Citizendium Blog

I’ll let Jason fill you in on the technical details, but we’ll be installing four new servers Tuesday, and our public launch should happen sometime not too long after that — by the end of March at the latest, but we have technical work as well as still considerable writing to do.  Major press coverage is already lined up to coincide with the launch, so it should be lots of fun.

I should explain the delay in launch, for those who were paying attention.  I’m happy with many aspects of our project, but I’m not proud of the launch delays: I’ll tell the story in all humility because it’s entertaining even if it is at our expense.  So…the first launch date was last October 1, I believe.  To be honest, even then I knew that was “ambitious.”  We pushed the date back because it took us time to decide on a suitable Internet service; we’ve been happy with our choice of Steadfast Networks, which has supplied two of our five servers free of charge.  (We’ll still need donations to cover the monthly bill for the others, though!)

Also, by the time we decided to go with Steadfast, someone made the suggestion that we do a pilot project; that would reduce our server needs, which we expected to be beyond what a single server could handle.  Then, once Steadfast had our server installed, it took considerable time before we could do a private launch for people outside of an ad hoc steering committee, which we finally did at the end of October/beginning of November.  After our first press release, last October, I said we were going to launch publicly in six weeks, but I acknowledged that might be ambitious; sometime in the month of December is what I said.  The trouble is that donations of equipment that we had been hoping for did not materialize, while at the same time we were arranging a new relationship with the Tides Center, which would make a monetary, rather than in-kind, donation possible.  We did get some much-needed startup funds then, from the Revson Foundation.

Then of course the holidays happened, and then people had to recover from the holidays, so we didn’t really do anything launch-wise until mid-January.  By then, I was saying, “Let’s use some of this money from Revson and just go for it!” but the Executive Committee said, “Hold your horses, Larry.”  Their caution was well-placed.  We wouldn’t have been ready last January.  We were going to open up to self-registration at the same time we opened up to public viewing, but instead we decided to test out just self-registration — and it’s a good thing we did that, because what we learned in the three weeks of the test was that we have several vandals who have nothing better to do with their time but write scripts that create thousands of accounts per hour, and register faux accounts in order to scrawl dirty words on the walls.  It got so bad by mid-February that our constables were doing nothing but undoing vandal damage.  So we shut down self-registration and redesigned our e-mail registration system, which is now actually pretty efficient — people usually get on board within 24 hours, sometimes within just a few.  That’s a significant improvement over last year.  It’s just that now we’ve got to create a new semi-automated registration system, which will make getting people on board as easy for constables as pressing a button.  The great thing is that we haven’t had vandalism either before or after self-registration.

When we were Slashdotted twice within a week (about a month ago), I said we’d be launching soon.  We held out a little bit longer for more funds (and thus more servers).  But then we decided really to study the question how many servers would be needed.  We still don’t know for sure, but we figured 4-6 servers would probably be enough for the first few months at least.  This isn’t a scalable solution, but it will allow us to launch.  So, that’s what we decided to do.  We might have launched last week, except for the fact that the servers were on back order for some time and didn’t finally arrive, and won’t finally be installed, until tomorrow (Tuesday).  So launch won’t take place until next week.  It will definitely be before the end of the month.