Please explain recent ups and downs of this forum

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

With unbelievably bad timing I got very sick on Dec 30, and even sicker on the 31st. (I'm better, and just now able to sit up long enough to use the computer.) I was following the ups and downs of this forum, but finally gave up. I know that Philip Greenspun kicked us off for the second time and wrote a letter saying forumites had sent nasty letters to the president of MIT and otherwise misbehaved. Someone named Lisa set up an alternate forum, but that's about the time I crapped out. Now I see we're back in business. How did that happen?

-- Pearlie Sweetcake (storestuff@home.now), January 01, 2000

Answers

Sorry to hear you've been sick. Hope you're better.

Where to begin? Hmmmmmmm. Well, Phil had a technological mental meltdown and proceeded (at the worst possible time of all or best, depending on which end of the dollar you were on) to make 'demands'. Many buckled, he conceded and here we are!

THANK YOU LISA FOR BEING EMOTIONALLY RELIABLE (it's a woman thang)

THEN, when the lights stayed on, a WHOLE bunch of ninnies who had *been* anticipating a 5, suddenly blew fuses wondering why NYE hadn't gone instant Infomagic. Apparently they had only been prepping like 'wanna-be Doomers'. -yikes-

Now people's heads are spinning around on their shoulders as we seperate the wheat from the chaffe GI-wise and the pollys and trolls are foaming and bouncing off the walls.

Very entertaining actually. Happy New Year Pearlie Sweetcake!

-- Will continue (farming@home.com), January 01, 2000.


Hi Pearlie,

wondered what had happened to you. Isn't it great to have lights??? It's not all over yet, let's see what next week brings. But I always did think the grid would stay up....I know my hubby..and he is very smart..he told me so!:>

-- Moore dinty Moore (dac@ccrtc.com), January 01, 2000.


Thank you, Will Continue, for the best summary of forum events anyone could have written. LOL! Pearlie, that about covers it!

-- (RUOK@yesiam.com), January 01, 2000.

Did someone (or many someones) send money to Philip Greenspun?

-- Pearlie Sweetcake (storestuff@home.now), January 01, 2000.

I did not kick anyone off! The server was overwhelmed by forumites who were using desktop robots in an attempt to copy all 300,000 old messages to their local hard drives (I guess on the theory that this Unix server would die on January 1, though in fact its ancient bones and my software appear to have been unaffected). So it was forum users who effectively closed the forum.

I spent several days with a colleague adding servers, upgrading software to newer more efficient versions, and creating a static forum archive available for download on another computer (try http://homepage.lcs.mit.edu:8 123/ -- this way the archivists won't compete for scarce computer resources with interactive users.

I was a little bit annoyed that I had to spend my New Year's doing all of this system administration because, frankly, the Y2K forum has been a thorn in my side for 1.5+ years. When a forum user doesn't like the moderation policy, he complains to me! When I tell him that I don't moderate the many thousands of forums at greenspun.com, he complains to senior MIT officialdom (this has happened every month or two for the past 18 months). Of course, none of these MIT officials have any idea what greenspun.com or the TB2000 forum is. You can imagine...

To see whether or not it was worth my continuing to invest so much time in this forum, I experimented to see if the users cared enough to donate some money to a no-kill animal shelter (see www.sarasanctuary.org and http://db.photo.net/shoppe/). A bunch of people did (nearly $5000 raised) so I decided "Yes, I'll spend the next few days really working on this software."

Next step: I'm going to spend about $20,000 of cash and admin time to set up a dual-P800 Intel server (probably 6X the computing power of the current server (a 5-year-old quad-CPU 167 MHz Solaris machine)). I'm going to have one of my students rewrite the software to accomodate a forum where people use fake email addresses. We're hoping to have all of this set up in stages starting in February. So Y2K discussion will be much faster and better-supported soon.

Keep in mind through all of this that we have never thought Y2K was an interesting topic! If you check http://greenspun.com/bboard/ you'll see discussions about Edgar Allen Poe or photography. We can support hundreds of these forums for the same admin and computer cost as TB2000 (since their users aren't as active, don't use fake email addresses, and don't all try to pull 300,000 messages down to their desktops within a few hours).

Bottom line is that by donating money to SARA you've saved a lot of dogs' and cats' lives and also motivated a small group of computer nerds here to provide continued financial support and effort to make the Y2K forums possible.

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), January 01, 2000.



Oh yes, to clarify the question above: nobody sent money to me personally! All the money was a tax-deductible contribution to a 501(c)(3) non-profit animal shelter in Seguin, Texas. I have no connection with them except that I've donated a minivan and some stock photography earnings (derived from http://photo.net/photo/ ) to them.

Money for the new server will come from my pocket (or maybe I can browbeat the valinux.com or penguincomputing.com folks into giving me one since we're MIT! The server on which the forum is current running was donated by Sun Microsystems in 1995, by the way). I'm waiting for the dual P-800s to become available (Intel has announced them but apparently not shipped any). Then we need 2 GB of RAM and five 50 GB hard drives (we will mirror these X2 and then have a hot spare; total of two mirrored disks (not very good for Oracle performance -- one really wants to have 17 mirrored drives -- but easy and simple to maintain)).

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), January 01, 2000.


Phil...

And I thank you!

-- Tommy Rogers (Been there@Just a Thought.com), January 01, 2000.


Thank you Philip, for your help, for hosting us, and for caring about animals.

-- Pearlie Sweetcake (storestuff@home.now), January 01, 2000.

God Bless you Phil. Check is in the mail. Taz

-- Taz (Tassi123@aol.com), January 01, 2000.

Once again, I say "Thank You Philip!"

You went the extra distance, during a rough, uncertain time, and it's greatly appreciated.

We will continue the "donation drive" into next week, and will somehow reach the goal of $7,500.00 donated to SARA, per your request.

And... somewhere... somehow... (although it may take a few months)... you've made a friend for life Philip. I run into some "interesting" people--CEO's and Key Executives--from time to time, in Silicon Valley, and I will "nudge" some equipment donations your MIT server farm way.

That's a promise!

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), January 01, 2000.



For the credit/debit card challenged... donation checks can be sent to:

SARA Sanctuary 1050 Rawhide Road Seguin, TX 78155

Put a note in to credit Philip Greenspun and ArsDigita for the donation.

Thanks all... for "motivating" these wonderful "MIT nerds."

;-D

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), January 02, 2000.


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