Let me tell you a story.

One year and one day ago today I received a phone call from LE. The first protest against the Church Of Scientology by Anonymous was tomorrow and he was driving around with his girlfriend looking for a CVS to make a protest sign.

In the month that followed he repeatedly told me about his new website, Enturbulation, which organized these protests. It was prompted by an idea between LE and Tamphax while discussions about the Church of Scientology raged through 4chan and Something Awful. It was created within a few hours using a Dreamhost VPS, and later went on to be housed in CalPop on it's own dedicated server. By this time I became an administrator of the site and was optimizing the server architecture to handle the massive amounts of traffic we were getting. During Enturbulation's run I had several duties. Optimization of the server, handling advertising, playing mediator between LE and the rest of the administration staff, and dealing with random bits of drama from LE's embezzling money to TakeAnonMe handing out administrator credentials to the Internet at large.

Seven months later massive drama was unleashed when Enturbulation went down in late September. Details of the event can be found Here. It was then that Daemon and I conspired with the core of MarbleCake: Gregg, Alter, and da5id. They would provide a server, Daemon and I would provide the database. A week later WhyWeProtest was born again with the Enturbulation database. The natural continuance of LE and Tamphax's idea. Of the eight Enturbulation administrators, only two remained: Poppins and Daemon.

Today, February 10th, 2009 I have been stripped of my Administrator's title and abilities by da5id. I received notice by way of a skype message:

What da5id has said is correct. I have never been in Project Chanology for the "movement." I am not a very "movement" type person, I prefer to discuss things with friends over coffee or play pool and have some Rob Roys, not scream memes at a protest, let alone protesting itself. I got involved with this to help a friend admin a website. I found it challenging to work with limited hardware to provide a fast website under pressure. At work I simply got to throw load balancers and multiple servers at an issue, with Enturbulation I had to be a little more creative. I continued with WhyWeProtest because I did not want to see the "movement" die, and I felt that the resources maintained at Enturbulation needed to be put back into the public eye. Bringing the database to WhyWeProtest was the quickest way to do this.

Financial issues with the site was a beast of it's own. When WhyWeProtest went live, it was decided Gregg and myself would split the ad revenue 50/50, I would have the legendary "Poppin's Coffee Fund" that was maintained throughout Enturtbulation's run and he would have a "Legal Fund." Donations would pay for the dedicated server that ran the website. Shortly thereafter the Coffee Fund was removed from the website, while the Legal Fund continues to exist as Gregg's piggy bank. Alter has expressed hate at the fact I've displayed poppins@enturb.com as the Poppin's Coffee Fund paypal address in WhyWeProtest's IRC channel once a month or so. As it stands now Project Wonderful has been replaced with Google Adsense, the site brings in over $40/day in advertising revenue on the ad space after the first post alone. Although Gregg's new position is that ad revenue will be spent on the hosting fees now and donations will not be taken, donations are still being taken and the amount needed per month has been updated to reflex the new hosting costs.

Nonetheless, when WhyWeProtest was created it was agreed that there would be a more diplomatic approach to handling issues. Everyone had had enough of LE's "It's my website" mentality. I no longer see this diplomatic approach being taken with WhyWeProtest. Two out of five admins decided to boot two other admins. It's hard to see a 40% majority as being diplomatic.

I've learned many things in this last year. Perhaps one of the most important things I've learned is to not care. Through the various drama bombs that have landed, I've become nearly immune to trolling. I no longer find my heart rate and blood pressure increase when I'm in disagreements with anyone. I've learned a handful of technical skills and a lot more about lighttpd through working on a single server that got over 1,000,000 HTTP hits per day on a regular basis. Perhaps the most important thing I've learned is that a diplomatic republic never works perfectly. If you have the option, a single key master is best, even if they're only needed to make a hard choice once in a while. When you don't have that, infighting and the one with the most keys will take over. In this case, MarbleCake held the most keys.