RIP Zoklet
Dfg
Admin
You last visited: 11-16-2012 at 08:25 PM
Due to recent unfortunate events I must say farewell to you all. I can no longer be your administrator, I will no longer be posting, and most importantly I will be closing the site.
There are a few things that I've tried to keep a secret from zoklet over the last few years - I hinted to some of them in my "Where did zok go?" thread but since this is the end, I might as well tell you. I have a few serious health issues and some mounting medical bills as a result. I'm also currently in between jobs and can't afford to keep the website online, nor do I have any desire to.
Zoklet is a money pit no matter how you look at it. While it may make a few bucks off of ads (in the past we even made a PROFIT off of ads), that says nothing for the amount of liability and legal issues the website generates. Over the years, I've been contacted and questioned by the FBI, secret service, local law enforcement, lawyers, and nosy reporters. Even if the website makes money, nothing will keep those forces at bay. And often times they end up costing a lot of money themselves in legal fees. It has not been a fruitful adventure.
The website has also been a major source of stress for me over the last few years and it's only made my health problems worse - a lot worse. I was hoping that with my recent push for changes on the website I'd be able to reappear as a member and even a leader, but that is no longer looking like a viable option. After trying to become more active and dealing with the problems facing the community, things have only gotten worse for me. According to my doctors: if I don't want to die a young man, I need to quit - period. Adding to that, someone's been threatening to post my personal information (as well as that of my family) and all the other standard threats. This has all just solidified my desire to make my departure. I don't need this in my life any more.
As HST once said: it was time, I felt, for an agonizing reappraisal of the whole scene.
With that said, I will be shutting off the forums in the next couple of days. A short time later, I will be shutting down the site altogether. Because I don't want to see the community become any more fragmented than it already has been over the years, I encourage you all to make plans to find a new home now. If you guys can come to a general consensus on where you'd like your new home to be, I will redirect zoklet.net to that location. I will also file a change of URL with both google and bing so that you get the traffic that zoklet usually has. But just as totse.com will forever be Jeff's, zoklet.net will always be mine. I'm going to keep ownership of the domain for the years to come. It is not for sale and neither is the website itself.
Anyone who wishes to create a static archive of the website (to put in a torrent or whatever) may do so. I suggest that you organize your efforts so that you don't just DDOS the server with everyone trying to scrape the thing at once, though.
Whether you love me or hate me, we've all been through a lot together. I know I've dropped the ball on more than one occasion and if I could take it all back I would. I may not have been the best leader in the world, but I've always given it my all and everything. I'm just sorry that it wasn't always enough.
I ask that for my own sanity you do not try to make contact with me after reading this. I will be abandoning my gmail address, changing my phone number, and in the weeks to come, moving as well. I will never be coming back. Let me live the rest of my life in peace.
Anyone who I want to contact me will already have a means in which to do so. I will not be signing into IRC again either - the channel #zok will likely expire and #totse will be given to O_RLY. My IRC server will be disconnected as well.
And sadly, this will be my last post on zoklet. It's been a pleasure to be here with you guys all these years. I've spent nearly half of my life with this community and it pains me more than anything to leave it behind. My time here is done though, and I need to go. I wish you all the best of luck. It has been so good to hear it
Admins: please use this thread to link to other people's websites who wish to carry on the community. Organize the list as you see fit.</p>
For anyone looking to start up their own website to host the remaining members of the community, there are a few technical details that may serve you well:
Find a host that is offshore but has good latency.
Read the host's terms of service and acceptable use policies thoroughly. Make sure they're OK with the kind of content you want to host. A good rule of thumb is to look for warez hosts or fringe pornography hosts.
If you accept zoklet's traffic, you will need LOTS of bandwidth. Look for a place that offers unlimited bandwidth if possible.
You will be DDOS attacked. Maybe not right away, but eventually you'll get hit with a big one and it will knock you offline. Find a host who does not care about ddos traffic or set up a reverse proxy (cloudflare or prolexic or something)
Zoklet currently has a dedicated 3ghz dual core machine with 8gb ram. We use all of this. A cloud solution will likely not work unless you separate web from db - even then you'll have to pay a lot.
I host with sharktech because of their unlimited bandwidth policy and "ddos protection" It costs about 80 dollars per month. With SSL certificates, domain name registrations, IRC services, and various other nickle-and-dime expenses, it usually manages to cost upwards of 100 USD per month.
You will get regular DMCA complaints. Make sure you take care of these ASAP.
I suggest that you mirror as much of zoklet's content as you can and write clever .htaccess rewrite rules to forward crawler bots to the mirrored content (eg, when a bot comes looking for /bbs/index.php you forward them to /zoklet_archive/bbs/index.php. Make sure your own BBS is in a separate directory though - like /community/ or /forum/ so that it won't get confused between the archive and your community).
I suggest using a linux based server. Mine runs CentOS with OSSEC and CSF for security purposes. I can send you my configurations for these services if you like so that you don't have to set it up on your own.
There are a few advertisers on the site as it is. If you would like to do advertising with them for your new site, please contact them - I'm sure they'd love to do business with you to help alleviate some of the bills.
If you have any technical concerns, I urge you to ask the folks on freenode irc. They're some of the best nerds in the universe and they'll help you with just about any problem you can come up with... just be prepared for them to make fun of you first.
I hope you take some of totse's views into mind when setting up your own ground rules and values. Freedom of information, anonymity, and the occasional paranoid belligerence. Never forget your roots. I also hope that you can learn from some of zoklet's mistakes and take into consideration a lot of the ideas which were posted in the suggestions thread the other week.
And from one admin to another: No matter what rules or systems you put in place, you should know that your users will always find a loophole. Do yourself a favor and keep it simple.
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Comments
Please read through this entire post before replying (it's a doozie, I know). In your reply, please address specific points or raise new ones of your own. I'd like to try to keep this thread as organized as possible so that good ideas don't get buried.
For those of you who weren't aware, I made a thread in the News forum the other day indicating that I'd be spending a bit more time on the site in the weeks and months to come. I answered some questions about why I left in the first place and why I've come back. If you haven't read it yet, I suggest doing so: https://www.zoklet.net/bbs/showthread.php?t=310330
Now for the fun part. In that thread I mentioned a few things which I've identified as being problematic on the website - things that cause people to leave, things that keep people from visiting in the first place, and just a few general problems with the way the site is run and managed. To refresh your memory, here's that list again:
No well defined purpose or site identity. Who are we and what unites us?
Good members leaving the website (being driven off, losing interest, getting banned, etc)
Lack of new members
Mods/admins who either don't live up to users expectations or abuse their power
Illegal content (child porn) being posted
Inadequate representation of users
Zoklet library (let's get this thing off the ground!)
Some of these are very low hanging fruit which can be taken care of right away. Let's start with those:
#5 - Illegal content
I can't believe I have to tell you guys this but: child pornography of any kind is strictly forbidden. If you see it posted here, report it immediately. Offenders will be banned without question. Repeat offenders will be reported to the proper authorities as well. Same goes for "jailbait" type photos. If you have to ask yourself "is this person too young?" the answer is yes, yes they are too young. Don't try to push the line to see what you can get away with - you will be banned.
Why? The laws on this are rather vague and vary from state to state and country to country. The punishments also tend to be very strict - so it's best for us to air on the side of caution. Some states and countries say that nudity MUST be involved, others say that it just needs to "depict sexuality" while still others say that it need only be intended for "sexual gratification." Again, these laws are all over the place and it's very hard to stay on top of them. I would much rather not have any sort of jail-bait type photos than risk having the website shut down because someone thought it'd be funny to post a 15 year old girl in a training bra giving the camera sexy-eyes.
#1 - A well defined purpose and identity for the site
When I first brought this thread up to the mods last week, Snoopy was the first to point out that I'd entirely glossed over the zoklet-identity issue. He gave a pretty good pep talk and then made fun of me for a bit. But partially thanks to him, I do realize that this is one of the biggest issues with the community right now. We have no purpose, no flag to unite ourselves under, and no identity. Not only does this keep people from sticking around, it keeps people from visiting in the first place. When I visit a website and I see a strong identity and culture, I start wishing that I was a part of it and I ultimately stick around. It's an in-group thing and we need that.
I suggest that we unite ourselves under a few main pillars:
We were all part of totse. Even though everyone views those days through rose tinted glasses now, it's something we can be proud of having been a part of. We were there. The fact that we now view it through rose tinted glasses just goes to show how important it is for all of us that we came from totse. You always see people bragging about how they're an old timer and how they've been here since 2003, etc, etc. That's the kind of pride I'm talking about.
Raw data for raw nerves! Not to steal Jeff's words, but that's possibly one of the best ways to describe why we all found totse in the first place. It wasn't just a giant text archive of useless crap that nobody cared about - it was an archive of articles and information that couldn't be found anywhere else on the net! It's a bit outdated now, but I think we can successfully make a 2.0 version with the Zoklet Library. This needs to be a goal of ours.
Because this site is a mixture of both Totse and Zoklet, I think we've always had a hard time pin-pointing a single identity (in both a concrete and abstract way) and I certainly didn't do anything to help by saying things like, "This is zoklet - NOT totse" while simultaneously trying to make the website as much like totse as possible. Though it may be a different site, the community is still the same and I think we need to embrace our roots instead of trying to turn ourselves into something new. We can embrace our Zoklet identity as well, but forgetting our totse roots and history would be a shame.
On a more concrete level, I think we should make use of some of the symbolism from those roots - the stuff that totse gave us: the color scheme, the symbol "&T" (or in our case "&Z") the background image, etc. The website will never be what totse was since a lot of its purpose is long since gone or obsolete. But there's always a need for high quality fringe information on subjects like hacking, weapons, theft, drugs, and everything in between.
#3 - Lack of new members
Lack of new members isn't going to be as hard to fix as one might imagine. There are some inherent problems on the website that must be fixed if we want to keep new members, but getting them here in the first place isn't going to be terribly difficult. In the years past, IDChief would often dump some money into Google Adwords to drive traffic to the site. It brought a lot of people to the site - a LOT. There are also a few things we can do with advertising and SEO. This is all easy stuff - but it's keeping the members here that's tricky. I don't want to invest money in bringing people here if they're not going to stay, so let's tackle that problem too.
#2 - Keeping new members/good members leaving
Keeping new members falls into the same category as the existing good members leaving. If we can fix one, we'll likely end up fixing the other at the same time. Keeping new members is commonly referred to as a "conversion rate" - converting hits to sales (or registrations/posts, in our case). I have a few ideas on how to fix this, so I'm going to number them:
I've said this so many times before and some of you may remember it: When Jeff closed the doors at totse, he pointed out that the site had lost its purpose. It was originally made for free speech and anonymity, but now you can get those... anywhere. 4chan, wikipedia, youtube, etc. It's a dime a dozen, now. When totse started, that wasn't the case - which is why it grew so rapidly. Now that every 12 year old with a proxy and youtube account has free speech and anonymity, they're pretty much standard internet features. You can't base a website off of standard internet features.
So we need to find something else - a NEW hook. What usually gets suggested is some sort of text archive repository. That's a good start, but that will only be successful if we have unusual or rare content - and lots of it (Zoklet Library).
Facebook, twitter, reddit, and all the other major players out there have something that we don't. They've all got that "itch factor" that makes you come back for more - you come back every 10 minutes looking for updates. You post something on facebook, and you just sit there refreshing over and over to see if anyone's "liked" your shit. You come back every couple of minutes to see if a friend has posted anything new or funny. Reddit has the same thing but with "up votes" and reddit gold. Twitter has the same thing with retweets and followers. And every one of these sites promises to promote your content based upon its rankings (retweets, upvotes, likes, etc). Zoklet has a few built in ranking systems but they don't DO anything except for display a number next to your username.
I think we should do something with those numbers. I don't want any gimmicky features, but I do think we need to get on the band wagon with positive-reinforcement mechanisms.
A while back I was talking to LifeJunkie about how to set up an algorithm which would take several factors into account in order to produce a "score." I want to use this scores to rank and sort the content on the main page. These scores would take in factors such as reputation/thanks, thread/post rating (the 1-5 star system), number of thread views, the staleness of a thread, number of thread replies, the recency of the last reply, number of user infractions, and any other number of variables in order to come up with a solid number. The numbers can be dynamically computed daily (or even on the fly) so that good content will float to the top and shitty content will sink out of sight.
I do want to make it clear that I'm only proposing we do this for the main page - not on the forums. For more main-page discussion, please see #7.
End the drama! If we want to be known as an informational resource we must end the drama. It seems like 50% of the posts on zoklet are ABOUT zoklet. I'm not saying that a little bit of drama isn't good - it may even be something we can pride ourselves on. But when I left the site, it was obvious that it had invaded a bit too much of the other forums. Since being back I've noticed how much it's settled down - I can't tell you how nice that is to see. Drama drives the good people away from the site and only manages to attract more people who like drama. Period. The people who might actually have something real to contribute take one look and NOPE the fuck right out. The people who stay are the ones who like that kind of stuff in the first place - which makes the problem worse.
I don't want to enforce a new "no drama" policy - that's stupid and it wouldn't work anyway. In fact, it'd probably just make MORE drama. Instead, I say we fix the drama-creating problems so that there's no reason for those threads in the first place. I'd like to cure the disease - not treat the symptoms.
Curbing the drama is going to be a very delicate operation and it will take time. It is not something that can just be "cracked down on" - it's something that must be done organically. It must come from within and it's going to have to start with the moderators. Moderators should be users first. Bad moderators cause drama.
It's also important to remember that abusive moderators are rarely malicious - they're just lazy or abrasive. Instead of taking the time to sort out a problem with words, they just use the warn/infract/ban buttons instead. These should always be last resort options! For more on moderators, see the next subsection.
#4 - Bad moderators
I kind of outlined some of the problems in my previous points (End the drama). Lazy moderators cause problems. Instead of using their words to solve problems, they click a button and deliver a punishment. You can't get much more bureaucratic and totalitarian than that. Anyone who's read Kafka's The Trail knows exactly what I'm talking about. No, there shouldn't be any expectation of due process or civil rights on the internet - we're running a forum, not a damn country, right? But we should be giving the users the dignity of addressing the issue with words before jumping on them with an infraction. The users are the only reason that we have moderators in the first place. Without them, there is no point to the website! If a moderator can turn a bad poster into a good poster, not only have we eliminated a negative aspect from the site, we've ADDED a positive one. That's the kind of thing that will make this website thrive - moderators who are a part of the community that they help lead.
Another part of the problem here is the way we select moderators. We've always had a few criteria that they must meet: clean record (no infractions or just old/stupid ones), knowledge in the subject, a serious need for a moderator in that forum, and the current mods get to select new mods. This last one makes a lot of sense but tends to cause the most problems at the same time. It makes sense, because who else would know that forum and its users better than the existing moderators? We trust the existing mods, so why wouldn't we trust their decisions on additions and replacements? In a perfect world this would be the ideal solution.
This is kind of flawed, though. The problem is that we get "groupthink" - essentially a bunch of people who sit around agreeing with each other all day because there's no difference in opinions or ideas. While it does make a wonderful "united front" it severely limits our horizons and turns all the mods into a single "administration" entity. I used to think this was a good thing (being a single entity) but it really promotes an "us vs them" culture when dealing with users. This is partially why acidmelt and I worked so well together. We had such radically different ideas of how things should be done but we were also able to work through our differences and see things through each other's eyes. We had our disagreements, but we tended to keep them out of business.
Either way, there are a number of ways that we could fix the moderator selection system. Voting is usually suggested as a fix, but we've tried that a few times with little luck. I'm open to ideas though.
#6 - Inadequate user representation
There are a lot of things that should be thrown into this category as well. Ideas, complaints, etc. I'll number them again
Moderator selection. I mentioned in the above that the moderator selection process is an issue. I don't think we should just have an open vote, but I think the users should have a much bigger say in who is a moderator. And whoever is selected is just going to have to get along with everyone else - users included. If they don't, they're out. In the past we've tried votes with admin-veto, admin selected votes (admin selects all candidates), pure votes (what we did with vizier), polls, suggestions, and just about everything else. None of these methods seem to work too well. I'd love to hear if someone has a better idea.
User created rules. Or a A "zoklet constitution" if you will. I think it'd be an excellent idea to let you guys create the rules that govern the website in the first place. There will be a certain set of rules which cannot be changed (like our policy about illegal content), but I think people should have the right to change the other rules how they see fit. Like I said, the only reason that the moderators, administrators, and website exist in the first place is because of you guys. Having half a dozen admins create the rules for hundreds of users is silly. It should be the other way around. It's your website, after all.
Quarterly votes on various things (amendments to rules, new mods, petitions, policy changes, whatever). We can't just set up a system and then refuse to do any upkeep. If we leave upkeep in the hands of the users, it'll have a higher chance of getting done - and to their satisfaction, at that.
#7 - Zoklet Library
This is something I'm really excited for and I think a lot of you guys are also. I envision that the main page will combine well written articles and forum threads into a single place. Users will be given something in exchange for writing good content. I haven't quite decided what the incentives will be - maybe just a badge next to their username, an @zoklet email address, or maybe they'll be entered in a monthly raffle - I'm open to suggestions.
I know there are a few users who have put in a LOT of time into this project and I'm going to make sure that they get the recognition they deserve.
I have a test server set up for development on this project, so we should be able to get the ball rolling and have this thing launched within the next few weeks, optimistically.
Odds and ends
These are ideas, points, issues, and questions that simply don't fit into any of the above.
Forum specific bans. If a user is a good poster on 90% of the forum but just trolls the hell out of one section, it makes little sense to rid them of the entire website. Obviously we should first try to solve the problem without moderator actions. If that fails, moderators should have the ability to remove them from that section without removing them from the site.
Amnesty. This is a big one. I know that with all of the changes I've suggested, someone is going to ask about unbanning various former members. I think we should indeed take a look at some of these bans (both old and new), but I'm not going to make any promises about this now. I think the other issues are a bit more pressing. When we do take this task on, we'll need to come up with a system instead of just unbanning left and right.
I suggest something simple like: We set up a 30 day amnesty period in which people can come and plead their cases. We have a set group of people (both mods AND users) who vote on it, come up with probationary conditions for their unban and all that fun stuff, then unban the user (assuming that's what is decided). It saves the admins from having to do it themselves and it would be properly representative of what the community actually wants instead of just what a few mods/admins want.
Again, this isn't something I want to tackle now. After we get a few of these other issues knocked out, we can make a new thread about ban amnesty. Just something to think about for now.
Donations I know a lot of people have asked about donations lately. I've got a bitcoin account set up to receive funds - I just need to integrate it into the website. Donation will be spent on one of two things: google adwords or website upkeep (server bills, ssl certificates, domain re-registration, etc.). At the end of each quarter, I will disclose how much was donated and what it was spent on. All donations will be anonymous.
https://www.zoklet.net/bbs/showthread.php?p=4789503#post4789503