ILE Contingency Plans

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Say LUSENET went down, for good, tomorrow. Should DG and I have any contingency plans? Would you want to keep in touch with the people here? And if so how?

― Tom, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Gah! I thought that said "So LUSENET...." as if it was really happening. Ye scared me!

So I guess the answer to question #1 is yes. I'd prefer through a message board.

― Maria, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

We'll all move shop to the Pitchfork message board. No, I really would want to keep in contact with youze guys, so figure something out! Perhaps we should start a website.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yes you should. I suppose "yahoogrops" is thee obvious one, tho' a mail list like analogue heaven might work better. Also, I think U &/or DG should back up the "archive" fairly frequently, if this is a bearable chore.

I would want to keep in tough w/ILE-ers, preferablt through a similar forum, I dunno how, you're the l33t one, I'm a lamer. Any suggestions etc etc

― Norman Phay, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The crudeness of the system is essential. Any backup plan (NOT email please!) should keep this in mind. No graphics, please.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Can we plan on just looking at site like Freaky Trigger for news if that was to happen?

― Samantha, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

mysefl and other tech-inclined types could probably get a lusenet-clone off and running in fairly short order. The massive server space required for our sprawl is a different question, however.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

We must keep in contact or all is lost.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

For a holding place and for communication purposes, e.g when greenspun is down Yahoo Groups is a good idea. (Also note that Yahoo Clubs will be merged into Yahoo Groups in the next few weeks)

maybe Tom/DG could set an ILE group @ Yahoo Groups for contingency/communication purposes - also there are features to store pictures, add bookmarks, create polls, also the yahoo members profiles are useful - all these functions could COMPLIMENT LUSENET / greenspun. For multiple conversations however Yahoo Groups is not practical.

For an alternative bulletin board forum software, see the Ultraboard software @ Ultraboard

― DJ Martian, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I dunno you all can participate in a mass suicide? At least it would make the news?

― micheal reed, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

*sends good vibes to the LUSENET system*

― james, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

tsk tsk michael. Not all of us were debating the cancerous gray mass that is media culture with you.

― Samantha, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I was being "proactive" and "brainstorming".

― micheal reed, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Ultraboard is pretty shit, or at least the last version I installed was. it would do for temporary solution, but is hard to maintain, and the code was absolutely appalling, (therefore hard to change). It really wouldn't be hard to write a simple version of LUSENET in Perl or similar, providing we had access to an SQL server. Even the full thing wouldn't be too hard to write given a bit of time

― michael, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Sorry, you've lost me. Is there something to be worried about? Is our beloved Greenspun.com on its last legs or something?

― DG, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Apparently yes - someone's found a loophole in Greenspun's security and is going round destroying forums using javascript (this picked up from looking at Anarchy). If you've got the time DG (I've not tonight :( ) then you should probably make a backup!

― Tom, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

No DG, Tom is thinking of possible scenarios if Greenspun no longer existed - i.e strategic contingency plans of what to do in the event of no Greenspun !

― DJ Martian, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I stand corrected.

― DJ Martian, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Well the original question was kind of like that DJ M but it was informed by my quickly touring Lusenet and seeing that all kinds of nonsense was breaking out on other forums.

The 'destruction' of the Anarchy forum isn't too dissimilar to stuff I've edited out before on ILM, but not on the front page (though that's doable).

Security idea - we make it impossible to post to the front page unless you're a moderator. Then we give everyone whose posted more than n times a moderator password so they can start questions. This basically removes the moderators' privileges and also potentially endangers the privacy of the forum and means that if one of us were to go mad they could delete everything etc. etc. so it's pretty drastic. OR only DG and I can post front-page topics, and people e- mail us with them. This would take the spontaneity away a bit especially if you post between 1 am and 9 am GMT.

― Tom, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

does josh or ned know re ILM?

wait, i'm an ILM moderator! — can i make a back up? blimey surely it is v.timeconsuming (esp. on my teenytiny computator?): should i wait for someone with megabandwidth?

― mark s, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Who, me? I don't think I could effectively help...I suppose I could stuff the contents onto my hard drive for a bit, though.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The other option is to turn IL* into a password-protected forum, effectively requiring 'membership' (i.e. being told the password by somebody who knows it). That would get rid of random spammers.

From what I can see the problem on other forums has been i) offensive spammers going apeshit with what we liberal sorts might call 'hate speech' and ii) people arsing about with HTML and Java. ILE is still more vulnerable to (i) in that deleting tons of abusive messages gets old and boring fast. In our favour we may be big and noticeable in Greenspun terms but we are fairly placid and not an inflammatory place anyway. We should still think about what to do if 'disaster' strikes though.

― Tom, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i would do it like a shot obv. except i fear it would be more drawn-out than a shot on my v.ancient system: and if it took eg 8-10 hours to download then (as it = past midnight now here) i would have a miserable night sat up checking my connection did not cut off for low activity etc

― mark s, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I'm off to bed anyway. Hope ILE's still here in the morning! :)

― Tom, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

er, ok, i'm taking Tom's response as a "no need to make a bac-up here and now mark"

― mark s, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Right, here's DG's thoughts:
1) I'll look into this backup business, if it'll take ages I'll set it going and go to bed.
2) Surely if ILE were to go password protected we'd never get anyone new here? Unless you want to post the password on NYLPM or something, but that defeats the object really.

― DG, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

my beast is reialble and quite large. i can and would be willing to be an archive if needed.

― anthony, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

My contingency plain for ILM's failure = get a whole lot more done with my life, really. :)

Somewhere inbetween Tom's ideas is the idea of actual usable moderators: i.e., password-protect the front page, give the password to a couple trustable regulars across the sweep of time zones, and give them all access to a central email account where questions are sent. So long as western Europe, N. America, and Aus / NZ are covered, that shouldn't kill spontaneity too much.

― Nitsuh, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The supplied backup isn't feasible, from the looks of things the form of the boards wouldn't be preserved so we'd end up with an enormous list of messages.

― DG, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

that's what we have here DG! I think what it also implies is that someone who knows how to do it could then rewire that basic blob of data (the threads, one after another) into something like what we have, with a search and change…

Not me though. I tried clicking on the ILM back-up provider, but (as I expected with my system) couldn't get a connection.

― mark s, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Contingency Plan A - Email Ned and be all "Hey Neddy, what's the deal?".

Contincency Plan B - as usual, there is no plan B.

― Kim, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Hurrah! I am content to be the contact person for the Good People, a group to which Kim belongs. :-)

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 28 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

DO i , because i want to be part of this password thing .

― anthonyeaston, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

there must be another similar bulletin board system somewhere, we should stick with lusenet until the balloon goes up, since I really like the informality of the system here but make sure that everyone knows where this new board is incase of problems, password protecting the forum would stifle the forum somewhat and passing threads through moderators would also be somewhat tedious, especially for the moderators.

― another james, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Sorry that post was actually from me, Ed, very confusing but I'm using another james's computer at the moment while I wait for a new power supply for mine.

anyway I founf this list of forum sites.

― Ed, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

further thought: could we ask the masters of lusenet to put a filter on posts to filter out aanything contained within tags

― Ed, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

further thought: could we ask the masters of lusenet to put a filter on posts to filter out aanything contained within tags

― Ed, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

grr, I can't remmener the tag that allows you to display tags instead of having them rendered. should have been SCRIPT tags

― Ed, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

< for <
> for >

if no-one else has done it, I will email [email protected] (the address given for bug fixes etc) and ask them to stop SCRIPT tags, if that's what it was.

― michael, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

What about a party chat line? You know those advertisements on telly where they have all these cuties talking on the phone to eachother. We could do that. (joke!)

― helen fordsdale, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

They haven't done anything clever, just added a <SCRIPT> tag in the subject line, which makes the browser treat everything below that on the page as a JavaScript instead of displaying it on screen. Nothing gets deleted or anything, so it's no problem for moderators to delete this if it does happen, and I'm sure whoever it is will get bored and/or Greenspun will be patched before it becomes a serious issue.

― Graham, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

yeah i just wandered over to the Anarchy forum (rather more offensive than the 'offensive' threads here!) and noticed it was all still there, fine. so either the moderators there have removed the posts, or LUSENET's been fixed already.

― michael, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

It happens with the TITLE tag too incidentally which I've had to change a couple of times here (eg Stevo's virus post today) so don't use that either.

Its nothing clever but it's a pain in the arse to edit as you have to fiddle with the source code (it fucks up the usual Greenspun editing pages too).

― Tom, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

If you look within each post on Anarchy they've done it on every thread - v.hassley to fix. I think the, uh, hardcore nature of that forum probably attracts that kind of vandalism.

― Tom, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

hardcore nature of that forum

ILE vs Anarchy: FITE

― Graham, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Remeber in the first few days of ILE when DG proposed we move off Greenspun? Even though we were only there like 2 days I still have the URL memorised. I always check it when greenspun goes down, but alas it seems no one else is as sad as me.

― Graham, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i'm glad ILE never moved there - it crashed Netscape and then caused a blue screen when I exited Netscape. why are people unable to write decent, simple webpages? plus it's all the advert servers, and crap JavaScript code those kind of sites have.

― michael, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

(re helen's suggestion: the simpsons gag proves that chatlines cater to NO cute foax, or indeed gurlz, only barney, apu, principle skinner and mayor quimby)

― mark s, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

well, my brother has written and runs his own customisable message boards so if the whole thing goes belly up you could all come and set up a board round his place : www.chatbear.com . plug plug.

― mms, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Only if he renames it www.pizzabear.com

― Nick, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

fisrt thing to be done is move dg or tom to a secure, ye undisclosed location...2nd is to issue a statement saying nothing is worng, go about yr lives as normal, and whatever you do, DONT PANIC!!!!!!

― geoff, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

[email protected] hurrah

― mark s, Thursday, 29 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

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