User:Fleetwood/My Own Memory Lane
I first started bothering BoyChat admin about the Digest sometime in 2001 (possibly late 2000) when I realized that BoyChat had become important enough to me that I wanted to give something back. Being somewhat of a history buff to start with I thought that bringing the digest back would be a cool thing to do.
I was met with tons of indifference, and hostility from some but overall the cry of “It's impossible to do” seemed to be impregnated in every answer I received. That is, if I received any answer at all. Despite that, I tried to keep on pushing and hoping that someone would listen. About this time The Great Outage occurred which obviously left everyone wondering if Free Spirits or BoyChat would return at all, let alone the issue of the Digest ever returning.
In August of 2001 I found myself with a lot of time on my hands and once again started the push for a Digest. This time Zero had actually taken the issue to the Free Spirits Committee and had initially returned and posted to Meta BoyChat that I was given the go ahead to start digesting. This was followed up quickly by a retraction stating there were issues about retaining posts for the digest and he would get back to me with an answer. The answer never came. In the meantime, not knowing what was going on I decided to start collecting posts anyway in the chance that something would work out. By October 2001 I stopped, because I could see the Digest issue was once again dead.
Sometime in November of 2001, the Free Spirits server suffered a CPU failure and all Free Spirits sites were moved to a borrowed server. It took almost 6 months for the server to be restored to duty and I'm not aware of why it took so long to accomplish but it's relevant to this telling.
I'm foggy on this particular time frame but I pushed again for the Digest and this time Flyboy took up the cause. We actually made some great strides in progress and had even gathered 5-7 persons interested in helping out with production. Our brick wall this time was stated to me by Wu-K'ung who said that copyright issues and the issue of being on a borrowed server were preventing any board being set up for use on the digest. This would put the time around the beginning of 2002.
Sometime in January or February of 2002 I attempted to at least try and work on the past 1998 to present posts which I had planned to complete here at home. I had asked Cris who was serving on the Free Spirits Committee to try and help me get a resolution or a start so that I could continue off line while Free Spirits was on a borrowed server.
The answer I received that time was something about the older posts being off line and there would be difficulty in getting them transferred to my possession. I'm not sure exactly what the trouble was but this latest attempt and by then expected brick wall was enough for me to shelve the idea again.
In the Summer of 2002, Puzzled started his own version of a BoyChat Digest which was hosted elsewhere and named The Unofficial BoyChat Digest. During its run from about July of 2002 until March of 2003 the Unofficial Digest seemed to be quite popular with BoyChat posters. Towards March of 2003, Puzzled announced that he would be discontinuing the Unofficial Digest after the March issue. I believe it was Puzzled who brought the issue of having an Official Digest start functioning again to Meta BoyChat.
I took some part in the conversation there but was still feeling standoffish because I expected another brick wall as all the walls that came before it. Yet everything seemed to go right this time and with HoldenC taking the issue to the cogs and then to the FSC, the next thing I knew, I was being asked to take the position of Editor. A few days later a Digest Team board was set up by Zero and I was able to finally start something I had been waiting to do for over two years.
The original Digest Team consisted of Cog Liaisons:
The original Gesters (name thought up by Zero) were:
The early days were crazy trying to get everything rolling. Float volunteered to do the site design and also thought about coding something so that we would be able to collect posts automatically. He was joined by Cognito and together they came up with the first version of Digest Tools that were used to compile issues from April 2003 - January 2004. Initially they were set up and running on a donated server and issues April 2003 - June 2003 were completed there.
Permissions to use posts in the Digest were covered by adding a disclaimer to the BoyChat post template and also the area of a reply. I suggested this manner of permission since it seemed the easiest way to go. Posts made between April 1, 2003 and April 7, 2003 had slipped past the disclaimer and Space Cadet took to the task of gaining permission for those posts that we selected but did not have permission to use. He was successful in gaining permission for a large majority of those posts you see in that issue now.
In June of 2003 there was a mass exodus of Gesters and the loss of the donated server which ran the tools. With that loss and combined with the fact of Summer happening in my area, most of the work on the Digest stopped. I would select posts as I had time but I believe that July and August for the most part were selected in sessions of about two hours each. I played with various ideas on how to compile issues manually but the task of collecting posts one at a time combined with all of the manual html gave me a case of the shits to be blunt.
Holden and I attempted to replace the tools where selected posts would be moved from the BoyChat main index to a board where they could be edited. Zero set up the board but Holden and I soon found out that the move tool would only move posts that were on the main index and hadn't gone into Old posts. We were dead in the water again.
About September 2003 several things happened that got the digest rolling again. I decided to set up a computer here in my home that would run the tools and at least allow the ease of automation to get caught up. Atom joined the Digest Team about this time and put July 2003 together by hand while I got the tools running at home. Atom immediately started talking about making digest tools that would possibly run on the FreeSpirits server.
The August 2003 - January 2004 issues of the digest were compiled on my computer at home but not without difficulty which ranged from corrupted ASP files to a HDD failure on my machine. One of the most difficult things about having to grab posts with the tools from a location outside of Free Spirits was the enormous difficulty we ran into trying to circumvent the automatic ban tool to prevent archiving which was put in place to thwart the Something Awful attacks. There were several times where I had to mail the security team and have them remove my IP from the banned list. This of course made things a lot more slow and caused more delays with compiling each issue. It seems there was always something technical during this time which was causing many headaches and delays.
When starting to compile the January 2004 issue it was discovered the tools were having difficulty handling the year of 2004 and there were many many other issues with them. We no longer had any tool support from the creator so Atom put together the first version of the current tools. Initially these new tools ran on Atom's machine at his location but it wasn't long before Atom suffered his own hardware trouble and we were without tools again.
By March it was apparent that we needed a location for the tools where everyone could access them. The March 2004 - June 2004 issues were compiled on another donated server. From the beginning of the new tool project, Free Spirits had been consulted and asked about transferring the tools to the FreeSpirits server but the scripts had to pass the security team scrutiny before that could be done.
There have been several attempts at gaining new Gesters since the last group left in June 2003 but the level of interest has been almost none. I often find it very discouraging. In July 2004 the PHP tools were finally installed on the Free Spirits server. The July 2004 issue of the digest will be the first one to be completed on the Free Spirits server.
August 2004.
