TOTSE
TOTSE (TOT' see, commonly mispronounced as TOTE' see), from the acronym for "'Temple of the Screaming Electron", is a popular (more than 2 million hits daily [1]) San Francisco Bay Area website and former BBS started by Jeff Hunter (a founding member of NIRVANAnet) in 1989 as a dial-up BBS originally named "& the Temple of the Screaming Electron". The original &TOTSE specialized in small text files (Hunter had an old 8088 PC XT clone with limited hard drive space; small text files were the only data he could store in reasonable quantity).
TOTSE became available on the World Wide Web in 1997, and the dial-up BBS system was discontinued in spring 1998 after a particularly vicious flame war between two then-prominent users was allowed to rage out of control for weeks while the sysop was absent. Upon returning, Jeff Hunter/Taipan Enigma promptly closed the system to new users. Anyone attempting to sign on as a new user during that period would be greeted by a message from Taipan/Jeff which laid the blame for the system's troubles strictly at the feet of the users. Although the persons involved certainly share part of the blame, long-time users were quick to note that this would not have happened had the situation not be ignored for so long. The absenteeism of the sysop, normally a boon when the system was home to a thriving population of self-policing users, became the system's bane. Not long after this notice to new users was posted, &TOTSE's dial-up incarnation was shut down. It has been noted that the same problem that lead to the demise of &TOTSE's dial-up incarnation have contributed directly to the poor signal-to-noise ratio of it's present incarnation on the web.
TOTSE is occasionally featured on mainstream news networks or publications, ordinarily for members committing crimes or for particularly controversial text files. A great deal of TOTSE is dedicated to theoretical methods of growing/creating illicit chemical substances, as well as methods for building explosives, bio-weaponry, and instructions on committing both computer and physical crimes but also contains many areas for the discussion of literature, politics and religion.
One must also understand the TOTSE's community is a very tight-knit group. With 33,000+ users registered on the BBS, people from all backgrounds interact, share knowledge, or just chat.
September 2005 upgrade
As of September 15, 2005, Jeff Hunter has upgraded the software that TOTSE runs on. According to a post made by Jeff Hunter there is, "a new OS (SuSE Linux Pro 9.3), new 2.6 Linux kernel, a new FILESYSTEM (reiserfs -- much better support for the thousands of flat files that UBB uses), a newer version of Apache 2.0, newer version of perl (5.8.6), mod_perl 2.0, new Postfix mail server (still working on that), and all sorts of stuff." [2] The UBB software dated from 2000 has not been updated.
This upgrade was made necessary by the website crashing due to the outdated version of Linux the server was previously running. Despite this, the server is still suceptiable to prelonged downtime quite often, for more than periods of 24 hours, this issue will hopefully be resolved in the next few months.
Forums
During a recent overhaul, several forums were merged and there are now 32 individual forums on the Totse.com community bulletin board. Many Moderators lost their privileges when their forums were removed. There are 5 Administrators and 44 Moderators at TOTSE. According to the site, there are 32584 registered users (as of 12.00 25th October 2005 GMT+1). Registration for the BBS was temporarily closed for several weeks, however (as of August 15th, 2005) registration has since been reopened.
Shutdown
From roughly 18:00 to about 23:00 on December 18 2005, totse.com was down, causing minor speculation about a permanent shutdown. After it came back up, a notice was posted on the main page reading "The BIOS on the main server for totse.com fried and died. The motherboard is a few years old so we will probably end up replacing the entire server. We have day-old backups of the entire system so we should be able to make a full recovery as soon as new hardware is in place. Please be patient, our volunteers are working to get this fixed as quickly as possible." They've also placed a new modderator named lord "Bobblet".