Website Development

August 2001

Growth in website traffic continued to accelerate during the past year.  Between January 1, 2001 and mid-May we served out over 1,000,000 page views.  During calendar year 2000 it was the end of the third quarter before we reached 1,000,000 page views for the year.

Along with this growth has come a proportionate increase in email and the need for other services.  To meet these emerging needs, the website is being restructured technically in order to provide a more stable platform to support significant additional growth.  This is in conjunction with moving the equipment and the network to the Sebastopol site.  It is estimated that the transition to the new platform will be complete by the end of October of this year.

A great deal of time was spent during this past year attempting to meet Foundation demands regarding what was displayed on the website and how it was displayed.  Much of this was diffused by the negotiations held in March.  The trustees never did agree to meet with the Executive Committee to discuss their concerns, preferring instead to work through their lawyers in attempting to wrest compliance from the Fellowship.

At present we've been able to restore many of the services to the international readership which existed before the losses of the negotiating session.  The Foundation required us to give them the domain name which we've used for the past three years to provide services to the Spanish readership -- librourantia.org.  There is also pressure being applied to remove the Spanish translation from our website.  We are no longer able to display the French text.

A major advance coming to the website is the content of The Urantia Book existing as a database.  A reader has been working on this project for the past year or so and has created a database in which each word in the book is a single record in the database.  These records have formatting and location attributes -- such as whether or not the word is italicized -- as well as attributes which link to external documents such as source materials.  Having the text in this database format will allow us to stream it out into various software programs such as text formatting for print media publication or to Internet devices such as text readers for visually impaired persons or handheld devices such as cellphones and Palm Pilots.  A new generation of translator's tools will become available with this database as it will be possible to pour any translation into similar tables and easily do cross-translation comparisons on a paragraph-by-paragraph or sentence-by-sentence basis. 

A significant need in terms of the website is for additional technical help, either reader volunteers or paid staffing.  These are not small individual tasks which need to be done, but ongoing work of a technical nature. 

An additional need is for a statement which we can publish for the international readership community regarding what is legal and what is not legal in terms of website publication.  Urantia Foundation continues to harrass readers in other countries who want to publish their own materials on the Internet when the Foundation feels that these materials violate their commercial rights.  This past year the Foundation actually shut down two websites run by young people outside the United States because of alleged trademark infringements.  In such situations we receive email from the people who are being harrassed wanting to know about their legal situation.  At present we are unable to provide any sound advice.  I feel that we should be able to respond in such situations with clear guidelines as to how these readers can proceed with their evangelistic efforts.

It should be appreciated that approximately half of the website traffic consists of Spanish readers.  There are Spanish readers in various countries continually providing content for the website.  A major contribution this past year was a Spanish translation of Bill Sadler's "A Study of the Master Universe" along with the Appendices to the study.  This was done as a joint project by The Church of the New Revelation and Cordesaes, two evangelistic groups working in Latin America.

Respectfully submitted,

David Kantor