Flux
Flux is one of the best-known and longest-time members of the online Diablo community. He began working on Diabloii.net back in 1998, and came to prominence along with that site, which grew to dominate the Diablo fansite community. This article covers Flux in terms of the Diablo community. See [User:Flux|his user page]] in this wiki for a brief, autobiographical account of his webmastering experiences.
Diabloii.net's History
Diabloii.net has been online since shortly after Diablo I's release, even before the announcement of Diablo II. Flux worked on the site daily from 1998-2003, when he began to cut back after moving to Northern California to live with a new girlfriend. Flux ran a Hellgate London fansite during 2006-2007, then returned to active duty on Diablo II in late 2007.
Shortly after that, the site was relaunched with a new design as Diii.net in early 2008, in expectation of the impending announcement of Diablo III. Diablo 3 was indeed announced later that year, in June 2008, and "The Unofficial Site," now found at Diablo.IncGamers.com, remains the busiest and most comprehensive of the numerous Diablo community fansites.
Besides the daily news coverage and regular features and columns, Diii.net hosts the most comprehensive Diablo image gallery online, as well as numerous discussion forums for all of the games in the series. In addition to posting most of the news and writing regular columns and features on Diii.net, Flux is one of the admins on this DiabloWiki, which puts him in the odd position of occasionally writing articles that reference himself, in the third person.
Blizzard North Connections
Flux, along with his Diabloii.net co-webmasters Elly and Gaile were the first fansite people to ever visit Blizzard North when they spent a weekend there in 1999, shortly before the Diablo II beta began. The reports and photo galleries they submited from that trip can be seen in the Diablo II wiki Visit articles.
Flux's long immersion in the Diablo online community, as well as the two years he spent running a fansite focused on Flagship Studios' RPG Hellgate: London (a company founded almost entirely by ex-Blizzard North employees/Diablo II designers) enabled him to develop and maintain communications[1] and personal relationships with a number of the original Diablo designers. [2][3][4][5][6][7]
This has enabled Diii.net to post numerous pieces of original opinion from ex-Blizzard North/Diablo II team members, and given the site much more in-depth knowledge of the making of the original, Blizzard North version of Diablo III. It also provides a more objective, less worshipful attitude towards Diablo III and Blizzard Irvine in general, and keeps the writing on Diii.net from falling into the non-critical, non-objective, "fawnsite" style of "everything Blizzard does is fantastic and wonderful" that many other Blizzard fansites exhibit.
This unwillingness to kowtow or automatically endorse everything they do has sometimes put Diii.net into conflict with Blizzard Irvine's PR department, where dependable obedience and non-objectivity from fansites are valued far above total readership and community influence.
Diablo Fan Fiction
As a fantasy/horror novelist in real life, Flux was ideally-positioned to contribute some of the first and best-known pieces of Diablo fan fiction, and he wrote a new story which was posted on Diabloii.net each year at Halloween, from 1998-2004, as well as branching out into a comedic series of semi-real life holiday fables, staring the Diablo II characters and monsters.
He has resumed contributing fan fiction to the community since the announcement of Diablo III, and has written several stories set in the Diablo III universe.
