The Internet never forgets, or so the saying goes. Actually it forgets all the time. We’re constantly losing important information from the Internet. The loss of the Deja News archives was infamous. In the 1990s Deja had an enormous repository of online discussions from Usenet, arguably an early form of social media. And then Deja went out of business and their archive disappeared. It was a blow to many as the archive had been a very useful reference tool for areas as distinct as IT and history.
For several years it was thought that the Deja News archive was permanently lost and then a reel tape was found in someone’s backyard shed. Google paid to have the archive restored. Google now considered themselves the owners of this information but at least it was online again. This was actually the origin of Google Groups which many will be familiar with. Information only stays online if someone cares to keep it there.
This is a good time to point out that The Cloud is just someone else’s computer. Data can be lost from The Cloud as easily as local servers. There are no substitutes for good backups.
Which brings us to A Voice for Men. The organisation founded by Paul Elam continues despite the best efforts of a vast array of characters. The Southern Poverty Law Center declared A Voice for Men to be a hate site in 2018 and then removed the designation in 2022 after I took over. Yeah, they really don’t like Paul.
A Voice for Men was, for so many years, nearly a lone voice in the Wilderness. A lot has changed in recent years. The Overton Window has moved substantially. Topics that would once have only appeared here are now mainstream.
Recent election results in various Western countries demonstrate a growing rejection of woke.
There are still challenges through. Traditional gynocentrism is ascendant as society pushes back against woke. A return to traditional gynocentrism won’t make things better for men though. A Voice for Men has always been about finding a new way forward, a way free of the misandry which has dominated in the West for the past 50-60 years but also free of traditional gynocentric obligations on men.
And so we continue to try to steer a new course while keeping the flame alive. A big part of that is making sure that the sites hosted by A Voice for Men stay online. Together these sites represent a vast wealth of knowledge. At the time of writing the list includes:
It is essential that these sites, and the information contained therein, go on.
Given that information online isn’t nearly as safe as is often assumed we’ve taken a considerable amount of effort to ensure the continuity of the sites on A Voice for Men infrastructure.
The servers that make up A Voice for Men deliver the sites, monitor the sites and perform a variety of tasks behind the scenes to make sure it all keeps working. This process is largely automated and requires very little human time to keep running, now that the hard work of automating it has been done.
The servers are backed up daily. The servers can be quickly recovered from these backups. We can even clone the servers from these backups, which we do periodically to test new software.
In addition, the databases behind the sites are backed up hourly. Several days worth of these backups are held on the servers with a lot more in the server backups. Copies are periodically archived to allow us to view older data if needed.
Every three hours the latest database backup from each site and other site data is copied to a remote test server. This server then loads a copy of the site from the database and the other site data.
A monitor checks every minute on the health of the servers, the active sites and the test sites loaded every three hours. If a problem can’t be corrected automatically a human is notified to take corrective action.
Additional copies of the sites are taken and stored offline and offsite at a considerable distance from the servers.
Our backups are:
- Offline
- Offsite
- Tested
In this way we can protect against the attacks we didn’t see coming.
It’s also worth noting that A Voice for Men infrastructure avoids Big Tech to the extent that we are able. Big Tech is so powerful and so expansive that it’s impossible to completely avoid it.
I talked about Big Tech and the dangers it poses during my ICMI23 presentation.
I’d like to see viewership move away from the large social media sites and back towards blogs, forums and mailing lists where Big Tech is much weaker. It’s worth noting that the Internet Engineering Task Force continues to use mailing lists. I think we can safely say they are tech-savvy. Maybe they’re on to something.
The A Voice for Men infrastructure is also built to be portable. Many sites today are locked in to particular infrastructure while we’re nimble and can move on short notice.
This, and some other plans in the works, are aimed at keeping the wealth of information on these sites available in to the future.
Protecting our own data is only part of the battle though. We make extensive use of archival sites to protect against the loss of valuable third party information. Despite our best efforts a lot of third party information has been lost. If you see a page and think it’s valuable to our cause consider taking a copy with an archiver like this.
It’s also worth noting that social media is largely a memory hole. Information posted to the large social media sites is mostly forgotten in short order. It’s still there but the nature of most of these sites makes it difficult to access. Compare that to what we’re doing at A Voice for Men.
The featured image depicts server racks at CERN, and is courtesy of the Wikimedia Foundation.
