Today, Shur’tugal officially celebrates its five year anniversary. Amazingly, a project started by a bored-but-excited fourteen-year-old over Christmas break evolved into something much more: an amazing, dedicated community of tens of thousands of fans across the world.
The success of Shur’tugal was never planned or anticipated. It was, and still is, the group effort of an enormous team of volunteers both past and present, along with support from a number of friends. Shur’tugal would not be what it is today if it wasn’t for the hundreds of hours of work that our dedicated team has put in.
We chose today as the day to launch our best re-design and re-branding effort yet due to the importance of the date as our website’s fifth anniversary. The site now features a new, sleek look in easy-to-read fonts, shapes and colors. The website functions normally in all major browsers and all default screen resolutions. A number of changes and additions have been made, all which can be read about in detail on our “Guide to Shur’tugal’s New Changes”! Be sure to continue reading for a list of thank yous and more information on the changes to Shurtugal.com!One largely-unknown fact about Shur’tugal is that an always-changing group of over forty volunteer staff members assist me on a day-to-day basis to keep the site running fresh. Though it will be impossible for me to thank every person who has contributed to Shur’tugal as a volunteer staff member over the past five years (there has been over three hundred of them), there are some people that need to be individually thanked: Robert (Bob) Cox, the website’s longest standing staff member, for his quirky personality and hard work developing many of the systems that power this website; Tim Bach, who also moved on from Shur’tugal (but currently resides on our message boards as an administrator), was one of the major driving forces behind Shur’tugal’s success during the Eragon movie era; Joelle Saveliev, who moved on from Shur’tugal nearly two years ago, but who’s layout graced the website as our face and image for over two years; Allison Jones, who manages our message boards and does amazing amounts of graphic work on layouts both present and past; the amazing team of administrators and moderators who have kept Inheritance Forums running for over four years, collecting nearly one-and-a-half million posts and twenty thousand users; the talented team of administrators and moderators at our fan fiction site and wiki; and last but not least, the ever-changing group of chat administrators and moderators who keep our chat room in line.
Shur’tugal has also had an incredible amount of support from outside groups. Most importantly, we all must thank Christopher Paolini and the entire Paolini family for working so hard to make Eragon and Inheritance what it is today, and who have shown Shur’tugal and the entire Inheritance fandom kindness on unimaginable levels; the amazing team at Random House, especially Judith Haut, who put faith in a then-fifteen-year-old Inheritance fan and have supported me, my website and the fandom unrelentingly ever since; Simon Lipskar of Writer’s House, one of the most interesting and entertaining individuals you could ever meet, as well as a brilliant literary agent; Nick Braccia, the genius behind Vroengard Academy, for his support and advice; and of course, my parents, who let me make my own positive choices in life, supporting me and the website every step along the way, and who offered me every bit of help I ever needed.
And it would be impossible to forget the Inheritance fan community who have stuck with Shur’tugal for five years with patience and gratitude. Shur’tugal was started by a fan, for the fans and has and will always remain that way. If it wasn’t for the support of our visitors, Shur’tugal would have no platform to stand on.
Now that we’ve gotten the very large list of thank yous out of the way, it is only proper to let you know that great things are coming over the journey to Book 4 for Shurtugal.com and the Inheritance community and we hope you stick with us to see it all unfold. We hope you enjoy the new edition of Shurtugal.com and the myriad of changes we will be implementing over the next few weeks to bring Shur’tugal to new heights.
We will be making several new posts over the next week to highlight some of the major changes and additions to Shurtugal.com. If you have any feedback to share regarding the new layout or any of the new changes and implementations, we encourage you to share it with us as a comment on this news post or contact us via the contact us page!
EDIT: If anyone has issues activating their comments account or registering in general, either send an e-mail through the feedback form or e-mail Robert directly at robert@shurtugal.com. Please send your registered username, e-mail, and your problem and we’ll get back to you with a solution.
