Orin

Most of the alternatives listed are for sending things either to Bill's WinkWink PO box, or via a funds transfer mechanism to his wink wink email, which is associated with a bank account that we don't have access to. Is there an alternative that people can use in the short term?

Do you want to get a sense about how much support there is for bringing it back up from the people here before buying that domain?

He was indeed on Medicaid, so they would have a claim on assets he had that are worth anything, which he didn't. A cursory glance ought to tell them there's not much blood to be squeezed from that stone. Rather than spending more than there is to be gotten, they might just move on to bigger fish. If they come looking, he ran a couple of unprofitable websites that didn't even run ads. If they were to sell them, I suppose someone (!) could offer them a pittance for the domain names, based on the free internet appraisal values of like $100 for one and $250 for the other and quietly make off with them.

Here's another way of saying that. It's on the 'Man in the Moon' Peter Max poster that commemorated the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969: "It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." -- Robert Goddard BTW, Deb is en route to Las Vegas to see about gaining control of the DNS info about the original domain name for this place, so @RadioRob can make it point to wherever this site lives, and the redirect from the old server will no longer be needed. None of this changes the ownership of the site, or affects whether it is listed by whoever the court assigns to be Executor or Administrator as part of the estate.

Can anyone here speak to the type and amount of editorial work that Bill performed on the reviews site? That would indicate what and how much could be automated.

After the hospitals' social worker was unable to find next-of-kin to make medical decisions for Bill, she sought his long-time friends, and Deb knew him the longest, by a hair. (I'm second, by a technicality.) When he had died, and his body was handed off to the mortuary, the people there put her down as next-of-kin, and asked about the burial arrangements. Because we paid for the cremation, under Nevada law, we are qualified to receive a Death Certificate. (They are restricted to qualified people and agencies in NV.) The Death Certificate has been issued by the NV Health Department. We have already requested copies, but have not yet received them.

I don't want this to turn into a train wreck, so please allow me to make a few points. We, 'Team Washington', as we've been dubbed, have been working to preserve Bill's digital assets, these two sites, as he would have wanted. In order to accomplish that, we first had to convince the hosting company to let us provide payment, so that they didn't go dark. Once that was accomplished, we found that there was another problem: the license for the XenForo engine had expired, ending support and updates. To address that, we would need to upload a file to the site's directory on the server, and that meant getting access to it. Bill had set things up so that it could not be accessed except from his computer, so we asked the hosting company if they could make that possible. Doing this was what caused the first brief outage. But there was a side-effect. During the night, some automated process at the hosting company, which could now access the server as well, updated something that broke the site. @RadioRob attempted to fix the problem, but after a lot of work, concluded that it would be better to port the code and database to a server that he had control of, so he could return it to life. This meant registering this here new domain, and redirecting traffic from the old URL to here. All of this was a work-around, a means to keep this site running. Ownership of the site has not changed as of this time, and 'Team Washington' do not wish to own it. It now has an alias, of sorts. Going forward, assuming ownership is changed, the original domain will still be its primary URL, but the alias will work as well, and it might be easier for people to remember. So we're in a holding pattern here. The state has not yet spoken. We have not gotten the death certificate. Being able to present a clear idea of what the community would like to do with the sites would help whoever it is that decides the disposition of the sites to understand the value of this place to its inhabitants, and to act accordingly.

IANAL, but... In the absence of a will, the court would first determine who is to be the executor or administrator of the estate. There's a hierarchy to follow for this process, beginning with certain values of 'kin', which a court representative is supposed to explore. That person is then empowered to determine the value of the estate. In the case of these sites, because they are not operated to produce a profit for the owner, the question becomes what was the value for which Bill had been running them. The intrinsic value of these sites is simply to benefit the community which use them. A cogent executor or administrator might then inquire about this, and then use the willingness of the community to take responsibility for it to guide the disposition of the sites. The executor would note that Bill's friends had paid for his funeral expenses, and ask them for input. Knowing what the community's goals are would make it possible for us to help guide that decision. And if we are selected to be Administrator, so much the better.

I have no idea whether this is important, but should the people in that group be distributed geographically as well? Would it be a good or a bad thing if they were all from the US?

Once upon a time, while a contractor on a project for the US Air Force, I created something that no direct hire was knowledgeable about. I actually had to explain to management that there would be nobody to take over if they were to terminate my contract or I was hit by a bus. In the avionics world, any single point of failure is a red flag situation. That applies not just to hardware, but to personnel as well. It also applies here. I think it would be prudent to make sure that there is at least one backup or alternate to cover each role. Having a single point of failure in any aspect of an organization, such as only one person being able to handle hosting or financial issues, leaves things in a precarious position if that one person is hit by a falling jet engine, or becomes unavailable for some other reason.

Thanks for weighing in, @stevenkesslar. There's a lot to discuss. When considering the possibility of creating a non-profit, it matters which kind it is. The first kind that comes to mind, 501©(3) organizations, are prohibited from engaging in any political campaign intervention activities. If this community intends to advocate for the rights and safety of sex workers, it could get drawn into a political context, and that could be dicey. On the other hand, 501©(6) organizations, which is the kind that Deb and Andy, another member of our crew, have been talking up, may engage in political campaign intervention activities so long as such activities do not represent their primary activity. That description matches what you've laid out above. What other choices are there, and what are their capabilities and restrictions? I had been thinking that I should be hands-off regarding the decisions reached here, but the role you've suggested, to help validate the group of people who would be making those recommendations, sounds reasonable to me. My thoughts on that are these: this committee ought to include a representative of each type of stakeholder. So please enumerate those roles, and we can match people to the roles. It's funny. This situation reminds me of a series of short stories that I wrote several years ago for my blog. It started off with a court case about the first corporation to be tried for murder after they were granted full personhood by the Supreme Court. As the cycle played out, the court-appointed person who took over the board of directors mandated that the staff become unionized, and that a representative of that union be added to the board, because they were key stakeholders in the punishment meted out to the company. A side-effect of that involvement was that the employees became a community, and that community took up the cause of activating customers in the process of controlling corporations.

Is anyone here keeping track of the offers of help? (That's not me, as I'm here to intercede between this community and the group working on closing out Bill's affairs and preserving the sites so they can be handed off to the community, NV court willing.) I've seen several offers about running and maintaining this site so far. If the reviews site is going to be preserved, as some here have desired, then the editorial tasks that Bill had performed would also need to be done, except perhaps as a shared responsibility, much like moderation on the forum. There's also been a call for a steering committee to make recommendation about the objective(s) of this community going forward, and whether it should advocate for change that would improve the lives, livelihood, legal standing and safety of sex workers. That will take people as well. And finally, if a legal entity is created to own the sites and represent the community, people would be needed for that as well. 'Team Washington', which includes Bill's friends in other states, has scheduled a second mission to Las Vegas this weekend to deal with more of the arcane matters, and the gears of the legal system will be engaged shortly. Whatever happens, it would be wise for there to be a plan in place when the time comes to take action. So please keep up this discussion, and work towards some decisions about your collective future.

What we did this time was post a new READ ME thread, and pinned it. But that's only in one forum. Not everyone looks here.

@Cooper -- should this thread be pinned?

I posted this in the READ ME thread when the site returned... Early this morning, something happened at the hosting company, and the site fell through a wormhole. I'd been talking with @RadioRob about it yesterday, and contacted him. For most of the day, he's been busy rescuing the site. Since he couldn't get it to work on the old server, he copied it to another one, and set up a new URL, M4M-forum.org to point to it. Now that it's working in its new home, the old site re-directs to the new one, where you should be now. Please bookmark the new URL. Once we have updated the DNS entries for the old site's URL to point to the new server, the redirect will no longer be needed and the old server can be relinquished. There is other work to do for moving the review site. All of this means that it is time to decide who will own and run this place.

Please don't send a check to Bill's post box. We may not be able to get it. If the money is to support this operation, then perhaps dropping it in the GoFundMe is a better idea. (Unless you want to send Deb and me a check directly; in that case message me.)

Thanks. If you haven't found it elsewhere, we're Bill's friends and co-workers. Deb and I have known him since 1978. He even officiated at our wedding in 1994.

Early this morning, something happened at the hosting company, and the site fell through a wormhole. I'd been talking with @RadioRob about it yesterday, and contacted him. For most of the day, he's been busy rescuing the site. Since he couldn't get it to work on the old server, he copied it to another one, and set up a new URL, M4M-forum.org to point to it. Now that it's working in its new home, the old site re-directs to the new one, where you should be now. Please bookmark the new URL. Once we have updated the DNS entries for the old site's URL to point to the new server, the redirect will no longer be needed and the old server can be relinquished. There is other work to do for moving the review site. All of this means that it is time to decide who will own and run this place.

And that perspective is really the crux of this whole adventure. The 'writer' side of me has a few thoughts about that to share here. Twice, now, there was a 'someone' who cared enough about the continued existence of these sites to put in the time and effort to keep them running. Or, to put it into literary metaphor, a 'hero' arose to unselfishly take on that burden. We're all used to reading or watching stories that follow the well-trod path of "the hero's journey", to focusing our attention on some singular leader or sole possessor of whatever qualities are needed to push the story past obstacles and adversaries to achieve some climactic victory and reach a satisfying conclusion. Judging by the posts I've read, some of the people here appear to yearn for such a savior to rescue this virtual world. But there is another type of story, one in which a group of people band together to overcome whatever obstacles are placed before them. And though conventional histories tend to focus on narratives which present certain individuals in that light -- people like presidents, generals and so forth, there are other histories, such as that written by Howard Zinn, which show how changes have been wrought through the communal efforts of labor unions, popular movements and collectives. It has been suggested here that it is time for the community to take up a mission and step beyond the 'protect and inform' notion that Daddy/Guy/Bill laid out in the TOS, and advocate for the sex workers who populate this place, perhaps even in collaboration with the likes of the HRC. If there is a sense here that such a path is worthy of communal action, then the task of keeping the site running becomes a means to that end, rather than a burden placed on some singular hero who arises to save the day. Much of the fiction that I have written for my blog is about the accomplishments of people acting together. But such things also happen in real life.

If we step away, and the hosting lapses, there won't be any raw materials to grab.

he didn’t.

You tell me. We only got the keys to Bill's apartment because the hospital accepted Deb as his medical decision-maker. Because we paid for the cremation, we are able to obtain a death certificate. It also means we become credible to be named Administrator, if no kin are located. The site is an asset of Bill's estate, and the Administrator is empowered to deal with the assets. It has to be handed off to another person or legal entity, so it would be possible to transfer ownership to either someone here, or an entity comprised of people here or their associates. But until that can happen, the site must be preserved. This site is ONLY accessible from a computer in Bill's apartment. It cannot be logged into remotely except from his computer, because of the security safeguards that he set up. That computer is also what performs the daily backups. Having the death certificate enables us to cut the red tape and make things happen. We are incurring these expenses in order to honor Bill's legacy by preserving the sites and handing them off to people who have an interest in their existence, rather than to someone seeking to profit from them. And as regards to the question just raised by @LookingAround, I suppose it would be possible to scrape much of the content of this site, and port it to another one. Is that what the community here wants to do? Or is there value to this place, enough to want to preserve it?

It ain't over until we've handed it off. Timing is out of our control.

What @JEC said. I think we have a possible legal referral in the works, but won't know for certain until we've actually consummated it. One of the roadblocks we're trying to get around is that we don't have power of attorney to directly handle Bill's financial issues, so we're relying on the desire of businesses to accept payment from whoever is willing to cover a debt. Now that we have access to Bill's account at the hosting company, we know that it costs $115/month, and we can keep that up to date. But time is slipping past, and more bills will come due over time.

I just posted this update in another thread, but I think it would be relevant here as well: In case anyone is interested, we're using donations collected from the community here to 'keep the lights on', at this point. Without Bill around to do it, and until the state assigns an executor or administrator, non-payment of some of the bills that come due would result in termination of the account. So, for example, if the power is shut off to his apartment in Las Vegas, where his computers are located, the daily backups would stop. But more importantly, as far as we have been able to determine, this site was being managed from those computers. So it's important to maintain access to the apartment, and to keep those lights and Internet service on. We're trying to stay on top of it, but any notices that are sent would likely go to Bill's commercial mail box, and those can't be forwarded, unlike actual US Mail post boxes. We're also still waiting to receive the death certificate.