Talk:Dark Ages

Start of the Dark Ages

I'd like to figure out when exactly the Dark Ages started. One way to nail it down to 24 hours is to look at AperfectBot's edits. The bot creates certain templates a few days in advance. It created Template:Expedition summaries/2019-09-06 on 2019-08-30 07:01 (all times in UTC), but did not create Template:Expedition summaries/2019-09-07 until after the Dark Ages. So it is safe to say that the Dark Ages had already started at 2019-08-31 07:01, when the latter template was supposed to be created. One edit between both dates is this one at 2019-08-30 11:01. So the Dark Ages had not begun at this time yet.

I am mainly asking this in the context of the Dark Ages achievement. For me, it does not make a difference since I did not go Geohashing between 2019-08-30 11:01 and 2019-08-31 07:01, but others might have.

Summary: The Dark Ages started between 2019-08-30 11:01 and 2019-08-31 07:01.

Question: Does anybody know how to get a more specific time? --Fippe (talk) 09:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

It's not precise, but I propose we call the start of the Dark Ages 2019-08-31 00:00:00. Anyone W30 wouldn't have gotten the hashpoint for the 30th yet (assuming the site went down by 13:30) so we would miss a day, but that would allow for hashers not under W30 as they would have the hash for 2019-08-30. Still, if anyone did go hashing, they likely wouldn't have been able to report their Expeditions when they got back home. Pedalpusher (talk) 20:01, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

End of the Dark Ages

I'd like to figure out when exactly the Dark Ages ended. DanQ created his account on the new wiki at 2020-02-02 07:04 (all times in UTC), and shortly afterwards on the same day, other users followed. But before that, the Admin user and the maintenance script doing tasks, such as importing the old wiki.

The Admin user was created as early as 2020-01-29 15:02. But I am unsure if the wiki already was online then and visible to the public. Dan writes the launch time was "at the end of last month" (January).

I am mainly asking this in the context of the Dark Ages achievement. For me, it does not make a difference since I did not go Geohashing between 2020-01-29 15:02 and 2020-02-02 07:04, but others might have.

Summary: The Dark Ages ended between 2020-01-29 15:02 and 2020-02-02 07:04.

Question: Dan, can you provide some information about when the Wiki was opened to the public? --Fippe (talk) 09:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

My argument is more symbolical than technical (and maybe it's not what you are looking for ¿^^), but I would say the new era began on 2020-02-02 (for the beauty and uniqueness of this date) and therefore the dark ages ended on 2020-02-01. --SastRe.O (talk) 13:15, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

I think we can still call 2020-02-01 the end of the Dark Ages since DanQ was the first user to register; whether he found the site open by accident/randomly checking or knew it was going live. Anyone who knew/found the site was live before this would presumably register. Also, none of the old registered users were notified so unless you found it by randomly checking, most people still had no idea (Fuzzier transition out of the Dark Ages). I didn't actually find out until the end of Feb. when my HashDroid App was updated on my phone. Pedalpusher (talk) 19:10, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

DanQ announced the new wiki on IRC on 2020-02-02 (aka "palindrome day") at 07:41:14 UTC. At that point, a number of things still had to get fixed (which mostly happened in the following hours/days), but this is when people started re-registering their usernames. So I would tend to say that any expedition on or after 2019-09-01 and up to and including 2020-02-01 qualify for the achievement. --Crox (talk) 21:57, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, I did not know about the IRC announcement. I agree that 2020-02-01 should be the last day of the Dark Ages.

But why 2019-09-01 as the start? The wiki already was down on 2019-08-31, perhaps even 2019-08-30. --Fippe (talk) 22:40, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

You are absolutely right, I somehow missed that. According to the edits by AperfectBot it went down at some point between 2019-08-30 and 2019-08-31, compare [1] with [2]. Overall, this is the last edited page I could find before the wiki went down (although there might be a bettwer way to achieve this than manually looking for edits): [3]. --Crox (talk) 13:42, 8 August 2020 (UTC)