The Great Tree

[Tai'lahr]

I'm working on a project about the history of the Myst-Uru Community and hoping to find more information about a group called The Circle of D'ni. What I know is that it was a small group of Myst fans that came together in the mid-90s to share information about D’ni, especially the language. It was organized by Telanis (Rickard Johansson), a fan in Sweden, and was originally called The Circle.

Most of the information I’ve been able to gather was from posts made by one of the members, Erithan in a DPWR thread, “community timeline” in April 2005:

In this post, she indicates that she discovered the group about a decade before (the post was Apr 27 2005); that the group existed before Cyan Chat and before the Riven Lyst which was started in July of 1996.
In this post, she states that they normally communicated by e-mail; that "Telanis would get information from RAWA and it would trickle down through the Circle via puzzles or e-mails, etc."
In this post, she talks about the Circle of D'ni Lexicon being compiled by Teluknava Je'Alae and that The Riven Journals were released on April 21, 1997.
In this post, she talks about the Circle using the D'ni map translations as the primary source material for their work, building on it to create the lexicon, and “Telanis somehow managing to get info and words and such out of RAWA.”

So, according to all the research, the Circle was formed in 1995 and communicated mainly by e-mail, but the Guildmaster Telanis site (that hosted the group) has a date of November 1997, and both the site and the group are clearly influenced by the Book of Ti’ana which was released in 1996. Of course, it’s possible the group was formed in 1995 and changed over time as new information was discovered. So, I’m very interested in information about the group’s earliest days:

When was it formed and how did they find each other?
Was the website much different or was there an entirely different version in the beginning? This page, Application for The Circle may have once provided directions on signing up to the group, but now talks about restructuring the group.
What did they do / talk about before the release of the Book of Ti'ana and the opening of Cyan Chat?
And, how did they find out about Cyan Chat? The earliest website for Cyan I can find is from December 11, 1996. The links are broken, so I can’t see what information might have been revealed there.

Any information that anyone can share will be greatly appreciated - even a link to a post by a member of the group or recalling that a member was later known by a different name (many of them took on the names of characters in BoT, so it's likely they might have altered their name if they stayed in the community).

Btw, as long as we’re reaching back into the 1990s, does anyone remember seeing any bulletin boards about Myst back in the 90s?

[Moiety Jean]

Hmm, I'd never heard of this before.. I'm sure there are other "old-timers" out there who might know.
_________________
~Moiety Jean

KI#44727
"There is a certain beautiful danger when a group of geeks get together to entertain themselves." ~Orin Drake