What's happening with the ILM move?

I posted this question on ILE too.

I need to know too, it's like everyone is forming a new gang and not telling me. Whats up? have my repeated Boney m/Chic/Fall ramblings had the effect of ostracising me? it's like junior school all over again, Mum, Mum.

This will get you to the new boards, though if I understand correctly (big if), these new boards will be jumping from Lycos to another server, when ready. Key sentence on the Freaky Trigger community site: "We are aware that Phil Greenspun has stopped maintaining this server and that Greenspun will eventually go down forever."

There's certain things *I'm* not clear on myself.

Explaining the move is reason enough to start a ILx/nuILx FAQ.

these new boards will be jumping from Lycos to another server, when ready

Correct. A domain name has been registered and a server has been tentatively identified as the new home; however, not everything set is set in stone yet. The hope is that it will be, soon.

But the only reason I knew about the new server was that Graham started a thread about new domain names. As I said, why not post a message that gets everyone's attention and lets everyone know what's going on? And re-post every few days so that people who missed it once aren't out of luck. People shouldn't have to find out by chance, by bits and pieces, depending on whether they went to NYLPM or happened to catch something on a thread out of the corner of their eye.

Not that I don't appreciate all that Tom, Graham, and so many other people are doing (and have been doing to maintain this board for a long time). Obviously, we're all beneficiaries of these people's work.

tom has said (somewhere, I don't know where) that he plans to keep coming back reguarly to check on greenspun, tell people the show's over, move along, etc.

We're still planning the move, there are no solid dates yet or anything, so I don't see the point of making a formal announcement. It's going to be fairly seamless when it happens, so I guess we can just tell everyone just before it happens. We'll make sure if people come here after the move they know where we've gone.

1) why ILx is moving (the Greenspun server is not being maintained),

The greenspun.com server is provided out of the kindness of Phil Greenspun's heart. He no longer maintains it and it keeps going down and may go down for good one day.

(2) what's going on with the move now
(3) what's going to happen in the future

I've written and nearly finished software to run on our new server. Andrew G is providing that but wants to upgrade it befor we start using it. When it's ready we'll install my software, and then one weekend or something we'll close the site here and reopen on teh new server. This will be advertised in advance and will make sure there are signposts here to the new site for as long as we can.

(4) what will happen to old threads

Everything is being imported and the transition should be seamless.

(5) where people should go if Greenspun crashes again.

Freaky Trigger will have any news. The temporary new site remains for if Greenspun goes down again, and we've bought ilxor.com to host the new site.

I've uploaded some recent threads to the temporary nu-ILM server to demonstrate how threads on the new board will look no different from threads on the old board, and they're fully postable and searchable.

has greenspun run out of $$$'s?

graham, posting this here too... the imported thread i just looked at was upside down! see other post on lycos 'imported threads'

Gosh, well done for spotting that. That's because it expects messages to be in the database in the order they were posted, and importing them doesn't do that in the correct order. I've made it sort them now, so it should be alright.

What throws me (and inspired this thread) is the phrase "Greenspun will eventually go down forever," and that this "go down forever" could happen next week or next year. Or tomorrow. Seems like a pretty clear statement. Am I incorrect in thinking that, if greenspun.com goes down tomorrow, Tom won't be able to keep coming back and checking, because there will be no Greenspun for him to come back to? Is there something conceptually I'm not getting here?

It seems that most people expect the new board to be ready before Greenspun goes down forever. True, it might not go down that way. However, it seems to me that there's been an awful lot of discussion about this over the past few months.

we just prefer to live on the edge, frank. if apathy can be said to be a preference.

If greenspun were toast tomorrow most folks could still get the hint through Freaky Trigger or by one of its many blog cronies.

i love "freaky trigger blog cronies"!!

in lieu of red tape

If greenspun were toast tomorrow most folks could still get the hint through Freaky Trigger or by one of its many blog cronies.

I have come to realize that, as a mere visitor to the Milky Way Galaxy, I have yet to fully understand your ways of speech, nor you mine. So excuse me for being repetitive, explicit, explicitly repetitive, and repetitively explicit.

I am saying that there are people who (1) don't know the information now (2) that they need to know now. So, if you respond by telling me that (1) most people do know this information, and (2) that there is more information to come that they won't need to know until later, your (1) and (2) don't address my (1) and (2). So to be repetitively repetitive:

(1) Some of the people who post here don't know that greenspun.com is going down permanently and that we're moving (I just got an email from someone who didn't know until I'd emailed him); (2) some of the people who post here don't know that there are places (e.g., Freaky Trigger, NYLPM) to go for information whenever greenspun.com goes into temporary or permanent shutdown; (3) some of the people who post here therefore don't know to bookmark NYLPM or Freaky Trigger and to go there for info whenever greenspun.com shuts down (by the way, in the most recent shutdown, Freaky Trigger had no info about it, at least that I could see; I found the link to nuILx on NYLPM, and I had to scroll down to find it); (4) some people who post here - from the evidence, I'd say most people who post here - don't yet know that there's another ILx board already up and running, with threads and discussions underway (Norman's got a great thread about his band playing a biker fest, if you're interested), or that you can post there when greenspun.com goes down. The reason not everyone knows these things is that not everyone who posts here checks every thread, or visits every day, or visits every week, or visits on a day when threads like this are prominent, or visits the ILM or ILE top level when visiting (I'm thinking in particular of the people who link directly to the Jay-Z/Nas Throwdown), or are new and don't yet know what's what with ILx and NYLPM and Freaky Trigger. You're less likely to lose or confuse these people if you post the information that they need to know now.

For your info, I've known the move was coming for a while because I've linked to the Freaky Trigger community page. But I've never noticed a thread about the move until this week. That doesn't mean there weren't tons of such threads, it just means that my infrequent visiting and my way of visiting caused me to miss them. It may mean that the threads could have had more arresting titles. See my suggestion at the top of this thread.

Also for your info, I'd seen the acronym "NYLPM" in my first few months of visiting ILx, but I just assumed that it was another chatroom that many of you frequented; I didn't know that it was a blog that you maintained (also didn't know what a blog was). If ILx had suddenly gone kaput, I wouldn't have known to go there for information about it. Remember, some people may not only be new to ILx, they might be new to the Web, might not know yet how to Google their way to lost Websites, etc. Anyway, assuming that you don't want to inadvertently create different classes of ILx'ers - those who know about nuILx and those who don't - you'd be wise to post and re-post a capital-letter ALERT thread that gives the info in (1) through (4) above and provides a couple of sentences saying that Lycos is only a temporary home for nuILx and that the old threads will be brought into ILx. You don't need to add details and dates until they're needed. It seems simple enough. Would probably save time, since then no one would have to spend time reading and responding to threads like this one.

Anyway, it's not my place to keep badgering you guys about this, or to tell you how to run the move. Either you're concerned with the (maybe no more than a handful of) people I'm talking about, or you're not.

I'd wager that those people who don't read ILx often enough to know what Freaky Trigger and NYLPM are, probably could care less if greenspun vanished into the night or not. And unless I am mistaken, there has been no official word of termination from Lord Greenspun. Merely that he doesn't consider his free server and message board to be that high a priority.

there are two main reasons i think why there hasn't been a proper formal official announcement yet: one is that the ark is not quite built yet (for example, the replacement server is NOT finalised), so any announcement is necessarily incomplete and provisional, with no decision yet made WHEN the move will be. The other is, people feel awkward about being the person who stands up and says RIGHT EVERYONE in ILX LISTEN TO ME NOW, THE PLANET IS DOOMED AND YOU ONLY HAVE MOMENTS TO LIVE (POSSIBLY) MOVE IN AN ORDERLY FASHION TO EXITS 3, 7 and 9 WHERE YOUR SPACECRAFT WILL (POSSIBLY) BE WAITING FOR YOU (also, for those who caught the actual discussion: Tom did say he'd do it, and surely it's rude just to pre-empt him) 9YES BUT THE PLANET IS DOOMED!!) (I have no interest in life on another planet if we leave our manners behind...) (YES BUT etc) Frank is right that some maybe many will have missed the announcements so far: in fact, some people will miss any and all announcements, because there is no fixed place to PUT announcements on the board. Either (like this) they drift down unless constantly refreshed, or they have to go on an out-of-the-way (though fixed) place, which lots of people don't read. Some people will miss it HOWEVER large we advertise it.

(I also suspect those who've endured multiple Greenspun outages never in fact consider that the current one might (really) be the last, because it never is.)

Graham's board seems to be down at the moment. I agree with Frank that a Proper Big Announcement should be made, but I am less bothered that it has not been made in the last three days: there are bugs to iron out, and some of the plan may have to rejigged, maybe quite a lot (we don't know yet). (We can save the archives, and probably reconstitute them exactly as is, but we simply don't know whether and if we can stitch them seamlessly into the new board structure. Graham will be working at that, but he won't even GET them before Tue/Wed at the earliest... I downloaded ILM last night.)

(Even here there's a problem of undiplomatically stepping on someone else's toes: Graham realised that (a) the Separators needed better definition, so Mike Daddino's recent tireless archiving downloads, though they ensured we had not lost the archives should everything fail like NOW, were actually in a problematic format, plus there's an ocean between Mike and Graham, who does not have broadband and can't quickly download 79kbs of info over the phone. I tried it last night to see if I could: as I can and did (rather to my surprise), I can now burn a disc and POST it to Graham. But whether this was going to work, or would Graham have to wait six weeks until he had access to a much more powerful system, wasn't known until round midnight last night. There isn't a Decisions committee here, let alone a Press Office: just various people helping out because they would be sad if it all vanished suddenly. We are gambling a bit, yes, on time still available for the best possible job, including the clearest and most useful possible announcement, but it is not a wild or mad gamble, nor is it just laissez-faire chips-fall-as-may laziness.

We are working on it. Formal announcement soon.

(in other words, frank, yes we can say it all NOW, but NOW is quite likely soon be a lost THEN, as it has been so often before: threads started on Fridays or at weekends do not get best attention: the main info will come across best from gentle persistant pressure over time, not sudden big tannoys for a day then nothing when the imagined danger passes...)

nu-ILX is back up again

First, apologies if this is the wrong forum for asking this. Is there anyway we will be able to post pictures from our hard drive rather than doing an IMG SRC link to an external site. Similar to the way you can post pic's to eBay for example. Or would that be too complicated?

I want my experimental ILXor!

we're getting closer...

It's back at our new home ilxor.com (I've preserved messages and threads). I've blocked starting threads to prevent the boards being split in the days until we move (which I'll be making a proper announcement about soon - in the meantime keep posting here, everything will be copied).