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

Hello. I have been away for a long time, for personal reasons, and the fact that I made a tit of myself here too often. I came for a nostalgic look round today in a place I still have a huge affection for and the sheer upset around the place made me overcome my fear of all you people who saw me being a (frequently drunken) tit to ask - what the Belgium has happened? Give me the lowlights please, but please tell me somebody apart from the Larholms (whose patronage I am thankful for) who I know is still here.

I left this site when I was a mess. Now I that am more or less sober and thinking about coming back it looks more of a mess than I was
. Anyone I know can fill me in?

Well, h2g2 leaving the BBC was a bit like Brexit - nobody really wanted it, we were left to try and manage on our own, and soon discovered that nobody really cared about us any more. The upside is we no longer get invaded by all those 606 immigrants.

That's not exactly the /best/ metaphor.


....


But.... Yeah....

It wasn't me....

"please tell me somebody [...] who I know is still here."

A list of who you know might be a start...

Or you could start with a list of who you don't know and we could work it out from there...

There will never be a time when all will be peaceful and wonderful. We had problems then, we have problems now, and the prospect for the future is more problems, though some of them may well be different ones than what we have now.


The streets of cyberspace are paved with the bones of websites that didn't make it. So far, we aren't paving material. Let's keep going as long as we can, and enjoy the journey.

by overcoming such obsticles and obstructions to the smooth running of our lives, is from wence we gather strength and grow or something... probably...

While the official Announcements ( http://h2g2.com/forums/from_the_editors/ ) are few and far between, they are quite enlightening and you can get a good sense of what's been going on there.


On this side of the curtain, it has become a somewhat quieter place. Many folks just drifted away. Some left involuntarily when there were troubles with the log-in process and some passwords were lost. There are definitely fewer folks posting on a regular basis. Very few new entries get any comments at all. There are a few places that still get some activity, like here at Ask. The bottom of the front page has links the most recent posts anywhere on the site, so that's also a good place to look to see where people are still active.

The BBC ripped their security engine out of the Barlesque system and handed what was left over to NPL. Pastey tried to get it working but eventually had to rewrite large amounts of it. Even then bits of it never worked. What we have now is Pliny - the guts of a superb modern system but not quite working well enough to be used for writing entries. We also have the old system (Goo, Brunel, Alabaster) but it crashes if too many people use it, we can't make any changes to it and we're only allowed to use it until the end of 2016. I think. We're hoping the BBC have forgotten that last bit.

So unless someone does a sterling programming effort on top of the one Pastey has already done, we'll have no h2g2 to attract new writers. Douglas Adams's dream will have died and the internet will degenerate into a morass of misinformation and puzzlement.

Well you're just a bundle of cheer, aren't you?

Well at least its got us thinking and talking about it

As I saw the transition - - -

The Z's and some had the depth of heart and strength to pull together ownership, shares and technical folks of fabulous skills and will.

How-ever, as with a fair number of political propositions, some vied for the "big hats", without the actual skills or knowledge or "nature" to go with it. Some have said - "anyone seriously seeking power are the least suited to wield it". I think that stunted some of the movement, but efforts continue.

So while the site limps a little, there are still old timers, new-comers, and some cool entries happening.

I don't plan to tell the BBC on us.

~ ~

So, now we've told you. What we should be doing is not navel-gazing and asking ourselves what is going wrong, but generating conversation and writing entries, all joining in to Peer Review them and making the site work.

At the moment Gnomon, Bluebottle, dmitri and SashaQ are almost the only ones writing entries. Galaxy Babe should be mentioned; her name doesn't appear so much at the moment, but that's RL calling.

So - go out there and join in with general chat. At least you get sensible posts re Brexit etc here, with less polemics and certainly less spelling mistakes than on other social media.

Flex your knuckles and write a journal entry - Post about it in Ask, if you like. (To read Journal Entries, people must be subscribed to your journals, so make your presence known in Ask)

We're still figuring out how to recruit new researchers, but, like you, several of the old ones have turned up again recently.

Personally, I have visited the site every day for the past 16 years (except when on holiday or otherwise with no internet). It's still here and there is still stuff going on, but, as you have noticed, less than before.

Have a look at (that smiley used to link directly to the front page). Dmitri puts a lot of work into that.

If you think we're too parochial, let us know. It probably won't have any effect, but it'll create another erudite (navel-gazing ) thread for a while.

And check out the new smileys. etc.

there has always been, and always will be, the inevitable moans and crys of how the site has changed.... isn't as good as back when... or isn't this, that or the otter... but, actually, I'm not really sure its ever changed that vastly... sure, its been differnt at differnt times, but... arn't we all differnt at differnt times? I mean, I turn into Madonna every thursday night I must* get round to writing articles/entrys again... I've dozes and dozens of half baked ideas and barely started entrys on all kinds of everything and stuff but I've so little .... err.. oh... thats a loverly pair of sandles... what was I saying?

Also people move on..it's the story of t'internet.

People move on, yes, but no one mew stays as the system doesn't work properly. I don't blame them. If I go onto a new site and it is full of bugs I leave.