:azn:Thanks Looper, one of the reasons I had to step back when I was going through strife in life all those years ago was to make sure that the continuity of the website continued even despite my absence. I created this iteration of the site so that it would be part of my joy and legacy to add to the demo scene history and to others lives as well.
I will admit I think my reaction here was probably a little bit harsh. I’m going to remove the bans on these fellows, because after all, they have likely misplaced passion about something but the way of balancing and equating the two different things, which is someone just asking for a little extra time (not sympathy) was as many may agree- totally out of line
I have along with my wife, been making phone calls to ring in some favours from some old friends of mine of the scene, the custodianship is already set for many years with scenesat as you know, so long as ziphoid receives some donations from time to time to keep everything running, and I know he frequently has to use his money out of pocket.
However, mere hosting arrangements do not cover any hands on help with the website code itself, as my condition improves through my treatment , I have planned out some essential changes that need to be done in order to secure the website against future malicious behaviour. I just wish looking at a computer screen didn’t make me feel so sick right now :-)
Speaking of the malicious attacks,
I don’t even know why the people who did this started doing it, it is drama that’s come from some chat room on the Internet or a feud with the previous custodian, that has occurred during my absence.
The dialogue that is currently opening between my contacts is for specifically brainstorming for a special long-term preservation, there is no intention to redevelop a new site, however, that is an option entirely up to someone else if they wish to do so, but their project must be original and self supporting and standing, just as mine was when I developed the first iteration after the previous custodian left- and their code folded under the sheer weight of the website growth.
Providing and supporting mod archive has been 20 years of mixed joy and misery. there are some strange people out there with some funny ideas, religious, nutcases, paranoid, schizophrenic behaviour, all sorts of strange abuse, unfortunately outnumbered the positive which is why it played quite a considerable effect on my mental health way back when I had to throw in the towel.
IRC
To say, I felt a great loss when I had to remove myself from the social environment around The Mod Archive community, and the tracking scene in general, I had lost so many close friends and acquaintances that only lived on IRC. I have not returned nor plan to for the sake of my sanity :-) (plus things have changed drastically with so many different services appearing now and fragmenting the entire ecosystem. Oh well :-))
For those that remember me before I slipped downhill, I have grown considerably since and hope that the respect I once earned from you can make its way back. I really do miss you (the tracking scene circle) dearly, and I do wish that things that the steps I had to take for self preservation did not have such personal disastrous consequences, but the situation called it (standing up to the bullying).
Health
I am unable to use my screen for more than about 15 minutes at a time due to the nausea and extreme physical and mental fatigue that is the side effect part of the intense chemo-therapy treatment.
This and this alone is the only reason I
need time, not because I’m running out of life, although I was hoping on at least another 40 years,
I am only going to have two which is devastating to my soul mate and wife of 25 years, as for my family itself- I don’t really have one anymore.
For the record,
The previous custodian of the mod archive also felt considerably ill, and no one was there to do anything to help keep the website going so he could take leave and take care of himself. Mikael only handed me the reins when he was absolutely sure that I was trustworthy, and together with Robert Watson, the original founder, established sufficient trust for me to begin my experiments in parallel resulting in the eventual conversion to the database driven system you see today.
In addition, I took not one single line of code of theirs, I picked up two books from which I built my very first creations, wish included lots of bash script to do conversion of some of the data from the very original predecessor, this still exists on my systems preserved for posterity. It’s crazy how things came around from such humble beginnings to a considerably complex system designed to render extremely quick on very slow hardware.
Some of you eagle-eyed observers may have seen earlier iterations of the website, featured in the pro audio Sound On Sound and Computer Music magazine, as I learned my way through the maze of programming SQL.
The Mod Archive was and always has been my only coding project, so it may come as a surprise that, including the graphic work, everything is handmade on vi on a pretty slow Solaris SPARC system.
As I mentioned before, the entire system was designed to run on a very limited system because back then co-location of a server was very expensive, and we borrowed resources from the original founders startup (Safeport) until we could afford to rent our own dedicated server. This is what the donation drives I pursued enabled for quite a few years until the time came for me to step back for my personal health reasons.
Perhaps ironically, now, due to the massive differences in the libraries used on the current Scenesat servers, the original code has to run through some strange pipeline converters and shims which adds considerable performance delays, meaning the site is performing a little bit just like my original development system :-) :-)
Speaking of which, it would take a full-time developer about €18,000 worth of work to do a decent job to bringing the current code to run with modern libraries, as well as a necessary external re-audit for security which has always been part of the testing and deployment of code. Of each of the 5 years, that is roughly how much man-hour-wise I put into developing Modarchive.org without any compensation for it.
I will keep you all up-to-date when I can, I will be looking into who still has access to the administration system and what levels they have access to so that I can work out policy with the future long-term custodian of the site and how to proceed with the spreading of various responsibilities across a number of carefully considered volunteers who have been vetted and trusted by long standing peers in the demo scene resource hosting space.
As I mentioned earlier, I only need _time_ during my _treatment_,
The pain and suffering that this is causing should eventually be reduced enough, perhaps to the point where we can rejoin and rebuild friendships while listening to modules again without the terrible overbearing, dehumanising rhetoric from some members of the community, as I meant to imply while discussing those who I temporarily banned, I believe in second chances.
With love and a hope for a bright future for everyone,
m0d
P.S
PLEASE READ THIS STATEMENTEdits: Typos and some minor rewording.
