Talossa went online in late 1995 or early 1996. Originally, our online presence was Ben Madison's old website.
This came a few years after the consumer internet had started to gain traction in this country and around the world, and at that time, it was still a huge novelty and not the hand-cuffing bane it is now becoming. Those were fun times.
By this time, discussion forums had been around in one form or another for decades, and as a part of Talossa's part in that, a name was needed. I imagine it was Ben who coined the name 'Wittenberg' for our discussion forum, and of course, the name has stuck.
If one counts the two forums exclusive to the Republic of Talossa, this is Talossa's fourteenth Wittenberg incarnation and the Kingdom's twelfth. Here is a listing for all of these, using the Roman numerals used since Witt's first incarnation:
Wittenberg I came online, presumably, in late 1995 or early 1996. It was followed in quick succession by II, III, and IV.
Wittenberg V: This is the Wittenberg that, I believe, saw the 1997-1998 drama. By the time I came along in 2000, it had been retired, but was still accessible in archive form.
Wittenberg VI: This was my first Witt, and UC was Wittmeister and also kept backups. The system was such everytime a backup was made, all posts had to be deleted from the live board so that the system would not crash. VI went offline ca. 2000-2001
Wittenberg VII: I believe MPF administered this one for at least part of its existence. It was around ca. 2000-2001 and did not last even a year, perhaps.
Wittenberg VIII: The most infamous of all Witt incarnations, a perfect storm of viruses and a failed backup caused the Great Wittenberg VIII Crash of 10 November 2001, which wiped out our records of 9-11.
Wittenberg IX: This was the first Witt that used the single-cascading thread format we use today. The internet was well into this forum format, but the vast majority of Talossa railed against this, and this Witt lasted literally about a week. No archive was made of this Witt, as there was nothing of any consequence that went on there. We went back to using Witt VIII.
IX was online ca. February 2003.
Wittenberg X: Wittenberg VIII was taken offline permanently on 21 February 2003. Wittenberg X went online on 20 February 2003 and was the Witt that saw us through Halloween and was the Witt 'commandeered' by the Republic in 2004 under circumstances so extenuating it is still a sore spot to many on both sides of the question, but for very different reasons. Beyond 1 June 2004, the preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
Wittenberg XI: On 1 or 2 June 2004, Pete H. came to the Kingdom's rescue, and this is the Witt which, as this writing has been an absolute champ of reliability. Unfortunately, it is on the proboards.com service, which does not allow for native archiving and could go kaput at any time imho.
Manually archiving this Wittenberg is still a work in progress.
Wittenberg XII: The first of the two Republic Wittenbergs, it went online ca. 2009-ish (MPF??) and lasted a year or two. The preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
Wittenberg XIIb: The last of the two exclusively-Republic Wittenbergs, it went online ca. 2009-10 and was taken offline at Reunision on or about 20 April 2012. The preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
Wittenberg XIV: You're looking at it. It went online, today, 3 December 2019.
This is the perfect way to inaugurate the new Wittenberg :)
Quote from: Lüc on December 03, 2019, 05:14:42 PM
This is the perfect way to inaugurate the new Wittenberg :)
Thank you! If we can get at least three years out of this Witt, it will be a success in my book. It is important to know this is the first Witt since X that has been put together and put online in a unified/re-unified Talossa.
My chief concern is native-archival functionality. I cannot yet find out how to archive this thing.
It's really a shame that both Witt X and the different RepubliWitts were allowed to just go offline, and that they currently only exist in archive form on the computers of a few people. At the time, the argument was that there were a bunch of conversations in the forum only available to registered users, where people in the Republic said stuff they didn't want others to know now, but it is going to be a big gap in our history going forward. In time, the Republic will be known for what people said about it, not what it was. That's a serious loss.
Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on December 04, 2019, 08:42:48 AM
In time, the Republic will be known for what people said about it, not what it was. That's a serious loss.
Well, if fewer people had told lies about us because they had a disagreement with our very existence, that might not be a problem. But seriously, MPF put Witt X online in read-only format a while back, though I can't remember where. I forget who hosted Witt XII.
Quote from: GV on December 03, 2019, 05:19:40 PM
If we can get at least three years out of this Witt, it will be a success in my book.
Now that we collective own the database, there should be no limit to the lifespan. No-one can lock it up. No-one can take it and leave.
Quote from: Sevastáin Pinátsch on December 04, 2019, 03:37:13 PM
Quote from: GV on December 03, 2019, 05:19:40 PM
If we can get at least three years out of this Witt, it will be a success in my book.
Now that we collective own the database, there should be no limit to the lifespan. No-one can lock it up. No-one can take it and leave.
I'm talking about the long-term stability of the software and the underlying code. Improvements in tech happen all the time. I'll say this for ProBoards: their software is stable.
Quote from: GV on December 05, 2019, 01:07:37 AM
I'm talking about the long-term stability of the software and the underlying code.
I guess I'm not too worried about that. This software has been developing for over 15 years. For that matter, it evolved from the same original code base that Proboards once used (YaBB).
RE: Witt XI, Pete's admin account was set up in the wee hours of June 4. Not sure if the account formation was the genesis of the board. First post was June 6, to the best I can tell.
So, a two day window for your incompleteness, GV. ;-)
This forum needs a subscribe button for interesting historical tidbits.
Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on December 04, 2019, 08:42:48 AM
It's really a shame that both Witt X and the different RepubliWitts were allowed to just go offline, and that they currently only exist in archive form on the computers of a few people. At the time, the argument was that there were a bunch of conversations in the forum only available to registered users, where people in the Republic said stuff they didn't want others to know now, but it is going to be a big gap in our history going forward. In time, the Republic will be known for what people said about it, not what it was. That's a serious loss.
I can't see the hidden logic in this. The Republic would be known for what their citizens said and discussed in public and not for their password-protected stuff, which analogously might resemble people in public places, opposite to people in their living rooms and bedrooms, or some such. Researchers might regret the lack of access to those hidden informations, but still the Republic will be known for what it evidently was on the public side.
Anyway, given the required server software and passwords are still floating around, there are complete backups of the entire Witt XIIb content, AFAIK.
Quote from: DNVercaria on December 29, 2019, 12:52:14 PM
Quote from: Sir Alexandreu Davinescu on December 04, 2019, 08:42:48 AM
It's really a shame that both Witt X and the different RepubliWitts were allowed to just go offline, and that they currently only exist in archive form on the computers of a few people. At the time, the argument was that there were a bunch of conversations in the forum only available to registered users, where people in the Republic said stuff they didn't want others to know now, but it is going to be a big gap in our history going forward. In time, the Republic will be known for what people said about it, not what it was. That's a serious loss.
I can't see the hidden logic in this. The Republic would be known for what their citizens said and discussed in public and not for their password-protected stuff, which analogously might resemble people in public places, opposite to people in their living rooms and bedrooms, or some such. Researchers might regret the lack of access to those hidden informations, but still the Republic will be known for what it evidently was on the public side.
Anyway, given the required server software and passwords are still floating around, there are complete backups of the entire Witt XIIb content, AFAIK.
Yeah. This.
Sometimes the desire to have 100% complete archives of everything borders on becoming an obsessive fetish. We do not need a record of absolutely every single word that ever got uttered.
There are two reasons for keeping archives:
1) for people to be able to write histories of Talossa later, or at least being able to do historical research (eg. the Cort has just called for emails that were written 6 years ago);
2) for obsessives to find out whether X person badmouthed them on a private forum 10 years ago, so they can bring it up in unrelated political arguments later (not that I know anyone who does that 8))
But honestly, there is no real point in keeping archives if someone doesn't write the histories to make them understandable to newcomers, otherwise they're just noise. One problem was that KR1 was trained in history-writing and thus knew how to write a narrative, although of course his narratives were politically tendentious at best. There has been no Talossan history written worthy of the name since A Nation Sundered. Honestly, the fact that the pre-Reunision Kingdom overreacted to Ben's lying histories by deciding to have no history at all is in itself a tragedy.
Quote from: GV on December 03, 2019, 04:57:57 PM
Wittenberg XII: The first of the two Republic Wittenbergs, it went online ca. 2009-ish (MPF??) and lasted a year or two. The preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
Wittenberg XIIb: The last of the two exclusively-Republic Wittenbergs, it went online ca. 2009-10 and was taken offline at Reunision on or about 20 April 2012. The preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
If I remember it correctly, Witt XII and Witt XIIb were the same forum in two different places. Witt XII had been installed, hosted and maintained by Andy L., who, when he quit Talossa, didn't want to extend his contract with the webspace provider. So Ián Anglatzara found another provider and installed the forum software. Transferring the database required some undocumented changes of internal variables, so to get this fixed the two forums mentioned above existed parallely for a couple of weeks. Eventually Witt XII was completely transferred to Witt XIIb and therefor, completely preserved.
Quote from: DNVercaria on December 31, 2019, 12:24:08 PM
Quote from: GV on December 03, 2019, 04:57:57 PM
Wittenberg XII: The first of the two Republic Wittenbergs, it went online ca. 2009-ish (MPF??) and lasted a year or two. The preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
Wittenberg XIIb: The last of the two exclusively-Republic Wittenbergs, it went online ca. 2009-10 and was taken offline at Reunision on or about 20 April 2012. The preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
If I remember it correctly, Witt XII and Witt XIIb were the same forum in two different places. Witt XII had been installed, hosted and maintained by Andy L., who, when he quit Talossa, didn't want to extend his contract with the webspace provider. So Ián Anglatzara found another provider and installed the forum software. Transferring the database required some undocumented changes of internal variables, so to get this fixed the two forums mentioned above existed parallely for a couple of weeks. Eventually Witt XII was completely transferred to Witt XIIb and therefor, completely preserved.
Wow - thanks for this! 2009 to 2011 are the years in which I was almost completely inactive in Talossa.
> Wittenberg VIII: The most infamous of all Witt incarnations, a perfect storm of viruses and a failed backup caused the Great Wittenberg VIII Crash of 10 November 2001, which wiped out our records of 9-11.
NO, no no.. that's NOT what happened... First of all ZERO Viruses are involved
A quote from my probably never coming book, "The Resident Miracle Worker and this downfall":
The Wittenberg Crash of October 10th 2001
As I mentioned earlier in the chapter "switching to php", Perl, the language Witt VII was programmed in, really liked flat files.
This means that instead of using a database system for storing its data, it uses plain text files.
For example, here is a message from Ben in one of the old archives (all of it is supposed to be on a single very long line). I removed Ben's email address:
857|07/18/2001 02:18:52 EDT|R. Ben Madison|[Ben's redacted email] |RE: a Talossan flag question|> For our flag, what would be the correct vexillogical "blazon"?<p>Per fess vert and gules, I believe.<p>Ben<p><p>|0|||||848||0|wittenberg|129.89.118.61,<b>Ident:</b>[],<b>Host:</b>[]<br><b>Agent:</b>[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)]<br>|R. Ben Madison|13
If you divide the line with the |, you will find some of the fields:
⦁ 857: that is the post ID
⦁ 07/18/2001 02:18:52 EDT: the time is posted
⦁ R. Ben Madison: the user posting the message
⦁ [Ben's redacted email]: the user's email
⦁ RE: a Talossan flag question: the post title
⦁ > For our flag, what would be the correct vexillogical "blazon"?<p>Per fess vert and gules, I believe.<p>Ben<p><p>: the post text
⦁ 0: the number of replies
⦁ ||||: empty fields used for the replies
⦁ 848: the parent post ID
⦁ |0|: another field for internal use
⦁ 129.89.118.61,<b>Ident:</b>[],<b>Host:</b>[]<br><b>Agent:</b>[Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)]<br>: the IP address and info about that IP address
⦁ R. Ben Madison: the actual username (which might have been different from the name)
⦁ 13: the user Id of Ben.
This looks all nice and easy, but it causes multiple problems:
⦁ The separation character needs to be "escaped" because if it is used in the content, it may break the format
⦁ It means that to load a single element, you need to search the whole file, possibly loading the whole file into memory.
In a database however, each field is stored individually, properly protected from each other and you can select which rows you specifically want.
But more importantly, it really rare you have to load the whole database into memory...
Now, when I add a row to a flat file, I open the file in what is called "append mode". It means that the file is opened, and the pointer is placed at the end of the file.
Then, the new data can be added to the file safely and securely.
But the Wittenberg perl script didn't do that. Instead, it loaded the full list of messages into memory, and then, when a new message was added, would write the whole file on disk.
Worse, opening a file in write mode erases the content of the file, so even if you don't write anything, the content is gone.
A few weeks before the crash, users were complaining about the speed of posting message or even of browsing Wittenberg.
That's because every time a user wanted to load Wittenberg, the full data file had to be read into memory.
But then, on that October 10th 2002, something else occurred... the file became too big for memory just as a user was posting a reply.
That person posted a message, Wittenberg was loaded into memory, failed to load and as such, failed to write.
But the file had been opened and as such, we lost everything. All of the 5556 first messages of Wittenberg VII were gone forever...
My only backups covered messages 122 to 971, leaving 4584 messages lost to us.
I reacted quickly. I create an automatic backup so that the next time Wittenberg would crash, we could have a backup of the state of Wittenberg right before the crash.
There were other crashed in the future, but none of them led to data loss. I would simply archive the backup, trim the older messages and restore the backup so that the show could go on.
I also found a different control panel software for my servers which supported daily, weekly and monthly backups to roll back to a previous day if a crash occurred right before the backups are taken.
I also from time to time proactively archived (removed) from time to time the older messages so that the crash would be prevented.
I had intended to keep full archives from that point on, but to this day, I cannot find my earliest archives.
As result, I have all messages from #7837 (on February 3rd 2002) until Witt VIII was turned in February 18th 2003 (with message #19921), but I cannot find my archive from the period of the crash (message #5556, on Novembr 10th 2001) until the #7837 of February 3rd 2002, other than for a small snapshot of the 15 first messages sent after the crash.
This leaves an additional 2264 messages lost due to careless archiving on my part, though one day, I might find them in an old hard disk somewhere. You would be surprised at the number of hard disk I have stored in my safe (it's over 40, BTW).
For example, I found the archive from #7837 (01/14/2002) to #10624 (04/02/2002) only recently while writing this book, and another for #8398 (02/03/2002)-19817 (02/18/2003).
For months, I thought that the earliest archive was from #14342 (10/10/2002).
This new find from November 2014 will give us almost 9 months of additional history to study since my original republication of Witt in early 2014!
Wittenberg VII: I believe MPF administered this one for at least part of its existence. It was around ca. 2000-2001 and did not last even a year, perhaps.
Wittenberg VIII: The most infamous of all Witt incarnations, a perfect storm of viruses and a failed backup caused the Great Wittenberg VIII Crash of 10 November 2001, which wiped out our records of 9-11.
Wittenberg IX: This was the first Witt that used the single-cascading thread format we use today. The internet was well into this forum format, but the vast majority of Talossa railed against this, and this Witt lasted literally about a week. No archive was made of this Witt, as there was nothing of any consequence that went on there. We went back to using Witt VIII.
IX was online ca. February 2003.
Wittenberg X: Wittenberg VIII was taken offline permanently on 21 February 2003. Wittenberg X went online on 20 February 2003 and was the Witt that saw us through Halloween and was the Witt 'commandeered' by the Republic in 2004 under circumstances so extenuating it is still a sore spot to many on both sides of the question, but for very different reasons. Beyond 1 June 2004, the preservation status of this Witt is unknown.
----
I was indeed the host for all of those...
These are some of them:
http://talossa.ca/wittenberg2/
http://talossa.ca/wittenberg/
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt2.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt3.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt5.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt6.php
http://www.talossa.ca/files/oldwitt7.php
This is the index of message IDs:
1) 121-971
2)5557-5573
3) 14342-19921 (real end)
4) 121-587 (07/15/2001) (all contained in #1 above, so I didn't put it online)
5) 7837 (01/14/2002) - 10618 (04/02/2002)
6 ) 7837 (01/14/2002) - 10624 (04/02/2002)
7 ) 8398 (02/03/2002) - 19817 (802/18/2003)