TEOTWAWKI ATS Watch Party Thread

a reply to: FlyersFan

Excellent news, thanks for the heads up. I'll head over to that site & check it out.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: theshadowknows

Forgive me for asking a possibly dumb question, but how much does it cost to renew the domain?

Domains are the cheapest thing related to a site, around 20 dollars for one year.

The hosting is the main cost.

originally posted by: WeMustCare

The collection of knowledge here that the above entities want kept hidden, is far and above what is publicly accessible on any other social media platform.

I must have been logging into a different website.

Since 2017 this place had been about 3 days and 50 IQ points behind the rest of the internet.

My favorite poster back in the day was

Slayer69!

www.abovetopsecret.com...

www.abovetopsecret.com...

some of my favorite threads were created by this guy.

His name is John and now he gas a PC gaming YT channel.
www.youtube.com...@MainFrameGamerz

I'm finding it very interesting watching this forum board die. Many members left after that last snafu that had everyone locked out of their profiles, but the board is still active. My experience with dying boards is that the members drift away until it becomes an empty ghost town. That is with the free service boards that stay up after they are abandoned, ATS is way different in the way it is dying off.

There were other attempts at alternate boards from ATS members that lasted for a while, evolved, and then became ghost towns. [snipped]

Jukiodone,
"Since 2017 this place had been about 3 days and 50 IQ points behind the rest of the internet."

I agree with that statement, that alone had me wandering around looking for an alternative, as I'm sure many others were with some of those never coming back. I wanted to see the breaking news quickly, from every source possible, and I found that here for a long time until around the time frame Jukiodone suggested. Now I'm reduced to combing through news feeds without any extra commentary like here.

originally posted by: FlyersFan

originally posted by: Encia22
Yep, I saw that, but if the site were to go dark after the 23rd, we won't know for quite some time after that if it could come back online or not, which would cause the most anxiety. We wouldn't be able to say it's gone forever...

It would be like ... the living dead. Zombie. Dead but alive in a way. ha ha

Schrödinger's website!?!?! Both dead aand alive at the same time....

originally posted by: Kurokage
Schrödinger's website!?!?! Both dead aand alive at the same time....

That's good. I like that better than Zombie Website while it's dying.

I just had a thought (amazing right?).

Imagine an ancient civilization from thousands of years ago that archeologists have only basic research information about. Then a discovery is made. They find a complex messaging system containing thousands of messages, a primitive message board. They would then know the minutia of every detail of that civilization after such a discovery.

No so for our digital system that will vanish in the blink of an eye. So if we want to really preserve ATS, it will have to be inscribed on stone or clay tablets and buried in the desert someplace.

Does anyone feel up to the task?

My main regret was not being brave enough to reach out (PM) some posters I really wanted to. I had done that early on, and made some good friends, that unfortunately then past away.
Felt a bit like a jinx for a while.

But I do want to say thank you, to those mods, that are still here, even without a boss, keeping things civil. And some of you have been doing it for so long!
Thank you for your hard work and dedication. Honestly, some days ( like the B.S. guy era) must have really sucked!


I was always surprised by the number of Michiganders here. Some are gone, but few are still kicking around. "waves"

Hope to see you at Deny!

originally posted by: ksihkahe
I'm not a lawyer, so by all means don't take my word for it... but

Me neither.

The posts remain under the poster's copyright. Independent of what happens to ATS the site or even the legal entity, the rights ATS has dissolve entirely independently of the original copyright still held by the poster.

The T&C say that we accept to "relinquish all exclusive copyrights to any materials" and that we "grant all third parties the right to copy, distribute, display, reproduces, and publicly perform the materials" we post under the terms of the "Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivs 3.0 Unported" Creative Commons Deed.

This page explains exactly what can be done (or not) with works published under that licence.

From my point of view, if (when?) ATS goes down anyone can still post copies of the any ATS posts as long as they identify the original poster by their ATS name, identify ATS as the source and, if possible, post a link to the original (or an Internet Archive copy). The original posted material cannot be used to create other works without a specific authorization of the original creator.

I don't know how much the extraction method may bloat the data or what that ratio might be, but if I remember correctly the site db is only 40gb.

It depends, it may even become smaller, as I'm sure such an "old" database will have lots of "orphaned" records that will not be exported and some other data that is used only to manage the database.
From my calculations, the text from the (supposed) 26,845,186 ATS posts do not occupy more than 187 GB.

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: ksihkahe
I'm not a lawyer, so by all means don't take my word for it... but

It depends, it may even become smaller, as I'm sure such an "old" database will have lots of "orphaned" records that will not be exported and some other data that is used only to manage the database.
From my calculations, the text from the (supposed) 26,845,186 ATS posts do not occupy more than 187 GB.

That's what I was thinking, too. When Simon was selling his ATS Archive on CD it couldn't have been more than 600 Mb to fit on that medium. Obviously, we are excluding all the images and media, which is the bloat of any website or digital archive.

It's unfortunate that Simon no longer has the database archive to share/sell.

originally posted by: chiefsmom


But I do want to say thank you, to those mods, that are still here, even without a boss, keeping things civil. And some of you have been doing it for so long!
Thank you for your hard work and dedication. Honestly, some days ( like the B.S. guy era) must have really sucked!

Hope to see you at Deny!

Ditto that!!

originally posted by: Kurokage

originally posted by: FlyersFan

originally posted by: Encia22
Yep, I saw that, but if the site were to go dark after the 23rd, we won't know for quite some time after that if it could come back online or not, which would cause the most anxiety. We wouldn't be able to say it's gone forever...

It would be like ... the living dead. Zombie. Dead but alive in a way. ha ha

Schrödinger's website!?!?! Both dead aand alive at the same time....

Sign me up!

I nominate you for Head Zombie and FlyersFan for Zombie Party chairperson!

a reply to: ArMaP

That's chicken feed.

I have a 2 TB SSD hanging off my USB port. It's literally hanging off the end of the table. I think it costs me $109.

I've used 10% or less thus far.

Give the stuff to me, I'll store it.

Hell, anyone can.

Well, can always start archiving ATS on the Way Back Machine. Hot up archive.org and see how to get web crawler archivists to do their web thing.

Or perhaps we can get some digital currency going and finance the servers with some kind of bit mining Enterprise.

Either way, we wait and see.

a reply to: ArMaP

Users can share, distribute, copy, and transmit the work Users find on TAN websites provided Users provide proper attribution that includes the name of the Website User, the name of the Website, and a link to the content thread....

You will not copy, distribute, display, or publicly perform material from the Websites to Post on other websites or quote in offline research in a manner that does not comply with the Creative Commons License that specifies the author's member name as a member of AboveTopSecret.com, includes The Above Network, LLC and the member as owners of the content, provides the title of the thread, and a full URL to the board thread.

Each individual post needs to be covered under those terms, which is exactly what I pointed out... that they should ensure they have it set up so that individual posts and posters can be removed easily on the back end.

If ATS the site and entity are no longer functioning the conditions of complying cannot be met as written.

It's not really important who wins the legal battle or is correct about the details. It's mostly irrelevant and most of the time nothing ends up in front of a judge. The way things are is that copyright and DMCA claims heavily favor the claimant in day to day practice and if they'd like to avoid headaches then it would be wise to ensure individual members can be pulled from the imported threads. Then they can make their defense that it's fair use under whatever guidelines... but still have the ability to pull all the posts if the person is persistent or the posts become a liability.

originally posted by: ADVISOR
Well, can always start archiving ATS on the Way Back Machine. Hot up archive.org and see how to get web crawler archivists to do their web thing.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine only archives individual pages, not entire sites, for that they have a paid service.

originally posted by: ksihkahe
Each individual post needs to be covered under those terms, which is exactly what I pointed out... that they should ensure they have it set up so that individual posts and posters can be removed easily on the back end.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that bolded part.

I really hope this just all blows over and ATS continues to exist.

Knew about this place since about the mid to late 2000’s but didn’t actually join until 2014 when I was in a real dark place and it’s just been my go to ever since.

It’ll probably be like the death of a close friend if/when this place ceases to exist.

Plus, all my red dead online friends have recently f#ed off to Fortnite… so I just don’t know what I’m gonna do for recreation if ATS shuts down

Change sucks…

a reply to: Encia22

It was mostly the original website which were pages about different topics written by Simon himself. Not so much the forum.

tinyurl.com...