The Long Dark Teatime Of h2g2
Created | Updated Jun 22, 2003
The Long Dark Teatime Of h2g2 or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The BBC
(working and not-very-funny title)
Well. In case you have been living under a rock which has no internet access for the last 6 or 7 weeks, our beloved h2g2 has been offline. Now it's back, and everyone is flooding, or more accurately oozing, back to their old haunts, almost everything is back to how it was in the good old days. Except for some slightly silly new rules (allegedly), nothing has changed. After the period of the flop, as I have heard it described, everyone is continuing like the perfectly rational people that they are, neatly sidestepping the fact that six otherwise valuable weeks of their lives have been needlessly wasted.
For some, those six weeks were the longest they'd ever had to survive. Those were the people with no lives outside h2g2. For the rest of us, though, it was still a pretty long time. What was there to do? No one knew what was happening, because there was no prior announcement. No one knew when the site was coming back at least for a while. Some feared the worst: the end of the world as they knew it, the apocalypse, the demise of the guide. They began to panic. The little forum that h2g2 had set up as a refugee camp was singularly inefficient. Everyone I spoke to on the Muses e-group was setting up contingency plans, making new sites and swearing undying brotherhood (Or sisterhood... it depended on their sex). I was quite bemused by this... sure in the wisdom of h2g2 towers. But I began to miss my friends who weren't Muses. I was bored. I had so much spare time where I couldn't bring myself to do actual work. So I started looking for my friends. This is how I found the die-harders of the h2g2 community.
The first place I found was the h2g2 e-group. Containing 938 users in total, it seemed as though my problems were solved. Until I realised how much more time on their hands 937 people had than me. It was nigh on impossible to hold conversations with the accumulated weight of so many talkative researchers. I could only get on in the evenings, by which time my previous comments had been lost in the mire of chat. I tried valiantly, but found that I couldn't keep in touch. Also, any attempt at societies went out of the window, and
I found out from a friend that certain elements of the community had set up at The Temporary h2g2 Board
This was far more like it. There was everything - forums, other people, a veritable community. There was an active branch of the Aroma Café, the Crossed Purposes, The Donut Stall and the Atelier, which had a huge number of postings. This last one is significant, because it is still in use. The Atelier will continue to live at the Ezboard until external pictures are allowed at the guide. It seemed like a perfect stop gap until such time that h2g2 was back up, but it was still very much a poor imitation of the guide we all knew and loved: we couldn't have user pages, or endless forums, and although there was a section for new articles, few used it for such. And I pined for the lack of a *stout* smiley. People were still disheartened though, knowing very well that this could never replace h2g2.
'I miss h2g2 terribly and worry that h2g2 may not make it back'
Gwenllian42
When it was announced that Auntie would be taking the site over, there was near-universal mass elation, barely reduced by the fact that there was ages to wait before we were finally let back on. Now, with everything hunky-dorey (well, largely) nothing appears to have changed. One problem seems to be the fact that only a few seem to be aware of h2g2's return. Perhaps an email from the towers wouldn't go amiss. And maybe some decent refugee camps, too, should the unthinkable happen once more.
