel and Gram system (which is an extension of the new Chat system). It will be great to connect with old friends again! We are also investigating options for developing multi-user 3D environments for each world.
The community launched in September 1995 as The Rostra, a bulletin board for players of an online game set in ancient Rome entitled S.P.Q.R, developed by CyberSites, Inc and published by Time Warner Electronic Publishing. Before long, it became clear that the contributors to The Rostra were not only interested in discussing the game, but shared an deep interest in the ancient world. To facilitate greater community interaction and cohesion, AncientSites.com was launched, providing a suite of homegrown early social media features such as Grams (instant messages), Homesites, Groups, Friends Lists, Cities and Hoods and a Who'sOnline Panel. Even though the community grew quickly, AncientSites was shuttered during the dotcom crash in January 2001.
In autumn 2002, the 100,000 registrants of the community were invited by the founders of AncientSites to a reconstructed version of the community called AncientWorlds.net, which continued the tradition of AncientSites and thrived until 2015, when it's flame was doused due to technical issues. In total, AncientWorlds received 57,236,013 page views from 16,538,996 unique visitors (.25% of the Earth's population) and 40,377 registered members during its tenure!
[Updated: January 25, 2023]
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