Encyclopaedia Dramatica has vanished from its home in the Serbian Republic. It has been missing for more than a month. The site may return tomorrow, or never - it's in the same position as You're The Man Now Dog! in that the pages are available (if you know how to look), but the main site is no more. The chances are high that we will see ED get hosting in Zimbabwe, or Nagorno-Karabakh, or North Korea, because nobody in "normal" Internet hosting countries wants anything to do with the website. Which is a shame, because underneath the gore and ancient rips on defunct Livejournal accounts was the truth about what was going on at Wikipedia - until Sherrod DeGrippo decided to junk ED and turn it into the failed Oh, Internet project, there was a lot of backroom information about Jimbo's Jungle. All of that was ripped to shreds when the site was copied and sent to Spanish servers by ED dissidents who wanted the site to remain as it was. And after they ran out of time in Spain, they moved on to Serbia. while DeGrippo and Oh, Internet have gone on to nothing.
There is a thread on this over at the Wikipedia Sucks messageboard on how the whole thing fell apart, but you have to be a member to see it. Here are the highlights:
Well.....their server crashed late Thurs or early Fri and has been shit-the-bed for almost 4 days now. Not a word about when they will fix it. Quite possible they had their hosting or DNS yanked yet AGAIN, either by hackers or by another pissed-off victim.
Also, I checked Zaiger's Facebook. He's BAAAAACK.
https://www.facebook.com/zaiger
(not that it matters, he has at least four FB accounts that I could find)
- Eric Barbour, Aug. 25, 2019 6:03pm
https://www.reddit.com/r/encyclopediadr ... own_again/
There is a Zaiger with a reddit account going back to 2010 who is top mod on the subreddit. So, no, unlikely Zaiger is in prison, unless he gave his password to someone or it was hacked, also very unlikely. Apparently lives in Massachusetts. End of interest.
- Abd, Aug. 27, 2019 8:04am
Well, kiddies.....it's been down a month. Still no "action".
If you really MUST look at ED articles, it seems that Wayback saved some of the more popular items (but not all, the wiki was a mess of ancient and forgotten pages and chaotic crap anyway). I has assumed they had NOFOLLOWed everything but it appears that someone allowed archive.org to take snapshots starting in 2016 or 2017. This is the only way to look back at ED right now, unless somebody restores from proper backups. Last capture of the front page was August 17.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190817063 ... /Main_Page
You can fiddle your way to articles although it is easier to remove the "m." from the front-page URL.
If you like stupidity, there are some forum captures ending at August 22nd. Good luck getting to the individual threads.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190816203 ... matica.rs/
- Eric Barbour, Sept. 20, 2019 8:13pm
Check out @eddotse on Twitter. This Rockenhaus guy keeps saying that he's "almost got it fixed." It's been down now for about five weeks.
Here's a post by @RockRockenhaus on October 2 on the @eddotse Twitter account:
"Alright, here’s the deal. Sibin’s RAID failed. All data was lost. He didn’t have any backups. What we’ve been doing is recovering DB backups we can find, building a new backend, and then building the frontends. So basically we’re rebuilding ED."
The images posted by Robert Crawford on October 3 on @eddotse have to do with the court martial of Rockenhaus from the U.S. Navy in 2014, where Rockenhaus was a technician. He was court martialed for seven counts of making false official statements and four counts of wearing an unauthorized ribbon or device.
Sounds like Rockenhaus will be a good replacement for Ryan Cleary. I think Cleary by now has lost his appetite for ED. I read that he got a 34-month sentence for DDoS activities (he was arrested in mid-2012), but that was just a comment by someone so don't quote me on that.
- Daniel Brandt, Oct. 4, 2019 2:16pm
An End Without an End
There is no way they are not coming back, it's just a question of when and where the servers will be located. The thing that counts is that if some of that backroom Wikipedia information was saved somewhere, it would be nice to see it. There is something that demands Encyclopaedia Dramatica to exist, if only to mock the pretensions of Wikipedia, which like Jimmy Wales (who recently became a British citizen) seems to think it has risen above normal Iinternet affairs. The reality is that Wales has run away to a country where he can more easily defend himself in libel suits, and Wikipedia is still a grimy hole hiding behind a massive PR effort. Oh and Zaiger, if you are reading this...."homeless, drugged out, and stupid is no way to go through life, son." (Apologies to John Vernon.)
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