Evolt Org Server Outage June 20 2001

On 20 June 2001 someone we invited into our community decided to show their contempt for the generosity and openness that have defined evolt.org since day one.

Unfortunately, this person took it upon themselves to use their members.evolt.org account to temporarily derail all of the lists (thelist, thechat, etc.), the web browser archive (browsers.evolt.org) and wipe out a couple hundred GB's of data. Fortunately, because we practice what we preach, we do have backups and all of the data can be restored. The lists are back up, but all "non-essential" services on that machine have been shut down.

We are sorely disappointed in the actions of this member and the downtime that it has caused. Until the log files have been looked through and the data that were lost have been restored, all of the members.evolt.org accounts will be off the air. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience that this might cause.

As you might know, evolt.org has been providing free web site hosting for our members on hardware that was donated by the community, maintained by top-notch admins in their spare time, using bandwidth that is the result of further generosity. Accounts were available to anyone who wanted a no-cost place where they could learn, experiment with technologies that might not be available to them otherwise, and share their knowledge with the rest of the community.

Evolt.org is an open community. We invite all to participate, and give willingly of our resources to help each other out. We actively encourage the sharing of knowledge and opinions, we work hard to help each other be the best web developers we can be, and we care deeply about the craft we practice. Out of our caring, beliefs, and generosity we have created a community that is thousands strong and looks after itself. Someone apparently doesn't like that. Someone abused our generosity and openness. Someone has forced us to re-evaluate our policy of freedom, sharing, inclusion and trust.

Hopefully we won't need to take any drastic measures, but measures will be taken to prevent this from happening again. To all of you that make evolt.org as great as it is, thanks again. You are the reason we all care so deeply for this community and why it causes us such pain that someone that we invited into our house would cause such destruction. To the person responsible...well, you'll find out what we feel about you soon enough.