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

Two and a half years ago, when I attended the 2014 Manchester Meet, I was optimistic that good changes were in the works. Since then the only thing that seems to have happened is a lot of time and effort were spent thwarting a hacker with possibly benign but misguided intentions.

I have seen literally no evidence of any improvements, just bandages applied to some server issues.

It appears that while there are some valiant volunteers keeping this place limping along, there is no one at the helm and we've just been set adrift. I assume they've determined this place will never be financially viable and have decided not to invest any new resources toward repairing and improving the site. It's been abandoned. At best it's on life support waiting pending an inevitable death.

I won't . But I suspect that if this place is still here for its and my 20th Hootooversary, it will be a lonely party.

It's a bit sad, but it looks like the reality is that this place simply doesn't have the resources to compete with other platforms online, and probably never will. We've had one or two occasions in the past when it's been 'plucked out of the fire' after a call to arms and a rally-round by users, former users, and wider well-wishers - but that is never going to work indefinitely.

Every time in the past that Gnomon left the site, there was always a great outcry and he came back eventually. This time people seem to have just resigned to it. Not a single protest.

This time his reasons were frustration with the site itself, which he has been talking about for years. How many are there of us left?

~ ~

I was very sad when I read this, but wasn't sure what to say, or what I can say.

I am hopeful that Gnomon will come back when the fixes are implemented, but I don't know when that will be, as even fixing the Front Page is taking the Tech team time, which is sad...

All I can do is hope the keep going...

I suspect Gnomon's not left for good. He's invested far too much into the project not to be concerned and curious about its future. I don't expect him to post here, though.

It's so difficult to know what to do to improve things here. Should I write things? Should I post to community forums? Should I moan about the lack of direction? Should I do a bit of each?

If I had some sort of sign, I would know where to direct my efforts.

Yes - it's good that Gnomon is friends with h2g2ers on Facebook, so *when* announcements about fixes are made he should see them.

All I am doing is keeping going with editing Entries etc to ensure the Front Page isn't static - posting to forums helps with that, as do sending Entries to the Post and submitting Entries for Peer Review.

It is good to see Researcher 5 posting on site occasionally - proves we're not totally adrift in space, honest... A general Q&A session would still be helpful, though, I think, and I hope it is still in the pipeline...

The more I look at it, the sticking point has to be the technical issues. It's preventing the site growing. If we had an influx of new researchers, it would be very difficult for them to work out how to contribute; indeed, just a moderate amount of activity can make the site crash, I'm told.

From a purely technical point of view, someone with knowledge of the app and infrastructure needs to catalogue the problems, assess their impact, and prioritise them for fixing. The prioritisation needs to take into account the business priorities (are they planning any technical refresh any time soon, for example?)

Then all we need is someone with the requisite skills, knowledge, time and access to crack on with the fixes.

Simples.

I actually had a brief discussion online with a coder on Reddit who was interested in making an interface resembling the Guide from the film. Zi was not aware of h2g2. I told hir about it and zi was very interested. I told hir to come and check it out, but I also had to tell hir what the current situation is here, at least as I see it, that it's basically been abandoned; and while we desperately need people like hir, I wasn't sure there was much zi would be able to do.

Here's the conversation if anyone is interested in further reaching out to this person.

http://www.reddit.com/r/DontPanic/comments/5sgot4/ive_been_working_on_a_webbased_guide_interface/

I don't doubt that guy's enthusiasm, but h2g2 isn't ever going to resemble the film or other adaptations. He might not be motivated to fix the existing system, but there's always a possibility someone will separately develop h2g2 mark II and migrate the content on to it, and we'd need a few PFYs to do that.

And today even the front page is broken, the featured entries section just displays an error message.

Finally got three minor bugs in Pliny fixed.

1. Borders on tables
2. Positioning of smileys within text - it's not perfect, but it no longer pushes them all out to the right margin
3. Positioning of pictures with respect to text - the options of left, centre and right are now available as in Ripley - up to now Pliny just put them on the right, no matter where you put them.

Thanks to Brian for implementing the changes I told him to do.