h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When the italics were reduced from six to two. Forget what we called it, which isn't surprising considering how swiss cheesed my brain is recently.

Was that Petunia? I think I was here then, but I don't remember a two week hiatus. Wasn't that the earlier Rupert?

No it was definately Petunia. We could still post on site but no new entries were added and we were all left in suspense to whether we'd have a site to come back to (what with Book of the Future and Sense of Place closing just before the blip).

Rupert was a lot longer than two weeks, more like four months!

Or maybe that was just me.

That was just you. Rupert was about six weeks!

Had a feeling I'd be way off, although it certainly felt like that at the time.

Nah, the bit where we didn't get paid for two and a half months felt *much* longer!

The Lufthansa mass sacking was about 8 years ago in their in flight catering base at Heathrow

Where's my sodding backlog, this is getting silly, are we going to getnthese messages back or will they be lost in the "we'll get around to it soon"

They'll all be back today, don't worry.

What I'm miffed about is I always thought the mods were supposedly subcontracted out, and therefore shouldn't have been affected by the strike. Am I wrong in assuming this?

Sorry for posting during the strike, but I was very confused I hadn't heard about the strike, being in france, and when I read about the pre-mod stuff I thought that everything would be on pre-mod but that the posts would appear within a few minutes and that we should post as normal...

So sorry for making more work for the mods!

what lol ?

We have a habit of naming site downtime.

I suggest yesterday should be called Thompson part one, and next week Thompson part two.

Surely from a political point of view, the more we posted during the strike, the better.

The service the BBC is supposed to supply in this case is a community website. If we don't try and use it on a strike day, that it looks to management like a minimum of disruption was caused, therefore the strike didn't achieve its aims. If, on the other hand, we posted a lot, and caused a massive backlog for the mods, then it proves that this is a well-used service, and the strike caused a large amount of disruption, which means that the threat of another strike would carry more weight.

People who post aren't crossing a virtual picket line, because we are customers, not fellow employees.

Oh, well, in that case I'm not sorry and I did it on purpose to show that the mods need to be employed by the beeb because we need them!

I see that point. i agree.

i still didn't post because i couldn't see what i posted to!

>> even more disruption?

Hi Croz,

The mods of h2g2 are contracted out, but that's not true of all of the other messageboards. All BBC sites that are reactively moderated have an escalation procedure team, who are there to sort out serious emergencies, and without hosts *and* the escalation team many of the BBC communities and boards needed to close.

In other words you couldn't leave the site open in case some git decided to take advantage of your absence and start a massive trolling campaign.

So when's my journal entry going to appear There's no trace of it and it was a really good one about knickers

It was awfully quiet here yesterday. I was tiptoeing about the site thinking how spookily empty it was ... turned out there were 152 people logged on

Mol

Good skills italics. I hope you get more of your colleagues out for the next one. Thogh 40% is pretty good I reckon.