Source: (consider it)
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Thread: FAQs - History of the Ship
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Shaun
BANNED
# 348
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Posted
Hi i was reading the info about the history of SofF, and i was just wondering why there was no mention of Murray Watts or Paul Burridge? i may have got their names slightly wrong but when i was introduced to this website by my uni lecturer, she mentioned these names as if they were really important, with regards to the conception of SofF.
Could you shed some light on this, or am i just going completely mad? [ 05. January 2011, 21:22: Message edited by: Tubbs ]
Posts: 112 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
How much time do you have? The thing is... Simon and I have never met. We've spoken on the phone a fair few times, but there has never been a face-to-face meeting. I stumbled across the Ship about a month or so before the official launch in the spring of 1998, via a link from Anglicans Online. The original board was implemented in July of that year. (Trawl around in the Ship's Archive for an article that Steve Tomkins wrote, it's freakin' hilarious.) I remember when there weren't that many of us, and looking around, the only people still left from that first month or so on the boards are me, David Rayner, Steve T, Dyfrig, Chris, rachel (not rachel_o, the rachel who had Sven in Minnesota), DP, rosemary and Fudge. (Apologies if I left anyone out.) Anyway, in January of 1999, I was a regular member, just like you, until the Ten-Horned Beast of the Apocalypse descended upon the poor, unsuspecting souls of the bulletin board. I'm not going to get into the details, unless someone really, really wants to know, but I will say that it took three months before she finally left us alone, and to make that happen Simon, Suse (no longer here) and I spent days and nights deleting thousands of posts; we shut the board down in order to implement the registration and subscription requirement; and David, Simon, Douglas (no longer here), Claudine (again, no longer here) and I spent countless hours doing battle on other (now-defunct) bulletin boards where she had gone to rally people against us. Because of ALL that we had been through, and because we were also the group that put the original 10Cs together, we sort of became board advisors. At the time I was working a job from 3~11p which was SO BORING that I would pray "please, God, let someone post a message". So I became very active in overseeing the boards, and gradually Simon ceded various responsibilities to me. Believe it or not, that's the short version. If you want the long and boring one, just ask.
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Thank you. For myself I would like to hear more, if you have the time. In fact if anyone else from the early days wants to post their memories I would be fascinated to read them.
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Schroedinger's cat
Ship's cool cat
# 64
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Posted
I'm with bb on this one - I think a place on the ship ( probably somewhere in the lower bilges ) where important historical documents - sorry articles - an be stored, that would give newcomers ( like myself! ) a historical insight into ship-building and crew press-ganging. A longer version of your tale, Erin, would be interesting!
-------------------- Blog Music for your enjoyment Lord may all my hard times be healing times take out this broken heart and renew my mind.
Posts: 18859 | From: At the bottom of a deep dark well. | Registered: May 2001
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sophs
Sardonic Angel
# 2296
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Posted
Im with every one who asked, it would be intresting to hear about the ship!
Posts: 5407 | From: searching saharas of sorrow | Registered: Feb 2002
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
quote: Originally posted by starbelly: And Erin, If you could put it all in the form of a Traditional Folk Song, that would be even better!Neil
The trouble with that is now the only melody that is echoing through my brain is the theme song to Gilligan's Island. Thanks a lot. More memories, huh? It took us about three months to get to a situation where we needed the 10Cs. And that, interestingly enough, came out of a discussion on tolerance!! Oh, and Laura the admin was the person who proposed the board split that happened about two years ago. [ 28 March 2002: Message edited by: Erin ]
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
The hottest topic of all was a series of... shall we say... misunderstandings re: the United States. I don't want to reopen old wounds, because a lot of the people (on both sides of the argument) are still posting, but suffice to say that it was so bad that I quit as administrator a little over two years ago. It was hideously ugly, and there weren't a whole lot of Americans posting at the time, and nearly every one of us was ready to bail. Clearly we worked through it, but that is the main reason we are so quick to jump on any form of racism, sexism, nationalism, etc. Outside of the fact that it just shows an appalling level of ignorance that we really prefer not to have displayed on our boards, we have seen what it does to the community to let that stuff go unchecked.The other hot topic, which was so very recently resurrected and subsequently beaten to a bloody pulp, is the likening of a member's position to that of a universally-reviled group. That generates far too much heat, and absolutely no light, so in the interest of community preservation that is simply out of bounds. A big explosion a year ago over this particular technique (note: I was not involved in that debate AT ALL) led us to implement this policy. We also had a shipmate who was in the habit of telling those who did not agree with his interpretations of the Bible that they were going straight to hell. Again, huge argument, so that's out of bounds. Those are the major no-go areas that I can think of at the moment.
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
Who does what and how... well, let's see. I won't get into the main site stuff right now, I'll just look at the boards.Simon is editor, owner, designer, and basically The Final Word. Just about all the board functions are delegated to me, as he has loads of other things to worry about outside of them. I, in turn, have delegated them outwards. Once upon a time, when there was one lonely bulletin board, I was it. I am the Community Editor, which basically translates to manager of the bulletin boards, along with other community functions. (There are six editors, total.) Besides the stuff y'all see (responding to 10C violations, tech support, etc.), I manage the hosts behind the scenes. I'm responsible for the direction and high-level maintenance of each forum, recruitment and management of the hosts, and decisions about threads, posts and members. If members have complaints about hosts, they are referred to me. I spend a lot of time in trend analysis, too, to see if we're headed in the right direction and what the next step in our evolution should be. David and I sort of split the overall, high-level functions -- he deals with a lot of the technical stuff and I deal with the people aspect of the boards, though we cross-cover each other's functions quite regularly. Clare and Laura are member administrators, which means that if (the general) you continue to argue with a host after a ruling, the host turns it over to one of them and they deal with it. They do everything that David and I do, with the exception of major board maintenance and disciplining hosts. The hosts are the people who are responsible for the day-to-day running of the boards, as well as communicating to the administrators and editors any problems, suggestions or comments that come from the members. Each board's hosts are the primary guides, so to speak, of the boards, but all hosts offer opinions and suggestions about the direction of each board. For example: David, Ruth, Tom and 'frin run Hell. With rare exceptions, they make 100% of the decisions about how the place operates on a daily basis, but it is not done in a vacuum. They get input from me, from other hosts, and from Steve Tomkins and Simon before they make the decision, but in the end the decision is theirs. They interpret the 10Cs through their board's guidelines, which is why some things that earn a nudge from a host on one board are engaged in by a host on another. A lot of discussion happens behind the scenes, between hosts, between administrators, between editors and writers. We propose ideas, talk them out, weigh the pros and cons, look at it from every possible angle, see what our options are, and then make decisions. A perfect example would be the sex edition -- this had already been discussed by the writers and editors for the main site, then the boards were brought into it as it is the point of interaction for all of our readers. We had to determine what the potential problems were, how we could best deal with them, and who would take on which responsibilities in all of it. So them's the basics. Does that help at all? [ 28 March 2002: Message edited by: Erin ]
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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Moo
Ship's tough old bird
# 107
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Posted
I'd like to know more about the Joanne episode. Last year Suse posted her account of spending eight hours one night deleting Joanne's posts. She said there were over two hundred.I take it you and Simon took turns doing this for a couple of weeks. You also said something about helping prevent Joanne from shutting down other boards. This whole thing sounds really bizarre. I'm very glad you guys managed to keep the ship afloat. Moo
-------------------- Kerygmania host --------------------- See you later, alligator.
Posts: 20365 | From: Alleghany Mountains of Virginia | Registered: May 2001
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Simon
Editor
# 1
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Posted
In the beginning was the board. Just one board. It was 17 July 1998 and there was just one message on it, by me, which said: "testing... testing..." In the first few weeks and months this was a free-for-all space: no rules, no hosts, just conversation. You can read about this Eden-like period in the article Erin mentioned, by Steve Tomkins. It's here.The first time we ever had to consider having anything approaching a rule was when someone posted something about their personal experience and someone else responded insensitively to it -- which led us to caution people about the wisdom of posting overly personal stuff. After that, the first version of the 10 Commandments was assembled in response to specific events onboard. Hurricane Joanne struck us on 7 January 1999. It's memorable to all old-timers here because it was so completely unexpected and traumatic. Joanne was warmly welcomed, like all newcomers. She debuted by asking us all to spam another website that she violently disagreed with. When we checked the site, it turned out to be a role-playing game, so various people told Joanne that they thought spamming it was unnecessary. This was met with incredible hostility, and Joanne heaped personal scorn and ridicule on anyone who attempted to calm her down. At this point, she also started large numbers of new threads, all designed to start flame wars, and she dominated every active thread on the board. Basically, we were being spammed ourselves, and normal conversation very quickly became impossible. Our board software at this point was pretty basic, so when I finally asked Joanne to leave us, she simply refused to go, and there was nothing we could do about it. The incident you mentioned, Moo, took place on Sat/Sun night 30/31 January, when Joanne posted many hundreds of messages on the board, which Erin and Suse deleted manually... no wonder it took 8 hours. I seem to remember the night concluding with the entire text of Amazing Grace, with Erin and Suse posting the verses alternatively. The only way to be rid of our unwanted guest was to shut down the board, which we did the next day. We reopened a week later with newly-written software that gave us a registration procedure and some protection against people who wished us harm. Joanne then registered a few times under different usernames (but her unique style quickly gave her away, of course), and we repeatedly booted her back out. She then took her quarrel with us to another bulletin board, The Godless Zone (sadly no longer running), where our banning of Joanne was hotly debated and where we were initially taken to task for censorship. A few weeks later, The Godless Zone banned her themselves, as she did to them what she had done to us. Erin wrote about it: "They, like us, sought to engage her in dialogue. They, like us, tried to ignore her, warned her, and finally banned her. She took that fight to still other boards, and then dragged Ship of Fools there with it." I think the fight continued on a further three boards across the Net. One of the things this episode taught me was that it is very difficult to draw solid lines between "real life" and what happens on the Net -- it was a line a lot of people tried to draw solidly in those far-off days. Joanne's behaviour was cruel in the extreme (I especially recall her vicious attacks on one poster's marriage, which was at an already agonising point of collapse at the time) and she left in her wake a lot of confused, distressed and wounded people -- all through words typed onto a screen. The wounds were real, not virtual. The rest of our structure (rules, hosts, admins, the separate boards) evolved over time in response to quarrels, growing numbers and our desire to try different and better ways of doing things. Hope that's long enough on Joanne... As for the drunken party, Chapelhead, I'll post something on it when I've had a whisky or two. [ faulty date fixed ] [ 29 March 2002: Message edited by: Simon ]
-------------------- Eternal memory
Posts: 3787 | From: London | Registered: Mar 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Yes, that was great. One change that happened just before I joined was you went from a subscription-only system to the present free boards (I might not have joined the old system - I am well known for being extremely mean). Why did you change, and what number was the membership when you did? (Personally I think there is real status in having a member number below 100. Is there any way of buying one, like a rare car number plate?)
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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sophs
Sardonic Angel
# 2296
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Posted
(Time for me to look really thick) Yes i know its stupid person but i had to ask anyway..... IS there really such a person as St Simon the holy fool?
Posts: 5407 | From: searching saharas of sorrow | Registered: Feb 2002
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Chorister
Completely Frocked
# 473
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Posted
I assumed he was synonymous with Simon Jenkins by the way, has he really written lots of books, on sale at amazon.com,or is that a namesake too?
-------------------- Retired, sitting back and watching others for a change.
Posts: 34626 | From: Cream Tealand | Registered: Jun 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
When I first started posting on SoF it was on another set of discussion boards - noth the ones you had to pay for, something else - before I didscovered these. What were those, and what happened to them?
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Aha! I thought it looked familiar.
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
We stopped archiving threads a few weeks before we made the switch.
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
The resurrected E-pistles page was moderated for a while, so Simon would have to go in and approve all posts before they'd show up. That was to prevent both a Joanne-style spamming AND to mitigate against the conversation aspect. But that got tedious, so it was ditched.
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
E-pistles - that was it. Sorry, at my advanced age (I'm 97 and still got my own teeth) the memory needs a bit of jogging.
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Another thing I've wondered about - has the Ship really grown bigger, and if so by how much? Yes, I know there are now over 2500 registered members, but most of those are not active. Sadly quite a few people never seem to post at all, while others make a splash for a while and then just fade away (Matt the Mad Medic are you out there?).Is there any way of finding how many people posted on Friday, say, and comparing that with the number a month earlier, six months, a year? It would just be a way of getting a snapshot of Ship activity, and seeing how we're going. Not sure if it's of any use, but I would be interested to know.
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Grief - only 318? out of over 2500? Now that dose surprise me. It would seem that more people "fade away" than I had realised.
-------------------- Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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Orcadian
Shipmate
# 1564
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Posted
Wanderer - suggest you put Quizmaster onto the case. He has ways of getting people to answer these sorts of questions!
Posts: 87 | From: London | Registered: Oct 2001
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Erin
Meaner than Godzilla
# 2
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Posted
Actually, that's fairly typical of bulletin boards I've seen. Usually only between 5 and 10 percent of the membership are active at any given time. Some register to specifically comment on an article, some are lurkers and post very rarely.
-------------------- Commandment number one: shut the hell up.
Posts: 17140 | From: 330 miles north of paradise | Registered: Mar 2001
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