Lessons Learned

[Archie]

[Very fittingly, as I write, archive.org which hosts the wayback machine and many, many digitized books and other materials has gone offline due to a DDOS attack. It has been down for about 24 hours.]

If there is any silver lining to the outages at CODOH and the old forum collapsing (besides Germar Rudolf being active again) perhaps it is that it has been a wakeup call and a time for reflection.

Here are some of my takeaways from this experience. Go ahead an add your own.

1) Keep personal research files backed up. Don't depend on a website. Don't have all your research in the form of links that might be dead in a couple years. Traditional citation formats like author, title, publication, date, etc., have the benefit of not being dependent on an unstable web address. Having some things in hard copy is probably not a bad idea either.

2) Don't always assume that things are fine and that somebody is taking care of things. If there are signs that something is wrong, take precautionary action. I remember back in December of 2023 I noticed that the Castle Hill bookstore website was down. I noticed (I think I even made a thread about it), but I didn't really know what was going on and didn't do anything about it. In retrospect, that was a major warning sign. I could not have done a lot, but I probably could have salvaged more things.

3) Regarding the value of a forum, not every post is of supreme value, but there are of course some gold nuggets. As I've thought about this over the last nine months, I've concluded that a forum is not an ideal way of preserving knowledge because those gold nuggets can be too hard to find amid the great mass of posts. But at minimum the people who wrote those nuggets in the first place should know where they are and should be able to package them nicely for everyone else. Things that are most significant should really be written up as articles, books, documentaries, wiki-style pages, something. I'm not saying everyone needs to start trying to write books (a good book is a huge amount of work), but I do think we need some sort of way of guiding the forum activity toward more polished, better preserved materials. Here is another way to say this: You could be the best researcher of all-time, but if you don't communicate your knowledge to others then all of your knowledge will die with you and will be for naught. Technically, posting something on a forum is "publishing" it, but most of what's on a forum tends to get buried and forgotten.

4) In thinking about these more productive efforts, I see two main areas. One would be revisionist research. This would involve publishing novel insights that extend beyond what is currently known. This is generally difficult, especially since the frontiers are pretty far out in a lot of ways. But there are still plenty of things that can be explored. The second would be popularization. This involves taking known material and presenting it most effectively to a broad audience. Ideally, there should be organization and editorial oversight to help coordinate these efforts.

5) Another issue that came up with the forum going down is that most of us had no way of contacting each other. This was a problem. (In the meantime, a few of us gathered at RODOH as a backup). The main issue here is that there is a lot of concern about privacy and security for obvious reasons. But if we are so cautious that it hinders collaboration this I think can be a problem.

[Pineapple]

I have a suggestion to make. I would suggest creating a Discord server as a backup to the forum. In a lot of ways a server is better. A Discord server can be a great way to enhance community engagement, streamline communication, and also crucially provide real-time interactions among members. A Discord server is also "private" since anything that's published stays within the confines of Discord and is not out in the public. A private CODOH server would be great since not anyone can barge in and take over. One can specify who can have access and who doesn't. There would be mods who can run the server just like how there are mods here. There would be server rules There would be channels for things like debates and revisionist-only channels,just like boards here. One can make certain channels accessible to a specified group of people. There's also the option to engage in a voice chat but that's only an option.

What do you think about this suggestion? Let me know. Thanks