Today's Trailblazer is perhaps our most recognizable face - Beelzebob6666. You might have seen him in a lot of places. If not on the wiki, then surely on the beta server forums dishing out spoilers one after the other. Or perhaps the name is familiar from the discord server, where he gives solid advice on gameplay and general FoE stuff.
The story of Beelzebob joining the team is rather unconventional. Actually, he did not start on a good note as some minor disagreements had arisen with another admin. Regardless, for some reason not known to me at that time, I felt that he had a lot of promise and invited him to join us. Probably the fact that he was a tech expert came as a huge plus point. He started on an ad hoc (interim) basis and the Feudal Japan Settlement was his pilot project.
His work on the same, coupled with some significant changes to the backend code of the events articles were quite impressive, and quickly the "ad hoc" tag was dropped and we welcomed him aboard as a full time CM. The Projects article was a brainchild of his, and the first project we worked together on was a comprehensive restructuring of the navigation bar. The newly updated, dynamic and flexible bar has won praises from several quarters.
Another significant task undertaken by Beelzebob was redirecting all the technology pages of an era to a single one. Sure, this really chopped down the article number, but in fact has greatly improved the overall quality of the wiki by eliminating stubs. We also worked together on the beautiful "Universe" template, which is kind of an index to the wiki's articles.
His technical skills, especially in CSS and JavaScript have been quite noteworthy. I'm not going into the exact specifications as these things generally confuse me, but it suffices to say that he has tinkered with the wiki's code and made a lot of quality of life improvements. In several places, the code has been made cleaner by using templates and other portable elements.
No essay on Beelzebob is complete without mentioning his awesome data extraction skills. The amount of content he was able to extract from the game just by the click of a button is mind blowing. One look at the HowTo article will be enough to see that GB stats, cumulative tech pages, new image files and much more can be easily accessed.
In November of 2019 he received a well-earned promotion to Administator, and was one of the two Main Admins I appointed in April of 2020. For close to a year the wiki and its admin team were in good hands. However, eventually real life caught up and he stepped down in January 2021. But, I am glad to announce that as of September, he has returned in a way and does some light-weight moderation in the discord server.
| “ | Congrats to the whole community from me to 10 full years! I am proud to have been a part of it for about two of those years. | „ |
Ten Years of Forge of Empires Wiki • Down the Memory Lane • Introducing the Guide Library • Auctorius • Nike Aisling • Shadowblack • Mr. Quib • Devilsangel01 • Puer et morietur II • TheEmbracedOne • Beelzebob6666 • PhoenixFenix • Pafton