Q: Who runs the Lurker Lounge?
A: The staff administrators run each section of the site. The webmaster, grand poobah, and supreme muck-a-muck is Bolty, but that's mostly an ego thing and the other admins let him assume he's in charge. See the Contact Us page for more information, including email addresses and bios.

Q: How can I join the Lurker Lounge team?
A: You can't. Unless there's a general call-out for someone to join the team, either as a site administrator or forum moderator, we don't accept applications.

Q: I have this great strategy, article, etc. that I'd like to write up; will you host it when I'm done?
A: It doesn't work that way. No matter how knowledgeable you may be about the game, no strategy guide is perfect until it's been "nitpicked," a longtime Diablo Strategy Forum term. If you develop a strategy guide, post it on a forum somewhere - whether it be the Lounge forums or that of another quality gaming fansite. Suggestions from other players can only help to improve your guide, because there's always things that other people might think of that you haven't. We don't take guide submissions in general; rather, we see a great guide posted to a forum and offer to give it a home on the web.

Q: I've written or I saw a great guide on another website. Would you link to it?
A: You bet. Unlike other websites, we prefer the community aspect of the gaming scene. There's often a friendly comraderie amongst webmasters for gaming fansites, and it's unfortunate when some webmasters decide they don't want to be a part of that. However, we're always ready to point readers to other quality websites. Some websites would have you believe they're the only one out there, but we don't operate that way. Just look under our community pages for each section for sites that you shouldn't miss if you want to learn everything there is to know about the game.

Q: Why don't you run ads on your site? You deserve to make some money for your work.
A: That's not why Bolty started the Lounge and we will never run ads on this site. This site is built upon the work of other people. 99% of the strategy articles aren't by us, and we simply highlight the work of others. By running ads, we would be making money off of other peoples' work. Besides, we do this because we enjoy it, not because we're out to make a buck. Of course, the site isn't free for us. If you want to help out, you can help our costs by donating money to the site via the Donate menu link. All money donated will go only towards site costs.

Q: Hey, why don't you cover news about (insert thing here)?
A: Sometimes we'll miss news about something because we're not around, but most of the time we don't cover specific news bits because they don't affect the strategy community. You won't see news bits on general game company news, sales figures, or voting polls on other websites. For general news, we recommend the many other quality general news sites out there. There's a different kind of "news" that goes on at the Lounge - bugs, discoveries, anything that's related to how we play the games or items that are of guaranteed interest to die-hard players. The concept we try to follow is that news items we place on the site will help to make you a better and more informed player. So, instead of pointing out how your favorite game is featured in a comic strip on a certain date, I'll let you know when someone discovers that treasure chests have a 14% higher chance of dropping elite items than monsters (just a hypothetical example).

Q: So, are you going to cover (insert game here) by opening a section for it?
A: The decision on the Lurker Lounge's next covered game is a big one. Bolty has set down a policy that once a game is chosen to be covered, at least one full calendar year must pass before the Lounge can cover another game. Moving to a new game will control the site's destiny for a good long time, so it's not one made lightly.

Q: How long has this site been up? How did it get started?
A: The site began on July 15th, 1999. It was originally called Bolty's Diablo Strategy Central, and sucked. We're talking ugly. Bolty started the site to learn HTML while doing something he enjoyed - pointing out to people where to go for quality strategy and information about the game. In Diablo 1, there was no centralized website of information like Blizzard's Arreat Summit for Diablo II. Instead, things were much more spread out between documents like Jarulf's Guide and numerous strategy websites. What he wanted to create was a central hub that could track all the news about the sites and host a little strategy of its own. Things grew from there, but the focus remains the same. Over the years, Bolty's redesigned the site eight times, and finally stopped going it solo on July 15, 2002.

Q: Where is this site hosted? Can I be a hosted site under the Lurker Lounge?
A: This site is hosted at ServInt. As for site hosting - we provide hosting for small sites that need it due to other hosts wrecking your sites with pop-up ads or slow, slow access. If you're a strong part of the strategy community, we can provide a home for you. One condition: no ads whatsoever. It's a requirement for the server and for our own personal ideology as well. We cannot host your domain name, sorry. If you feel you want hosting, contact Bolty and we'll talk.

Q: What did Bolty use to code the site?
A: In the beginning, Bolty used Microsoft Frontpage to learn HTML code; he'd do something in its design section and then look at the code it generated to figure out what he did (yes, he was THAT much a newbie, learning it all from scratch). For years, Bolty then coded everything in a text editor.  To make it easy for everyone now, the Lurker Lounge runs off of the Mambo Content Management System.