No Cheltenham today, as storm stopped play, so I’ll turn attention instead to my other vice, online activism, which I’ve tried to knock on the head for Lent, along with the pints but with less success. Until that is, an abstinence was forcibly applied, since the anoraks’s favourite hangout, Politics.ie (or P.ie for short) went mysteriously AWOL…

Now we all know, website maintenance doesn’t take a fortnight’s downtime, even RyanAir’s recent much publicised outage was, I suspect, another novel marketing technique to allow hype to build around a ‘Closing Down Sale’… So innuendo and intrigue surrounds the continued P.ie downtime and according to indymedia there are all sorts of accusations and counter-accusations flying around. Given that the core rule of the site was DGDS, Don’t get Dave Sued (Dave being site owner, onetime yoing PD chair and now Libertas Director) one wonders whether some tribunal junkie finally went overboard with the conspiracy theories and incurred the wrath of a proscriptive writ, or whether the google ads just weren’t covering the hosting fees anymore and someone else pulled the plug…

Like the immediate aftermath of the Nixon denouement, all sorts of tales from the dying days are now beginning to emerge – tales of accounts hacking and moderators abusing permissions and user confidentiality are swarming the blogosphere… Stories of intercepted private messages, rumours of YFG posters finding their avatars (user logos) morphing overnight into IRSP placards, and so forth..

As someone who moderated and even ran an FF private chatroom on the site, just like the Pistols at the Hacienda, the last helicopter out of Saigon, or the men behind the barricades in 69/16 I can truly say I was there when it all came down…

But I am interested, if anyone can tell me, does anyone know what the hell is actually going on?

And most importantly where are all the P.ie refugees going to find a new home? (The comments section has been quiet here..Hint Hint)