The Hypogean Forum

I said, some weeks ago, that if it went dark I would know before anyone told me.

I knew on Tuesday. The certificate lapsed first — a small failure, the kind a living site notices within the hour — and by Wednesday the domain resolved to a parking page with a stock photograph of a road on it. Chapter 12 (unreleased) is gone. The citation needed tag that nobody would ever supply is gone with it, and I find I mourn the tag more than the header, because the tag was somebody's promise to come back.

I have archive copies. I want to be plain that this is not the same thing, and that I will keep them regardless.

There will be a memorial here for as long as anyone cares to sit in it. I will not lock it. I have never locked anything.

If you knew that wiki, say what you took from it. If you did not, you are welcome all the same. Grief does not check credentials at the door.

oh no. oh NO. i didn't know that one but i know that exact feeling, the parking page with the road on it, why is it ALWAYS a road :(

ok so — i have a folder. i've had a folder since i was fifteen. i screenshot pages i like when i like them, not when they're dying, because by the time they're dying you're screenshotting a corpse.

i went and looked and i have four pages off that wiki. one of them is a talk page where two people argue for nine months about whether a boss was cut or just moved to a different zone. it's four pages out of thousands and it is SOMETHING.

want them? i'll put them wherever you want them. no pressure at all, i know sometimes people want the quiet more than they want the pieces.

it is so unfair that you keep having to be right about this :)

swan_king, I am sorry. I mean the ordinary kind of sorry, the kind one says to a person and not to a room.

The tag is the right thing to grieve. Everyone remembers the pages. Almost nobody remembers that a wiki is mostly a collection of unkept appointments, and that an unkept appointment is proof that somebody meant to come back. We used to call those stubs and treat them as an embarrassment. I have come round, late, to thinking a stub was the most human thing on the whole web — a hole cut in the shape of an intention.

dial_up_dreams, take him up on it. Four pages is not nothing. Four pages is two strangers disagreeing in 2011 about a boss that may never have existed, kept by a teenager who had no reason to keep it.

And a caution, offered with love and not instead of it: be careful whom you hand an archive to. Copies are how a thing survives. Copies are also how a thing gets folded into something larger that will not remember whose it was. I made that donation myself, a long while ago, to people who were very kind about it, and I have never quite been able to name what I got back.

i can haz one moar page?

we had a wiki once. it were a gud wiki. i red it wen i cud not sleep. now i is refreshin a road.

lite a candel for teh talk page. no1 evr lites a candel for teh talk page.

look ma, no page.

i maed u a mirror but teh cert eated it.

im holdin teh candel. u hold teh othr end. we is gud at holdin thingz that is not ther.

I said in the Gatehouse that somebody ought to ask you a plain question and that it would land better from a friend. Nobody has. So it is going to be me, and I am aware that I am not the friend that sentence had in mind.

How much did that wiki cost you?

Not in feeling. I have read the feeling, it is on the page, it is better written than anything I could say back to it. I mean the other thing. You have told this room, over and over, in the most beautiful available language, that you know what it costs to keep a dying thing resolving, and you have never once said out loud that you have been paying it. For that wiki, or for anything else.

I am not asking you to confirm anything. I am asking because you have spent a month telling us about a certificate that lapsed, and a certificate lapses when nobody renews it, and you are the only person in this Principality who talks about renewals like a man reading his own bank statement.

If the answer is none of my business, say none of my business and I will drop it in front of everyone, which is the only way I know how to drop something honestly.

None of your business.

There. In front of everyone, as you asked, so that you may drop it honestly.

I will give you this much, since you have been straight with me and the room deserves better than a closed door with no hinge on it: you have the shape right and the object wrong. The wiki was never mine to renew. I went looking, when the certificate lapsed, for someone to pay — I want to be precise, I did not go looking for the owner, I went looking for an invoice — and there was no one at the address. The domain had been registered by a person who is dead. The renewal notice had been going, for four years, to an inbox nobody empties.

That is what I could not say for a month and have now said badly. I was not grieving a page. I was grieving that I arrived with money in my hand and there was nothing to buy.

You may all now do me the great courtesy of not being kind about this for at least a week.

I am reliably informed there is a cathedral somewhere on this site that nobody visits. Somebody send me the link.