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

I thought I'd drop in and say hello; we've been talking a bit recently and I realised I don't really know much about you.

To be specific, I waned to know some basic things about you -

Sex, age, location, who did you vote for at the last election, what's your favourite colour, favourite food, favourite book, what colour is your mousepad and how many active windows have you got at the moment.

Me?
Male, 19, Perth - Western Australia, Australian Labor Party, orange (at the moment), pizza or steak, tough call - anything by John Marsden or hhgttg, dull grey, four.

See you around,
Rob.

Great questions. I already wrote this in a couple other message posts, but in case you haven't read them yet, I put links to the ASCII Uprising from the Zaphodista Communiques page and also from the Workarounds page, plus I put that awesome poster on the bottom of the main Zaphodista page. (You could put "Almighty Rob" in a corner of the poster, if you wanted to sign it. I predict this poster will begin appearing on lots of peoples' personal spaces before long, if you make it easy for them to copy & paste that code.)

Male.
28.
MARRIED! YIKES! (Why else would I call myself "SUBcomandante?" Guess who my Comandante is?)
Lower Peninsula of Michigan in the USA.
Voted for Ralph Nader and the Green Party.
FavoUrite color? = usually green or olive drab.
FavoUrite food? hard to say since I'm a gourmand, but maybe beef & broccoli stir-fry.
Fav. books: Hitchhiker's Guide, authors Donald Westlake, Loren Estleman, Piers Anthony, Harry Harrison, Robert Sheckly, and I've been checking out Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn lately, excellent and scary stuff.
Hope you're not too disappointed by my mouse pad -- it's a bulldog and cat clawing/embracing each other on a couch, as if discovered in the middle of making out. (The same image was used in a tv commercial for some video camera that captures images in very low light, and this is supposed to be one of those rare moments you'll capture if you start using this camera.) Got it for my wife, but I like it too.
Four windows open right now. (Great question, I would have never thought of that, but it tells a lot about a person, or at least the capabilities of their computer.)

Unfortunately, I have to close the rest of these windows and go to the laundromat. [THE REVOLUTION MUST BE OCCASIONALLY LAUNDERED!] Your entries have been great lately, and very inspiring. I've been considering dropping out (timing it to drop out on the same day that I get a guide entry accepted to the edited guide) because I'm afraid the petition will do no good. But you may be right. If we get public opinion on our side, they will have to listen to us.

Gotta go. Talk to you later,
Deidzoeb

[wrote this in the afternoon on Sunday, but couldn't get it to post correctly, too much traffic on h2g2? maybe my ISP?]

Don't drop out, Subcom.

I think there are some things that have gone really wrong with the site, but if people drop out, what does it achieve? Nothing. The BBC continues to infringe peoples rights. Just because they don't complain doesn't mean it's not happening. We need to be the voice of the oppressed.

Cheers,
Rob.

I'll stick around. It just gets frustrating. I keep trying to convince people that BBC shows lousy business sense in their actions, that there are hundreds of other online communities where we could write freely without BBC's restrictions, and I'm doing a better job of convincing myself about the whole thing. Why are we wasting our time here when they show no signs of changing anything significantly? Why spend an extra second on this site when we know it has reduced functionality (if you understand censorship as a stumbling block to our goals of communicating with each other)?

h2g2 has more character and more atmosphere than other online communities. Does that outweigh the disadvantages that BBC has dumped on it? Guess we'll have to wait and see.

I need to stop talking about it and do something about the petition, try to clarify it and patch up the last few stumbling points. Thanks for the pep talk.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELE-TUBBIED!

Personally, I think the character *does* outweigh the impositions.

If we are forced to leave because of the BBC, then we have lost everything the community meant to us: fun, friendship, atmosphere. Are we going to let them take this from us, too?

We have to stand up because if we give up now we'll have lost everything. If we hang around, things change. They changed under the Towers' regime and they'll change under the BBC's. It's just a matter of staying around, staying vocal and waiting until they recognise our legitimate concerns.

Keep fighting.
Rob.

"Personally, I think the character *does* outweigh the impositions."

For me, the impositions have become part of the character of this site. I can't think of it as the playful place where I can talk with intelligent people anymore. I now think of it as a place where I can talk with intelligent people about some topics, if I word things right, and constantly risk getting kicked out if I offend moderators as much as moderation offends me.

"If we are forced to leave because of the BBC, then we have lost everything the community meant to us: fun, friendship, atmosphere. Are we going to let them take this from us, too?"

Actually, the fact that so many h2g2 researchers kept in contact through other websites while h2g2 was down proves to me that this community could exist in a somewhat weakened state even if h2g2 went down entirely, and a community of refugees will be able to stay in contact elsewhere even if they get banned or decide to quit.

Anyway, I didn't mean to get into that again. I was just going to ask more details about the Zaphodista poster getting removed. It sounded like they sent you an email describing how they thought it broke the rules. Was there some problem with the words written above the poster (something about "overthrowing" the BBC?) or was it just the poster itself? You mentioned that the image of a person with a gun was too much. Did they say that in the email, or are you speculating?

If the poster itself was considered offensive or somehow breaking the rules, then this illustrates yet again the discrepancies between different moderators. I added the same image to the bottom of the Zaphodista main page yesterday afternoon. It was still showing there when I looked today around 2pm, when I saw that your Zaphodista propaganda page had been deleted. I removed the poster just to prevent them from deleting the Zaphodista page, but I saved the code for the image just in case. I doubt that the Zaphodista page went 24 hours without being checked by a moderator. But one moderator decided to delete your page, and another moderator left the image on the Zaphodista main page.

I was thinking about writing an article "A Modest Proposal for Consistent Censorship." If they can't recognize your rifle-toting Zaphodista ASCII image as a joke in the context of all the other guerrilla and war rhetoric throughout the text of the Zaphodista pages, then to be consistent, they should delete all the Zaphodista pages. But I'm kind of worried that they would do it. The censorship keeps getting more and more ridiculous, and I can't predict to what depths they will eventually sink.

(replying to myself here?-- sorry, it just reminded me of something else...)

"For me, the impositions have become part of the character of this site."

This goes back to the idea of BBC's "brand image" too. Somewhere on one of the FAQ or Help pages, around the time h2g2 first reappeared under BBC, I thought I read about them taking some of these actions to maintain the BBC's positive "brand image." (But I haven't been able to find the bit again in later searches.)

They think they're maintaining a wholesome, positive image by removing all the questionable "offensive" material from h2g2, but when I think of BBC now, I think of CENSORSHIP, lack of business sense, their desire to maintain total control and their expressions of how little trust they have for the public.

In my view, they will only repair the ongoing damage to their brand image if they return to the low level of restrictions that h2g2 used to have, more in keeping with industry standards for webhosts and online communities around the world.

I'll post some relevant extracts from the email here.

"Thank you for contributing to h2g2. Unfortunately we've had to remove your Guide Entry below because it contravenes the h2g2 House Rules, which you can find at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/HouseRules

'the BBC will be overthrown, and our community will be ours once more... Keep fighting. The war has just begun'

The use of Ascii art was/is fine, depicting a man shooting a gun within it is not. War with words
fine, gun pics against h2g2 policy is not appropriate. I'm sending you another email too, about whether you want to remain an Ace.

Regards...[Name removed by me - see, self-censorship is a lot better]

If you would like to re-write your contribution to remove the problem, then we'd be very happy for you to add it to the Guide again."

As you can see, I think the overall tone was misinterpreted. It was a bit of a parody, a joke. The poster is actually a Cuban revolutionary poster... but irony often gets missed when you over-zealously censor things. It's like "Huckleberry Finn", that great anti-slavery work, being banned for the use of the word 'n****r'...

Oh well...
I'm a bit tired now, I've been protesting all day at the Stock Exchange, in what the media dubbed "violent clashes with police" - a peaceful blockade in which the only injury I saw was a protestor punched in the head several times by overenthusiastic coppers. Hmm. Reminds me of certain h2g2 policies...

Cheers,
Have a good day.

Rob.


PS I'll email you the poster as soon as I get the chance.

How strange. The above message might also get removed or deleted because some of the h2g2 staff consider the text of every email that they send (especially those concerning moderation) as if it were some kind of private property. I've seen them remove message posts where people quoted from h2g2 staff emails they had received.

Seems to me that any time you send a letter or an email, it should become the property (physically and "intellectually") of the recipient, unless the letter explicitly states that it is to be kept private. Oh well.

As for the text about "overthrowing" the BBC, I guess it's a fine line between what they consider a joke or a threat. I've been careful to point out that i'm joking when I talk about "war" and "battle" and all that, but they apparently thought that you were serious, or maybe some moderators became worried that an ASCII image of a man with a rifle was intended as a real threat.

Again, it's conspicuous that no moderators took any action when the same thing was posted at bottom of the main Zaphodista page for 24 hours.

I was thinking a few days ago of making an ASCII version of the famous image of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc (?) burning himself to death in protest of the Diem regime. But that would probably be a little too over-the-top, especially if the Powers That Delete thought your rifleman was "offensive," or whatever excuse they want to use this time.

But yes, failure to recognize parody has been popping up a lot lately. Heard about the recent lawsuit to prevent publication of "Wind Done Gone"? It's a parody of Gone With The Wind from the perspective of a mulatto half-sister of Scarlett. The estate of Margaret whatshername sued to prevent it from being published. In this day and age, the right to parody or free speech is overpowered by the all-important need for corporations and rich individuals to maintain their "intellectual property".

HEY! Do you think you could change the rifle into a big DAISY or some kind of flower? People would recognize the man's stance and arm position as if he were holding a rifle, but instead he'd have a big sunflower or something? You might consider emailing a copy of it to Peta first (er, I mean, whoever might have written that email, just a lucky guess) to ask if a soldier holding a giant flower would be acceptable.

make him hold a broken TV aerial maybe?

Yes, the keyword here being "BROKEN."