Yes, my infamous werewolf website is back online, this time after being on hiatus for only a little over a year (since spring 2003), its third disappearance in its nearly decade-long history. However, The Werewolf and Shapeshifter Codex just keeps coming back, regardless of any vacation time it takes! There are many updates in this new edition, the biggest update being a name change. This website was previously called The Werewolf and Shapeshifter Handbook, from its first appearance until it was taken down in 2003. I wanted a new name to reflect the new focus, and to avoid confusion with other websites that have taken on the same name, in response to my plea for plagiarism. Yes, I encourage plagiarism of this website and always have! As a result, other sites based roughly on older versions of my website have taken the name The Werewolf and Shapeshifter Handbook and some of these have gained fame in their own right. Since I have had this website for nearly ten years, I am calling this edition The Werewolf and Shapeshifter Codex: The 10-Year Anniversary Edition.
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Below is some information about The Werewolf and Shapeshifter Codex that appeared after it had gone on hiatus for the second time in its career:
The HandBook first appeared in early 1996, in March I think. At that time it was not yet on lycanthrope.org, but was an annex on my personal home pages. It was first written over a series of weeks, with very bad spelling, and mostly in the wee hours of the morning. The first version consisted of that information which I kept hearing again and again from many different shifters. That first core went through quite a number of changes, expanding, deleting unneeded material, re-organizing, and changing location. At its largest, it was a whopping 150 pages when printed up, but the most popular version was only 30 pages long (this is the version you generally see plagiarized). At last, it disappeared from its longtime home, lycanthrope.org, for a number of reasons, one of which being that the shifter movement had many similar resources (often, in fact, plagarized almost directly from the HandBook) online at that time and no longer needed the HandBook as much, another reason was that the author had grown tired of the attention and email the HandBook constantly generated, and still other reasons existed that are more of a private nature.
Even long after it disappeared the HandBook, like "The Shifter's Edge" (another long gone but famous shifter Internet resource) was linked to from countless Internet pages, talked about a lot, and quoted on many pages. Underground copies of it kept popping up, and some of these appeared online. This copy, however, is the official, updated copy, created by the original author. I do not begrudge the underground copies of it that have circulated, the online copies, and the barely modified re-doings of it that are online. When I put this online in the first place, I meant it to be a resource freely available to the spiritual therianthrope community, to be used by them, and for every were to interpret it according to his or her own feelings and experience.
Those copies that I've seen online are just fine by me, but I do ask that those copies that have been modified or pulled up from uncertain locations have a thing on them saying that they have been or may have been modified. I do not want to be held responsible for anything I haven't wrote. As an example, I've noticed some pirate copies that imply that the famous singer Alanis Morrisette is a werewolf! I never wrote that (and in fact find the idea hilarious).
In the time that the HandBook was gone from it's official home, I took a good long rest, got a lot of things done in my life, and grew up some. Some of the reasons I took it off the Internet have now changed, so here it is again. If it gets to be too much of a burden again, I don't think I'll take it down, I'll probably leave it up but just stop updating it or responding to email about it.
The present version (which appeared back at this location in May of 1999, after it's long hiatus) is an altered version of the handbook at it's largest.A fair amount of the 2AM bad spelling has been left in the older sections, just because I don't feel yet like clearing it out. Some sections are missing. Some I just didn't agree with or like anymore, but other missing sections should eventually find their way back into the handbook, but I wanted to give them a complete overhaul first; which may take quite some time. Some new sections have been added, the most notable probably being the "articles" section. Yes, this little gem is one reason why I haven't gotten around to fixing up older sections of the handbook: I'd much rather add snazzy new stuff than spend time cleaning up the old stuff. Much of the extra time which I can afford to spend on the handbook (which isn't all that much nowadays) is spent researching and/or writing neat new articles for this section. I've got several articles-in-progress. I can't promise how often new articles will show up, but I'm hoping to get new ones out every so often.
I'm also hoping on adding a new section which will be a step beyond the AHWW FAQ and WereWeb: a step-by-step guide for new people trying to get involved and figure out all of this, a nice set of "painless start-up" instructions, answers to basic questions, basic facts about online shifter groups, what not to do, and pitfalls and warnings. However, that's a real megaproject and I've no idea when I might get around to it. I've got some cool ideas about it, but it'd be a lot of work to actually make the web pages.
Further update: the above material was written in 1999 and 2000, after the Handbook had just come back from a hiatus of more than a year. The Handbook was largely taken down again (leaving up the front page, a few FAQs, the "answers" section and the 4 links pages) in either December 2001 or January 2002. The missing sections were replaced with this page in way of explanation. Read it if you want to learn why the Handbook disappeared a second time.
You also might want to check out The FAQ about this Website.
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