I'm obviously a bit behind the times, but I was a bit shocked to find that The Palantir (http://www.thepalantir.org) has died. Anyone know when that happened?
Damned shame - for all our differences of opinion, I had nothing but respect for Jerry (Krahl) and what he was trying to achieve with his site.

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Dagster

I think after krahl lost his son he kinda gave up on the site and a few people posted but not many untill it didn't have post for weeks... A real shame as I liked it aswell..it had a great trade section

I used to visit The Palantir also - got chatting to Krahl and others over there a few times also. Such a cruel misfortune for anyone to suffer.

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Yeah, that happened a couple months ago if I remember correctly. I think actually Krahl started posting again right before it died, I was one of those handful of people still hanging around that place when it died. I still check back when I can to see if it's back because right before it died, the site you see now when you go there would only sometimes appear, other times you would go to the actual site. This went on for a little bit and was brought to the attention of one of the mods I think who said he wasn't sure what was going on. Now you can only get to that site.
I'm still upset about it too, there were some cool people on those forums, as well as some amazing painters. I could spend a long time looking at the gallery. If anyone knows of a way to view the pictures, would they mind sharing how? A lot of my brothers pics were on the site, and I think that's the only place where you can see them now.

-PoW

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My WIP thread: http://one-ring.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=18247

I didn't visit the palantir very often, but it was one of the few, really good lotr sites imo.

@ POW: I don't know if this will help but you can always give it a try.
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20110501000000*/http://www.thepalantir.org/

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“People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it's served up.”
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A shame that one of the old veterans of LOTR websites has gone. Makes me want to continue activity on OR and TLA so that the community will continue to thrive.

It sounds like the domain name was allowed to lapse, and so it just points to a 'placeholder' on the hosting company. The intermittent nature of it sounds very much like that - some domain name servers around the world might still have pointers to the site for a little while after it had lapsed. Ho hum , it's a shame to see it go under.

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Dagster

Bad news about The Palantir... and now, which LOTR websites we have?... The One Ring, The Last Alliance, La Guerra del Anillo... at last this three are running so good, and with The Hobbit so near I hope they live for a long time.

The Palantir died a couple of years back really and then only had a very few posts in a month. Thing is I don't know why it certainly was the best looking LOTR website around.

I think its best feature was the ability to rate gallery pics, a bit like CMoN. I tried for a while with it but gave up due to member inactivity.

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Not for long

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I was one of the admins there...

Basically, activity dropped off a cliff quite a few years back. After that, it was always a band of stalwarts keeping it going. They dwindled, until there was no real point in keeping it up, except as an archive. We also began to have an increasing number of software probs, which proved to be beyond our experience and resources to mend.

I tried to kick-start a revival a few times, suggesting that we migrated to different software, etc, but one of the problems was that activity was so low as to make any return on the significant efforts needed to get it going doubtful.

Also, as LotrCrown has said, Jerry understandably lost interest after the tragic death of his son.

The domain name lapse has happened repeatedly - and one such event contributed to the initial huge decline in membership. It has actually always - eventually - reappeared, after (on at least one occasion) a longer absence than this. However, I have tried to contact Jerry through Facebook etc; I've obviously got no means of knowing whether he's picked up the messages, but I've had no answer. I'm still in close contact with Taliesin, my fellow active admin, but neither of us can do anything in this situation. I no longer hold out any hope or expectation of it reappearing, which is disappointing - regardless of its current activity, there were some useful resources on there.

One of which was Sons of Gondor, a 100-page supplement that a dozen or so of us published on TP about 4 years ago (the last thing to be published there, ironically). I'm not quite sure what the quality will look like now, or how relevant it remains - but assuming it all looks ok, perhaps I could ask you to host it on OR, if TP doesn't reappear?!

All best,
Edmund.

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Sons of Gondor is here! www.thepalantir.org

I have Sons of Gondor. It's rather good.

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You don't have to be great to start. But you do have to start to be great.

What exactly is this supplement? Is there any chance we can get it on OR?

I'm not sure if I've seen this; but I would be interested in having it available to us here on the One Ring.

Praise indeed. Thanks Freddybear - that's actually really cheered me up after a slightly depressing job interview this afternoon!



It was a c. 100 page full-colour Gondorian supplement written over about 3 years between 2005 and 2008, mainly by about a dozen TP and OR members. I edited it after the project creator stepped down. It was released in November 2008 on TP; it was quite a big file, even in pdf, so TP - as an inactive website with a lot of server space etc - was the obvious choice to host it.

It was of variable quality, because I struggled to get articles for some aspects of the hobby, in particular painting. But I seem to remember there were some bits I was very proud of.



I'd be happy to send you over the file for a look, if you want? I stand to be corrected, but there was an implicit assumption that it would be available on more than one site; and it's not been available anywhere, to my knowledge, since TP disappeared. I might want to do the odd update before release; in particular, there were one or two formatting issues which have always bugged me.

Edmund.

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Sons of Gondor is here! www.thepalantir.org

Sure, that would be great. Pm upcoming...

Edmund, we'd be honoured to host it here, especially if TP doesn't manage to get back on its feet. All credit to those guys who put it together - I know from experience just how much effort goes into producing a fan-supplement.

PM me with the details and we'll set it up as an article and link to the PDF for you.

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Dagster

Cool, that'd be great, thanks. At 27MB, it's just too big to attach to an email (the original Word doc is 137MB - who'd have thunk it?!), so I'll find a workaround and get it to you. I can try to decrease the size when I look at the formatting.

Cheers,
Edmund.

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Sons of Gondor is here! www.thepalantir.org

That's cool. If it will be available through here, then that's good too. I would just like to be able to access it somehow, I don't care how...