ROOPHLOCH 2024 round up

So long, September! The window for participation in ROOPHLOCH 2024 closed a few days ago. Sorry that this round up post is coming after a short delay. Unfortunately I was travelling for work on the 1st and 2nd of October, so this is the soonest I could get it out. Thanks, as always, to everybody who participated, which, as we'll soon see, was an awful lot of you! As in previous years I've prepared a page of links to all participating posts I know of. If your post is missing, or you notice a broken link, please let me know!

ROOPHLOCH 2024 participating posts

At the start of September I was a little afraid that the fact that my phlog was temporarily not being picked up by the Bongusta! gopherspace aggregator might mean that participation this year might be lower than usual, or that maybe there would be a strong imbalance between the number of Gopher and Gemini posts. Well, I needn't have worried! The sixth incarnation of ROOPHLOCH was absolutely positively the most successful year yet, and all records have been broken!

Quite a few posts are available on both eligible protocols. In recognition of ROOPHLOCH's Gopher-only origins, and in the hopes of making up for any shortfall in Gopher participation due to the aforementioned Bongusta! problem, I have listed those posts, and counted them in the statistics to follow, as if they were Gopher only. Finding the corresponding gemini:// URLs for those posts, if you want them, is left as a straightforward exercise to the reader.

A total of 13 qualifying posts were made on Gopher, by 13 distinct users, and a total of 20 posts were made on Gemini, by 18 distinct users. That makes for 33 posts in total from 31 distinct users! Considering that we had a total of 17 posts from 15 users last year, this is really impressive! We basically doubled participation in a single year. There's a good healthy mix of Gopher and Gemini, old hats and first time ROOPHLOCHers (even somebody who only started their gemlog a week before participating!), pubnix members and self-hosters, all of which makes me really happy to see.

UPDATE 2024-10-09: I received late notice of one extra post by ROOPHLOCH regular xiled, which puts us at 34 posts from 32 users in total, which means we exactly doubled posts and more than doubled users, woohoo!

We still haven't seen our first non-RF-based post, but there were multiple LoRa posts this year and multiple amateur radio post as well. We also had posts come in from some interesting portable devices, some new (like the Freewrite Alpha), some old (like a PSP or a Palm TX), and some being used other than intended (like a Kobo Clara e-Reader). I don't want to write too much here about the different means by which people posted, though. Not that this isn't a big part of the ROOPHLOCH event, because it is and always has been. But based on a few emails and participating posts this year I have come to regret a little that there has been so little emphasis placed on the places that people post from and the means by which they get there, at least relative to the "techier" side of things. The "RO" in ROOPHLOCH stands for "Remote Outdoor", after all, and posts with well-written descriptions or even photographs of outdoor places outside of the author's typical daily routes are in the spirit of the event even if they're posted with boring old mobile data, and I don't want those posts to be marginalised. I also want to encourage other people who have perhaps not bothered participating in previous years because they did not have the skills or equipment to make posts in interesting ways and thought perhaps nobody would care to read their post because of it - you can more than make up for that by going to interesting places in interesting ways (cycling, kayaking, climbing?) and writing about that. This year we had a post from a beach, a graveyard and, goodness me, even from the vicinity of the now absent Nakagin Capsule Tower Building. One of the posts I particularly enjoyed reading was "only" written from the author's back porch late at night, but described the sights and sounds wonderfully.

Let me close with another big and heartfelt thank you to everybody who participated in ROOPHLOCH this year! I am already looking forward to next year's challenge.