See One, Do One, Teach One

Translation: The Moan and Groan Page. Like all self-respecting computer users, you say to yourself that now is the time to rejuvenate your machine, which has aged very quickly. Before spending astronomical amounts of money for new equipment, it is a good ideas to have a quick look at this page. It is chock full of stories and tales of woe and disasters concerning hardware and software. The problems are arranged by order of brands and products, and you surely understand that this is a free technical assistance service. A kind of efficient S.O.S. for computers.

When I was in college many, many moons ago, I was angered over the huge amount of computer junk that was being released into the marketplace. I collected people’s horror stories and posted them on my web page. The entire site was manual and maintained with donated server space and users time. The site was a hit worldwide and I was interviewed by many of the PC magazines of the day. Many users used it to organize class action lawsuits. Some companies tried to help themselves by posting fixes and work arounds on our site; however, many others tried to sue the site to take it offline. Lawyers donated their time and kept the site up and legal.

The site eventually imploded due to its size and popularity. We had tried to keep different sections on the multiple different donated servers to distribute the load. At that time I had no means of editing the site dynamically, so I had to hardcode every section and every update. As I entered medical school, the site could be maintained no longer.

If I would have known MightyQ back then, I have no doubt that we would have been more successful than eopinions. Of course, if so, I would have never learned medicine either. Things happen for a reason.

I believe that we were one of the first online communities to support consumer’s rights. Companies hated to hear about us and that was a good thing. The internet was much different back then. No advertisements were allowed. The “commercialization of the internet” was a supposed evil apocalypse still on the horizon. However, as different as the internet was, people still came together to help each other. At that time webmasters donated web space, users donated time, and lawyers donated shields. Now, people on sites like ours and across the internet still spend their valuable time to help each other. Although the media may change, good people still do good things.

We should all be thankful for that.