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What happened to Cyberstrike? (14 December 1998)

We got an email from one half of the Cyberstrikers a couple of days ago. It was a tragic email, and that is no exaggeration.

As you know, we became very worried about the lack of response from the Cyberstrikers to our emails and ICQ contacts, and also noted that our suggestions for things to do hadn't been taken on board and that their site seemed to be down for long periods. We eventually voted unanimously to drop our support when it became obvious that things were not going to improve.

And, a few days ago, Silicon TV (log in as Guest then go to UK Web users call to down keyboards ...) interviewed Erol, evidently because they couldn't get hold of any of the Cyberstrikers! He made our position absolutely clear; that he was interviewed proved, if further proof was needed, that there was something seriously wrong.

It turns out that Cyberstrike had come apart probably just after we met Lord Storm at the beginning of November:

Anyway, I got the impression from Lord Storm recently that Cyberstrike was off. I know he has received nothing but abusive mail from people since this started (as did I when I had the Webmaster link was up) and this basically left him disillusioned as to why he should bother to continue putting in the effort for such an unappreciating audience.
We condemn the abuse. We don't get much, probably because we quite deliberately designed the site to make it slightly difficult to contact us, but we have been assiduous in reporting abusers to their ISPs and that will continue.

It's a great pity Lord Storm didn't tell the world that he'd given up, although he was in a very difficult situation. Unfortunately, with the Internet it's easy to start things but difficult to stop them ...

If we had been able to we would have taken the Cyberstrike site over, moved it to our server, explained the situation, tackled the abusers and moved Heaven and Earth to get things going. Instead, we were helpless, with a dead site on a server we had no access to and no way of forcing a reply from the people who did have access.

Anyway, the 14 December committee meeting will discuss what lessons are to be learned from all this.

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