All the recent discussions about moderating got me thinking about that Weekend Of Our Lost Content, or whatever it was called. For a couple of days moderation was pretty much put into abeyance. We could say what we liked. Did the world collapse? Did posters completely abandon their moral compasses? Did nuclear war break out?
I can’t really remember, but I don’t think things went too awry. Can anyone remember what it was like?
Nope, can’t remember. The hangover faded long ago, and the dog has since grown all her fur back.
I think it was just in the Pit where there was no moderation. A lot of silly threads were made. There were NSFW picture threads. The place that does not get discussed got discussed. People said a lot of rude words. It was fun. I kind of miss it but then again if it went on forever I would probably go crazy.
As has been said, the rules were relaxed in the Pit only. And it was only for a couple of days. And many people only posted what they did at the time in the expectation that no permanent record would remain of it.
Not since The Men arrived at my door and…and…I LOVE THE MODS!
Thanks, hon, we love you too. 
There are plenty of unmoderated message boards out there. I suggest hanging out in one for a while. I used to try to participate in a few of them, but between the spammers and the flamers, I found it impossible to have any sort of discussion. They were about 99% noise to 1% signal.
It was one of those fortunate accidents where a constellation of events happened to make this possible. The message board was in the process of being moved to a new server. The board files had been copied over to the new server and the new install of vB and the bugs were being worked out of it.
The existing system was going to be turned off/wiped when the install on the new server went live so anything that was on the board during that interim time before the switch to the new server was going to be lost forever. And that’s what happened.
Barring something like that happening again – which is possible but certainly not scheduled at the present time – this most likely will not be a recurring event.
No thank you. I’m perfectly happy with the way things are here - thankyouverymuch.
I was just wondering how people here reacted to their new found freedom - not suggesting it should happen again.
For the most part it was just goofing around, and it was limited to the Pit. The “Winter of Our Missed Content” refers to (I think) 2001, when the board was down for a long time and a lot of posts were lost.
Yeah, it was a fun one-shot and except for one jackass who got out of hand*, a fun time was had by all.
That said, I don’t think I’d like it to happen here all the time or even on a regular basis.
*Said jackass posted about 15 “Let’s kill President Bush–here’s his schedule. How and where would you assassinate him? Be detailed” threads. Way to turn something fun into something the Secret Service might investigate, dude.
Would the lost weekend have been caught by Google cache or the Wayback machine?
This was before spidering was turned on, so no.
I meant to add that in addition to some really funny/silly and sometimes stupid (but fun) threads, there were also a bunch of “What was the real story behind what happened to < banned poster >” or “Do you post on the Snarkpit” or “Did Wally really die” type questions.
Beyond the fun of it, there seemed to be a lot of bottled up questions about the board’s history and discussing it openly was a positive thing–and I think changed the perception about that type of discussion as something not necessarily divisive.
[semi-relevant hijack]
Is the stuff from that interval archived and available anywhere? Whenever I go searching for an old thread and come up empty-handed, I often wonder if it was from that time.
[/hj]
The whole point was that nothing would be recorded. That’s why the rules were relaxed.
There’s also a difference between the Winter Of Our Missed Content and The Lost Weekend. The subject of this thread is a weekend-long block free for all. The Winter of our Missed Content encompassed a much larger time period – we were all posting on another board for a while before things got straightened out and we came back here. We lost a lot of material from that time period in archiving and resuscitating the hamsters. I believe with the relatively recent switch to new servers the Missed Content was able to be put back online. Go forth and search!
Actually, during the Winter, a lot of stuff was done on a temporary board (that IIRC Tuba paid for) as a temporary haven.
I wonder if any of that stuff survives. (Didn’t they have some weird rules that made the then-wilder Pit seem really tame? I mean like “no bad words at all” type weird.)
I think you may be confusing the Winter of Our Missed Content with the fact that for a time several years ago a large number of posts were deliberately taken off-line due to (I think) server issues. When we got a new server, those stored posts were made accessible again. As far as I know, the posts lost in WOMC are gone permanently and cannot be restored.
I think a lot of people reacted like I did–we pretty much kept on following the rules, though we posted things we might not ordinarily have.
For example, I discussed my disdain for the poster who annoys me much more openly than I would have otherwise because I knew that the post would be deleted. I felt freer to get it off my chest because it wouldn’t be preserved. It broke no rules. If I said the same thing right now, it might come off as harsh, but I wouldn’t be warned or anything for it.
I think Fenris makes an excellent point about how people took advantage of the opportunity to openly discuss “taboo” topics and how this may have influenced the way some of these topics are now handled on the board. It’s an improvement.
Anyway, the world didn’t collapse because most of us who have posted here for a long time have internalized the rules and agree with them for the most part.