The page that never changed

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The page that never changed, or a troll's obsession with trying to prove that it is "right". See also the link that never changed.

The troll in question has posted, according to counts by others, some hundreds of times, the allegation that I falsified or in some other way deceitfully altered my website.

Context: my website is dynamic - that is, some content is computed on the fly, rather than each page being a static html file. Until 2007 I used IBM Lotus Domino, now I use MediaWiki software. And it was this migration to MediaWiki that seems to have caused the troll to get its knickers in a knot.

Here's the chain of events:

  • August 2004, page put up.
  • June 2006, computed page footer changed to show the last modified date and copyright year computed from current date.
  • July 2007, last sight of the Domino website by Wayback Machine - this was roughly when the new MediaWiki site went online. I kept the old site live on port 8080 to save me having to move too much stuff at once, there were pages on the site which got a fair number of hits.
  • June 2007 version of the homepage, old Domino version.
  • July 2007, new MediaWiki version, and a pointer to the old site on port 8080.
  • October 2007, first archived version of the homepage on MediaWiki, also with pointer to old version on port 8080, I don't think the home page has been without this link since going live.
  • OK, now you're going to have to take this on trust; Domino uses universal IDs for documents; I now have a hard redirect in place for the page in question (as I do for several pages whose content has permanently moved or become redundant to new content on the new site). The universalID of the document in question is 02683D47E496B2EB80256FEA0056E222, using the UniversalID bypasses the hard redirect.
  • So the change that has the troll all bitter and twisted is between this version and this version.
  • The change was to add a footer to all content on the old site to the effect that it is no longer maintained and the current site is at http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk not http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk:8080 - in fact I link my site in my Usenet signature and the home page which that link delivers includes the same information, but there was obviously scope for some minor confusion.

And... that's it. A campaign of vituperation spanning over several months and many hundreds of posts because the troll failed to notice two things which should have been obvious: the last revision date in the footer of the version it first saw, and the fact that the site on the non-standard port 8080 is a legacy server retained only for convenience.

In as much as anyone in the newsgroup affected has ventured an opinion, it is that this is a matter of absolutely no significance whatsoever. Even if the change had been made with deliberate intent to deceive - which it clearly was not given the fact that the old port 8080 is clearly identified on the home page of the live site and in other places as well - it would be a trivial matter of no significance, because the last revision date tells the whole story and can be trivially verified using the internet archive.

Unsurprisingly, increasingly hysterical and strident demands for me to "come clean" have been met with exactly what you see above: the actual timeline of changes. Having read the facts and checked the revisions for yourself you are welcome to make up your own mind. You may very well conclude that trying to get a troll to admit that it is trolling, is a fool's errand. If that were your conclusion, I would be forced to agree.

But here's the baffling part: the total change was 240 characters at the bottom of the page (see below). If the informal count by one of the regulars is right, the troll has posted around 2.5 screeds of hate for every single character. That's completely bonkers!

I guess it serves me right for not realising that twenty words at the foot of a website is all the justification required for a months-long hate campaign. In case you hadn't noticed, here is the totality of the change to which the troll objects: <hr><b><center><span style="color:red">This page is out of date and preserved only for convenience. The current version of the website is at <a href="http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk/">http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk</a></span></center></b>. A minor tweak to give obvious information to those who arrived at the legacy site through an unexpected route, or a deliberate act of forgery designed to... er... er... well, designed to do something evil, I don't quite know what. You decide.

Happy New Year, JzG 15:41, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

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