Frans P. de Vries (Xymph)

Frans P. de Vries (alias Xymph) is a webmaster, programmer, and system administrator who was an early anchor of the Doom community from its inception in 1993 up to 1999.

Community activities
Frans was the lead support person in the Usenet hierarchy of newsgroups and a member of the RGCD Support Team. Aside from answering individual user queries and some administrative duties, he authored the RGCD FAQ and Other 3D Games FAQ to provide answers to commonly asked questions and pointers to further information about Doom-engine and other games.

Frans acted as primary maintainer of the idgames archive from December 1995 to February 1997, and was occasional backup to Ty Halderman during the latter's period as maintainer. On the side, he also administrated the non-Doom related (for Quake) and  archives, and still handles system administration for, the gamers.org server, and all its other gaming archives.

He was a major contributor to Hank Leukart's Doom FAQ, including its large ASCII logo.

Frans was instrumental in obtaining permission for release of the alpha and beta versions of Doom to the idgames archive, where he appears as their uploader.

Utilities
Frans is the author of the following editing utilities:
 * (DMPSMU) - Allows creation of a PostScript file containing the map of a Doom level.
 * (DMTXLS) - Generates cross-reference lists of used textures in Doom engine games.

Other notable activities
Frans was a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of the now defunct 3dgamers.com site which, amongst other titles, had significant coverage of Doom- and Quake-engine games. He was a major contributor to the Wolfenstein 3D & Spear of Destiny FAQ. He is also a programmer, system administrator and former editor for Blue's News, and an active member of the TrackMania community.