The Norn Society


 * Address: http://nornsociety.com -> http://www.sundownis.com/~november/creatures/ (down, no known archives)
 * Webmaster: November
 * Ran from/to: ? - 26 July 1997

Summary of Content
A well-organised collection of Creatures COBs, hints and tips.

History of Website
The Norn Society was founded in 1997 and quickly became known as one of the leading community websites. Unfortunately, it shut down on 26 July 1997 due to problems arising due to arguments between the creator of Nornfamily and the author of a pre-release tool called NDBase which did much the same thing. Screenshots had (perhaps unwisely) been displayed on the website which did not represent the final user interface, and which looked remarkably like Nornfamily. The screenshots were provided by the author to be displayed on the site as a pre-release look at the up-coming software. However the author DanB, misunderstood this request as a private eyes-only preview.

Ironically Elisabeth Witek and DanB - the programmers involved - sorted out their problems fairly quickly, but the site remained down.

According to November, the site remained down due to the actions of the programmers involved. It was then decided to close the doors to the site for good, after receiving verbally abusive hate mail from the offended author (Elisabeth Witek) whom demanded the screenshots and software to be removed from the site and threatened legal action. As a result of the site closing down, Ms. Witek received several abusive hate emails herself from many of the disgruntled users of the site. DanB pled with the community to stop sending these emails with the following statement "..to those who are posting anonymous emails to the author of NornFamily, please stop. If you don't, I will discontinue my work on N-DBase.."

An official apology was never issued to the site owner, but DanB did have this to say..

"Supporting November, who runs Norn Society and convincing her that her WebSite was an important contribution to our Creatures Culture is the way to get the site back up and running."

However the site still remained closed.

Interesting Facts

 * The Norn Society required registration, which put off a few people, including Lummox JR. However, the site at the date of closing boasted over 7000 registered members.