[Irinikus]

When I first joined this community, back in the Nekochan days, the community really seemed to be dead in the water! (It was my personal interest in SGI hardware that compelled me to join the community.)

There was little to no development going on and the community had basically stagnated!

With the advent of this forum, I believe these machines have certainly become more appealing to outsiders, as some really interesting software has now been made visibly available for these machines, where it was shrouded in secrecy in the old Nekochan days.

Although I personally love hardware, I do believe that a machine is only as good as the software available for it, and on this front I believe huge strides have been made in the past two years or so.

So maybe, just maybe, the demise of Nekochan may have been one of the best things that has happened to this community in recent years!

A huge thank you goes out to Raion and his team, and everyone who has contributed positively to this community in the last two years or so! (KEEP IT UP!!!)

[Raion]

Hey Irinikus,

Thank you for the continued positive encouragement. Let's be pragmatic for a second though, and reflect on what we have lost and gained over the years:

1. Nekochan had millions of posts of nearly irreplaceable data. While Nekonomicon was a good effort; as itself states:

Of the 30,844 subjects and 262,325 writings present at the last available snapshot of Nekochan, only 3,670 subjects and 45,367 writings remain in the Nekonomicon. As I improve the methods of extracting this information it is possible that this number will increase, but it is unlikely to be significant.

roughly 10% of topics and somewhere around 1/6 of posts were recovered. That's unfortunate, no matter how sliced. But it shows that we took it for granted.

2. Nekochan had a unified community. Though, the Nekochan I remember was well past its prime and beginning to become a bit spoiled. What I mean by that is that the old guard often were unfriendly to new users (I'm not old guard, I was relatively late to the party) a general level of pessimism permeated the bedrock of the site, and I ended up being at odds with a few staff members,

Nekochan's infrastructure had rotted from the inside out. it was running a version of PHPBB (3.1.8) that was far out dated, with XSS and other major exploits, PHP 5.6 which was essentially on life support, and a bunch of other ridiculous decisions, including the whole SPEAKEASY DSL thing.

And then Peter went and pulled the plug. I've kind of gone back and forth about how I feel about Peter. Looking through his old pics and stuff while rebuilding the gallery taught me a lot about the kind of person he was. He deeply cared for what he did, but at some point he just kind of snapped and gave up. FWIW, I only ever had positive discussions with the man, sold him a 3000D amiga, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

3. What we gained was renewed interest. I have to thank early supporters like Dodoid, Elf, Irinikus (you!), Micrex22 and others who immediately crowded around the place. I was thoroughly inexperienced at running things, still am kind of uncomfortable in my own skin about it all, and stuff, but I think we've done a lot to make it work, which is more than most people can say. I'm not really used to, however, the whole backseat driving thing that people often started off with at the beginning, hence why when threads got out of hand it got to be too much of a mess to clean up.

4. What we have gained is a greater understanding of fragility of communities.

I'm always working to improve the place. And there's other things afoot too, but I'll leave it at "Look for the users with bright yellow tags". it should tell you there's a major change coming along soon.

[Irinikus]

Yes, allot of information was lost, but was it all really that relevant? Trees have to be pruned from time to time to remain healthy!

From what I’ve personally experienced, these machines have become far more interesting to use in recent years and many of the key issues in getting these machines up and running have been addressed members present here.

As for the split in the community, that’s also not necessarily such a bad thing, as it allows people with differing opinions to fit in where they feel comfortable. Back in the Nekochan days, members only had one option: Nekochan, and from what I remember, tensions used to flair often as a result. (Just remember, that you cannot please everyone all the time, and you cannot be friends with everyone, and you don’t need to be!)

Members who are present here are present because they want to be, and within this forum itself, I don’t feel the presence of any tension.

So yes there is a rift in the community, but it may just be a necessary evil!

Raion, just keep on doing what you’ve been doing, and things will go well here. (Don’t worry about what’s said in other places, as opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one!)

[Trippynet]

There was some crap on there, but also a lot of useful info. Can't tell you how many times I ran into an issue, searched Nekochan and found an old 10 year old post covering the solution.

My biggest issue with what Pete did isn't that he shut down Nekochan (it was clear his heart wasn't in it any more), it's that he gave no warning at all. Just pulled the plug one day with no notice and hasn't been in touch at all with anyone regarding a copy of the DB. If he'd given some notice, we could have arranged to transfer data, archive the site etc. But instead, a lot of info has been lost. That's a real shame.

[Raion]

I gave him several chances to mail me a copy of the hard disk and I offered to pay him $1500 bucks. I would even do a little bit more if he had done so but he never got back to me and never even acknowledged my presence.

Perhaps promoting IN on there had a part to play but I'm also kind of a little unsympathetic when I tried to point out vulnerabilities and was immediately threatened with a ban.

I've never threatened anybody here for something like that but I have told people when they try to back seat drive and don't understand the depth of the infrastructure that it can get incredibly annoying. There was a gentleman here a while ago who I regret hasn't come back, but he basically was trying and failing to help with the Google delivery issues that I was having. One of the main issues was that he doesn't understand how phpmailer works and thinks that the send mail method done in the 90s can be kluged together to work. He may have certainly had a point but at the same time I wish that people would take it a little bit more seriously when I say that there is a very specific way I have set things up.

For instance this forum actually is very performant. We have had more than 700 users on at one point and more than a thousand guests and the total CPU usage was quite low as was the overall memory usage. There are alternative ways of doing things such as using proprietary software, but I prefer to make it so that everything that I do is contributable back out to the community if they really want it. Overall there are costs and benefits to not using major corporations like Amazon for I was staying and backups but the main reason why I have shied away from it is because of cost and maintenance and control. for me it's extremely important that I don't have to be at the mercy of a big company dude might decide to swing the censorship hammer. Smaller companies, especially those who I'm spending a ton of money with each year are going to be a little bit more reluctant about firing me for fear of both backlash and lost revenue.

[Intuition]

I remember discovering Nekochan around 2005. There were still news updates on the front page outside the forum.

Eventually ended up getting the 300Mhz O2 from Jeff Joplin at Acronym Systems.

His SGI always came with a bundle of goodies.

There was always pretty good search results when looking around Neko for information on most problems.

Feels there is enough expertise here to solve most riddles but it is amazing how Nekochan did feel a bit like a ghost site most of the time.

I joined here right away because I was immediately certain that anything new and Irix would create confidence around the subject matter as it would also represent information pertaining to things from today vs the web and usage standards of 2003.

Also, since we have this kind of retrospective idealism in mind at the get go there is the intent to restore and maintain vs looking at posts about updates from 2002 and wondering if any of it applies to something you are trying to do now.

Nekochan was definitely integral in my interest when I was buying an o2 but IrixNet has really become what I was hoping to find when I was looking and found Nekochan. A solid community of people that really want to maintain and document this innovative part of computer history.

[Trippynet]

Must admit that I wasn't especially "SGI-active" during the heyday of Nekochan. I had Indys and an O2 back in the early 2000s (acquired them from the university my dad worked at), but by mid-2000s I had stopped using them and had "archived" them to the loft.

I dug them back out in 2013 when I moved house, set up the O2 again, shoved a 300GB disk in that I'd acquired from a scrapped server at work then found Nekochan. It was a fantastic resource of information and I became hooked once more. This then led me to buy my two most coveted machines from Ian Mapleson - my Indigo2 and my Fuel. Still, it was a pity looking through Nekochan and seeing just how active it had been, and how active Pete had been, yet it felt quite quiet by 2013+.

Still, the old info on there was invaluable. I would love at some point for Pete to do the right thing for the community he created and donate the DB for Nekochan. I have a huge amount of respect for all the work he did with Nekochan, and Nekoware as well. It's just a pity (at present) that it ended on a bit of a sour note.

[Raion]

We'll recover.

[Irinikus]

We're well on our way, in my opinion!

Not being able to openly talk software on Nekochan was detrimental to the community in my opinion! And yes you could always organise in the background via the PM system, but that wasn't in any way conducive to striking interest in potential newcomers!

Machines are only as interesting, or as good as the software thats available to be run on them! (And it wasn't openly visible to potential newcomers in the Nekochan days!)

[Raion]

Yeah unless it's something where I'm concerned about DMCA or lawsuits, most stuff should be safe. That's why our nonfree mirror will be returning eventually. It won't be until I've strained out everything that was a disc image though, since it'll all have to be tarballs to be IRIX friendly.