Letter of Undertakings

Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge UK LLP
One Fetter Lane
London
EC4A 1JB

In consideration of David Guo no taking any action against me, I, Bruce Everiss, hereby confirm and undertake to David Guo as follows.
1. I shall before the close of business on 26 February 2010 remove all references to mobile telephone numbers and Citizenship Identification Number and all other personal information and photographs relating to David Guo, his family and friends from the website www.bruceongames.com and from all other websites on which I have published or caused to be published such information.
2. I shall not in the future by myself or through any third party post or cause to be posted on my blog website www.bruceongames.com. or any other website any personal data relating to David Guo, his family and friends that might not reasonably be expected to be found in the public domain.
3. I shall not at any time in the future post any photographs of David Guo, his family and friends that might reasonably be expected to attract the necessary qualities of privacy.
4. I shall handover to David Guo’s solicitors, no later than close of business on 1 March 2010 all private material, data and photographs that I have in my possession, custody or control relating to David Guo, his family and friends including copies of information referred to in paragraph.
5. I shall not commit any acts that may amount to harassment towards David, his friends and family and will not publish or cause to be published statements that are defamatory of any of them.

This Letter of Undertakings shall be governed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales, and I hereby submit to the jurisdiction of the English Court.

Signed……………………………….. Dated………………………….
Bruce Everiss

My reply:

Dear Sirs

David Guo

I refer to your letter dated 25 February 2010 which was hand delivered to my house at 11pm last night.

As I made clear in my email of last night, I do not believe that I have breached your client’s right to privacy, insofar that a Chinese citizen based in China has any right to privacy as recognised by the English courts. As you will be aware, I am being sued by Evony LLC in the Courts of New South Wales, Australia, for defamation on the basis of articles posted on my blog, Bruceongames. The identity of the persons behind Evony LLC and the number of staff working for Evony LLC will all be relevant issues in those proceedings in the event that the court in Australia accepts jurisdiction to hear Evony LLC’s claim against me.

In order to defend myself I have been pursuing further enquiries in relation to the owners of Evony LLC and the operators of the Evony game. In order to pursue these enquiries I have relied on people from China with personal knowledge of the Evony game to feed me information. From the information provided by these people, it is apparent that Evony LLC’s claim against me is based on untrue statements, in particular the claim that Evony has fewer than 10 employees (which is a prerequisite to bringing defamation proceedings in Australia).

Therefore, I have a legitimate interest in publishing some of the evidence I have collected, on the basis that it will encourage further people to come forward with information. However, it is not possible for me to name these people or provide any further information to your client as many of my sources have expressed concerns for their personal safety, should their actions become known to your client.

Your letter is the clearest possible confirmation I could hope for that the information I have published is true and I note that your client has not denied any of the statements made about himself or Evony.

However, in view of your unjustified threats to seek an order on the grounds of privacy against me, I have now removed all articles from my blog which make reference to your client. This has been done on a temporary basis and without prejudice to my contention that these articles do not breach your client’s right to privacy or that he has such a right.

Since it is impossible to comply with the draft undertakings attached to your letter, please provide me within 7 days with a complete mark up of the articles on my blog highlighting the text you consider breaches your client’s alleged right to privacy so that I can consider your requests further for the undertakings numbered 1 to 3 on a permanent basis. Please also confirm which persons are covered by the description “David Guo, his family and friends”.

I cannot give undertaking number 4 as the information has been provided to me confidentially and is relevant to my defence in Australia.

There is no basis for you to request undertaking number 5 as you have not alleged that any of the published statements are defamatory. Furthermore, you have not identified any acts of harassment towards your client – rather your client has been harassing me through the courts and I have been defending myself.

In light of the above, there is no basis for your client to seek any orders from court, since I am willing to consider your client’s privacy concerns in a consensual manner and in the meantime have removed the content complained of. In the event that your client does seek an order, it should be on notice to me and give me sufficient time to seek legal representation. In the event that your client seeks an order without notice to me, this letter should be placed before the court.

Yours faithfully

Bruce Everiss

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In the world there are over 100 million blogs and they are monitored by a service called Technorati. So you can imagine how pleased I was two year ago when this blog made it to number 52,589 in their ranking. This with an “authority” of 121, which is a measure of how often it had been referred to by other blogs in the previous six months.

Fast forward to today and Bruceongames.com is now ranked as blog number 7,139 in the world. And the “authority” is now at 464. Not too shabby when you consider that it is targeted at a fairly narrow audience, game industry professionals, that there is only one person writing here and that there is no marketing budget.

So a big thank you to everyone who has made this possible. You the readers and also the many other bloggers who have chosen to refer to what is written here.

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So in November the site had 98,120 visits which resulted in 182,537 page views.

Visitors came from 165 separate countries or territories with USA providing more than half the traffic with 52,784. The UK was well behind with 12,134 then Canada 7,842.

Further down we have 733 from Singapore yet only 168 from Hong Kong. There were 42 from the Palestinian Territories, 13 from Sudan and 9 each from Azerbaijan and Moldova.

It is pretty obvious that the main factors for the geographical spread are use of the English language, population size and wealth (the ability to access a PC).

45% of the traffic came from referring sites, 44% from Google and 10% direct. What is interesting is that traffic came from 919 different sources and mediums which shows just how embedded Bruceongames is into the internet. The biggest referrer was Stumbleupon, but even FeministLawProfessors.com was sending traffic this way.

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It is a little interesting that both Gamesindustry.biz and MCV have recently released traffic details. Gamesindustry.biz at over 340K monthly uniques, MCV at over 240K monthly uniques. Now both these sites publish multiple articles every day written by multiple professional journalists. So my whimsical opinion pieces can hardly be expected to compete.

Here are the numbers that analytics are telling me for the last month of Bruceongames: Visitors 100,869, Uniques 91,014, Page views 185,954.

Imagine what they would be if I had a bit more content and a marketing budget!

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I am going away on a big holiday to strange and exotic lands.
A lot of time I will be travelling, a lot of time I will be where there is no easy interweb access and a lot of time I will be enjoying my holiday.
So I will have little, if any, time to look after Bruceongames. Which means comments may stack up for a while before being approved, but please still make them. Normal service should resume after 14 September.

To keep you happy I have written a whole pile of articles which should auto publish themselves to a schedule whilst I am away.

• 28 August: Some free advice for Michael Grade
• 31 August: About good management
• 2 September: Gran Turismo 5 (GT5) Vs Forza Motorsport 3 (FM3)
• 4 September: What do game publishers do and is there any need for them?
• 7 September: Will video gaming become the main form of human exercise?
• 9 September: How to manage fansites
• 11 September: The Great Flu
• 14 September: Microdigital in Liverpool

Obviously none of these can be news related. They are more industry background pieces. I hope you enjoy them.

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The site is copied and mirrored in lots of places and people use RSS feeds, so most article are seen far more times elsewhere.

However here are some facts and figures for the site itself:

• 639 posts.
• Over 2,700 comments on those posts.
• Just coming up to half a million visits. Over 400,000 absolute unique visitors.
• Over 49,000 visitors in the last month.
• Busiest day Feb 18th 2008, 13,426 visitors.
• Top 4 articles. How to pirate Microsoft Xbox 360 games 30,296, Don’t play Evony 27,734, Fanboys 27,169, Is the GPU holding the PS3 back? 21,177.
• Visitor nationality. USA 212,046, UK 96,567, Canada 36,099, Australia 16,563.
• 62% of traffic comes from links, 25% from search engines, 13% direct.
• Traffic came from 2,522 sources.
• 7,155 internet links to Bruceongames.com

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MCV are inviting nominations/votes for their annual media awards. One of the awards is for games blog and Bruceongames is precisely that. So if you think this site is worth a mention please email MCV at gma@intentmedia.co.uk

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Evony is a new, free, browser MMO. And their marketing consists of spamming up the internet like crazy. This blog is receiving a huge number of spam “comments” from them. Fortunately Akismet anti spam puts them automatically into the bin. Here are some of the email addresses they are using for this spam:

tsenseless.evony.com/bx8s07@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/4cdtyg0fv@hotmail.com

tsenseless.evony.com/m36fqptkw2@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/sfhwrv@live.com

tsenseless.evony.com/fhgpzdbk80@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/w85@darkhorsefan.net

tsenseless.evony.com/xycw5vd@student.com

tsenseless.evony.com/ndh4pr1@bolt.com

tsenseless.evony.com/f3ypkg6@postmark.net

tsenseless.evony.com/ftcs@usa.com

tsenseless.evony.com/6n8ck@naplesnews.net

tsenseless.evony.com/rjd@email.com

And so on. They are doing this from the IP address 63.223.110.211

Whois Record

OrgName:    Beyond The Network America, Inc.
OrgID:      BNA-42
Address:    450 Springpark PL
Address:    Suite 100
City:       Herdon
StateProv:  VA
PostalCode: 20170
Country:    US

NetRange:   63.216.0.0 - 63.223.255.255
CIDR:       63.216.0.0/13
NetName:    BTN-CIDR5
NetHandle:  NET-63-216-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-63-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.CAIS.COM
NameServer: NS2.CAIS.COM
Comment:    ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate:    1999-12-09
Updated:    2004-11-12

OrgAbuseHandle: PAD13-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   PCCW AUP Department
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-703-621-1637
OrgAbuseEmail:  

Edit: I have written a second Evony article giving an overview and background.

Is Evony Malware?

Evony advert ridiculed by PopCap.

Queen of Evony competition.

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For a long time now I have been bringing you a quick analysis of eight current news stories every week. This is  stopping because I feel that the analysis is not getting the attention it deserves. Instead I will post single item news “shorts” as and when they crop up. This should keep the site content fresher and better reflect the news flow.

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