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

Character assassination, SEF, is *never* relevant.

SEF, i'll try and find some examples, but no promises.

BYT, h2g2 has a habit of doing things like this lately, i'm afraid you will just have to either get used to it, or leave now, before the addiction takes hold.

Whoami, unfortunately, we are this "fierce" frequently. not always, i agree, but a significant proportion of the time.

Tango

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"h2g2 has a habit of doing things like this lately"

Lately?! It goes back pretty much to the beginning of the site (once there were enough people actually doing stuff and replying to people) judging by the dates on the conversations I've seen. Perhaps you haven't looked back at those conversations yourself after all. Unlike the BBC's message boards, the history of h2g2 is largely preserved.

SEF, i don't have to go through all the old backlog, i was here when it was being posted. Stuff like this didn't start for quiet a while after launch.

Tango

I would like to state categorically that I was not suggesting you left. I was admiring your staying power. However, I can see how you could have misread that. Apologies.

I agree that good people have left under unnecessary clouds. That doesn't mean that people *only* leave when they're not at fault. Some leave before they're likely to be banned. Equally, not all of the Italics' decisions are perfect. I would bet you're not perfect, though. We're all vaguely human, after all.

Whoami?

Tango, I know you have an early ID but you yourself said you weren't around much then and hadn't seen much of what was going on at the time. That statement is probably in the bugfinders group messages rather than on h2g2 though. Anyhow I already addressed the issue of there not being much of anything at all going on in the earliest period of the site's existence - little activity and no officially sponsored groups.

Whoami, I realised that your comment could have two opposing interpretations, which is why I explicitly addressed both of them.

Fair point SEF, I'm not new to h2g2 but haven't posted much stuff
I guess I have been pretty lucky so far though because I haven't come across much disagreement at all. I must have been looking in the wrong places!

I was around enough to know the general feel of the site. It was one of fun mainly. Almost everyone was a fan of DNA, and therefore enjoyed trying to realise DNA's dream. Everybody was new, so there was no one trying to change long established traditions, it was the time when all the, now contraversial, traditions were formed. The software is obviously much better now, but i think the users were better then. Deciding if the site was better then or now is a matter of balancing those 2 factors. Everyone comes up with different conclusions. Personally, i would be willing to lose all the hi-tech features, if we could go back to the fun nature of the site when it was launched. (although, it would be best not to go all the way back to llama 1.0, because there were no passwords back then...)

Obviously the site is more active now, but per-user activity has definitely dropped.

Tango

Some of the folks are a bit stuck up, there are some cliques around but I like a bit of controversy...things change..

I have no objection to contraversy in itself, it's the things that are contraversial that i (sometimes) object to.

Tango

Why is not agreeing with you being nasty?

Indeed!

Tango, I'm not surprised it was effectively a fan site then. As a result the few people who found it would be more likely to generate a happy atmosphere (assuming that lots of people weren't taking things a bit too seriously and pretending to be vogons or something).

However, the party line is now very much that this is not a fan site but a serious attempt at an online guide. Unfortunately it fails in that too because of the lack of quality despite the pretence of it. So while the non-fan status is sometimes offensively made clear to new people who have made the not wholly unreasonable assumption that it might be, the falsity of the site's pretensions to high standards of content and behaviour are also made offensively clear not much later to those people who have actually read the FAQs and expected the intentions outlined there to be true.

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Sad to be nasty with folks...sad.

It was certainly not a fan site. It was a site of fans, yes, but not a fan site. Very little of the site is focused on a serious attempt to make the guide, now. Back then, almost the whole site was. We weren't very good at it, admittedly, but we learned quickly. Everyone was having fun, but they were all intelligent, thoughtful people, who knew what to take seriously, and what not to. The guide was taken seriously, chatting to people wasn't. There weren't people pretending to be vogons, that's something that has only developed recently with people who don't take anything seriously. HHGG is a very serious book, it's a funny book, but it's serious with it.

Tango

PS As off topic posts go, this is turning into a very strange rant... and for h2g2, that's saying something...

You say that almost the whole site was a serious attempt to make the guide but that is not the way the old articles read at all. They read as a serious attempt to make a fan version of the guide - ie entries in the style of Douglas Adams. I've even seen some of the recent threads where people complain about the old entries in the guide and talk about deleting or replacing them.

PS OK so no vogons, but very possibly a babelfish and lots of people with fan-based names, both then and now.

Maybe a few fan related names, but looking at <./>newusers</.> it doesn't look like many.

Our attempt at the guide was terrible, i know, but at least we tried, unlike the present day.

As for babelfish, i think the closest we got was the top secret blue fish. Can't remember that guys name... something beginning with "s"...

Tango

I think you may mean Shim (U168515). I was talking to someone about that recently - probably Croz.

However, I was thinking more of the bubble fish stuff (possibly rather later on) and the fact that the fish was one of the earliest smileys as well as all the people using HHGTTG names. Eg U35156 must have been fairly early unless the name was changed later. There are lots of variants of babel, wowbagger, trillian etc.