A Message from POV-Team Coordinator -- Chris Young

It is with great sadness that we announce our POV-Ray forum will be
closing its doors permanently by the end of this month.  The POV-Team
is moving our development effort to our web-site at
http://www.povray.org/. It marks the end of nearly nine years, since
our very beginning, that the POV-Team has  called Compuserve our home.


In September 1996 we moved into the forum from our original home in
the Go Graphics GraphDev Forum.  We contracted for our own forum with
CompuServe Pacific based in Australia through our team member Chris
Cason who lives there.  

However CompuServe Pacific recently decided to drop all forums from
its service. They helped us prepare a proposal to have CompuServe USA
pick up our forum. However considering our declining forum traffic,
CompuServe USA did not feel that they could devote an entire forum to
a single product such as ours. 

They generously offered to negotiate terms to place us in a vendor
forum where we would share space with other developers or vendors but
the POV-Team declined.  We feel we can meet users' needs better
through expanded use of our web site, ftp site, and news groups at
povray.org while keeping our identity intact and by keeping our
autonomy.

While POV-Ray by definition is a team effort, we feel it is right and
proper to thank several individuals who helped us in our stay here
CompuServe.  Their efforts in promoting us on GraphDev and POVRAY
forums and assisting us in maintaining our online home have greatly
contributed to our success even though some of them never wrote part
of the program itself.  Our sincere thanks to...  

 -*- Larry Wood and Matt Drury of Go Graphics Group who were our
     hosts on CompuServe until 1996.
 -*- Drew Wells who founded the POV-Team and made arrangements for us 
     with GGG.
 -*- Dan Farmer who spent countless hours both here and in GraphDev 
     answering users' questions.
 -*- Tim Wegner and the Stone Soup Group who proved that large, 
     open-source, team development had a magic power that we could tap

     and model ourselves.
 -*- Chris Cason who established povray.org and POVRAY Forum.
 -*- Dale C. Brodin who assisted me in promoting our libraries.
 -*- Alan Kong who kept our libraries full of the latest utilities and

     the greatest images.
 -*- The staffs of CompuServe Pacific and USA.  Although our ways are 
     parting and we've traveled some rough roads, we appreciate all
     you have done to help us.

 ...and finally thanks all of our loyal forum members, who were
willing to subscribe to CompuServe to participate in our efforts
there.  Their testing, feedback, artistry, and passion for ray tracing
(along with our internet users) continue to inspire and motivate us to
keep working to make POV-Ray bigger and better.

If you are a CompuServe subscriber and there are any files you were
planning to download there, or if you have questions we can answer
before we go, feel free to use the forum until it closes.  After that,
we look forward to seeing you at povray.org. 

  Sincerely,
  Chris Young -- POV-Team Coordinator <cyo### [at] iquestnet>

(permission to repost granted)

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