I Love Music was set up in August 2000 by Tom Ewing, who wanted a bulletin board as part of his Freaky Trigger music website but didn't have the space or know-how himself. It's grown to become a huge, wide-ranging music discussion site though it's still linked to Freaky Trigger. As the name suggests, it's a site for people who love music to talk about it.
By June 2001, the ILM board was also filling up with a lot of non-music talk, and a vote was taken and carried to start a non-music board. DG, one of the regulars on ILM, set up I Love Everything following this vote. I Love Everything is a site where posters talk about anything they want to - news, films, food, sex, drink, books, websites and each other are popular topics.
ilm.ilxor.com is a shortcut to the I
Love
Music New Answers page.
ile.ilxor.com
is a shortcut to the I Love Everything New Answers page.
If you have a simple request such as a broken link, or a real name that needs google-proofed, you can post to the Moderator Request Forum and someone will take a look at it. Your thread will be locked after it has been dealt with.
If you have a complaint or suggestion about how the site works, or with how it is run, consider starting a thread on the I Must Protest! board, which is for general site discussion.
If you can't post at all, or need to speak with Someone In Charge, contact a moderator by email.
The boards use a question-and-answer format. An individual starts a thread by asking a question, and other posters reply to the question. The threads read from top to bottom with the most recent answers at the bottom. Each board has a "new answers" page, which lists the most recently updated questions, with newest at the top. This is the 'home' page for each board.
Anyone can ask a question, and you don't have to wait before you ask one. You might find though that your question has already been asked. If this is the case somebody will probably link to the old thread - this is not meant to be rude or dismissive of your question and please don't take it as such! It just keeps things more efficient. However: Please do not revive old threads if you have nothing new to add to them. Bumping a thread merely because it makes you laugh, or you wish to bring it to other users' attention, is bad form, generally speaking.
If your question isn't anything to do with music, you should post it on ILE. If your question is to do with music, you can post it on either. depending on where you think you'll get the best replies - 'Everything' also includes 'music' after all. Factual questions about music, discographies etc. are likely to get a more useful response on ILM, though. Don't post it on both.
You have to register to post messages. You'll have to register using a real email address, but it's kept secret from everyone apart from moderators. Registration is required for most of the site's features, including bookmarks, stylesheet settings and timezone preferences.
We'd prefer it if regular posters to ILx kept to a single identity. This doesn't have to have anything to do with your real-life identity, though. If what you're saying constitutes a personal attack on another poster, please a)think twice before posting anyway and b)use your usual ID.
Yes. If you post hardcore porn it might get deleted though. Remember that a lot of Ilx users are surfing at work. If you are starting a thread primarily for pictures, please mention this in the subject line. If a thread gets a lot of pictures posted on it, please mention this to a moderator so we can put a "[picture thread]" insert in the question header.
Allowing HTML posts leaves the site open to security problems, which were taken advantage of in previous years. While code can be tightened to check for them, they present a moving target as new holes emerge and browsers evolve. The code we use (there's a quick reference below the posting box) allows you to do the most common actions, such as italics, bold, quoting, strike-through and images.
A Basic HTML translator is available, which will let you convert basic code (including that used by Flickr) to BBCode by clicking the button on the comment box.
No.
There is a lot of slang -- often picked up from bastardised hackerspeak and Molesworth books -- on ILE. There are also a lot of in-jokes. You don't have to use it -- and if you don't understand something you can always ask!
The first three of these are formula questions used to get a discussion going.
No. (To be honest nearly all of the Londoners do know each other). We like meeting new people though - if you're visiting London, New York, Dunedin or one of the other centres of real-life Ilx activity please start a thread and try and get people to meet you.
No. Jody Rosen is a guy who writes about music. Jody Beth Rosen also writes about music but is not a guy.
Ilx is light on moderation, so if you're going to post here a lot there's a sort of responsibility not to be an arsehole or act destructively. Try to keep personal slams against other posters to a minimum, and if you start not enjoying it take a break rather than try to stop other people enjoying it too. That's all fairly obvious really.
Threads can be deleted but we don't like to do it often and will not usually delete a thread apart from in exceptional circumstances. These include:
If you have a specific post you want deleted or edited -- for instance, because it is offensive or gives away personal informationsee above for details on how to contact moderators.
"No." is the short but unfortunate answer here. The moderators totally disapprove of people being assholes off-board but our jurisdiction is the board: there really isn't anything we can do about it.
However, there have been cases of clear and deliberate harassment on the boards based on an off-line situation, and in those cases we've tried to act by discouraging or attempting to ban the people involved.
There have also been cases which are online feuds that spill over onto the boards, or where any 'harassment' is blatantly two-way -- if there is somebody you hate on ILX then we suggest for the sake of ILX as a whole and its overall tone that you do your best to ignore them.
Yes. Although by posting you grant ilxor.com a licence to display it as part of the ilxor.com site, you retain your rights. If, as has happened before, another site or publication republishes your posts, please contact a moderator, so we can gang up on them.
Note:If you represent a publication looking to reproduce portions of ILX, please contact a moderator as detailed above, as the individuals posters will have to agree.
Greenspun.com is the Greenspun family webserver, set up by Phil Greenspun to host several of his web tools and applications. One of the web tools was LUSENET, a set of web-based discussion boards. Anyone could use LUSENET to set up a board for free and this is what we used to host ILM and ILE. So for two years ILM and ILE lived on greenspun.com.
The Greenspun server was no longer being actively maintained by Phil Greenspun, and was gradually filling up and suffering several-day access outages. Phil Greenspun had let it be known that the server would be allowed to wind down entirely. Many of the other big boards hosted by Greenspun had found out about this and wound themselves down or moved, and it was decided that ILE and ILM should make contingency plans in the event of the Greenspun server. An Ilxor called Graham coded an improved version of the Greenspun software and server space was donated in Australia by an ilxor called Andrew. In August 2002 the switch between them was made.
They still exist on the Greenspun server, but the ability ask new questions on them has been disabled, and the existing threads have been migrated onto the new server, so adding to old threads on Greenspun.com is also pointless. The Greenspun server was disabled some years ago by hardware failures.
In autumn of 2006, the aging ILX code used after the transition from Greenspun was at its limits. It was not designed for the size and load ILX has become, and had increasingly grave security problems. Towards the end of the year, the site began failing almost daily, and the database was corrupted a number of times.
To compound this, the free hosting deal we'd been using ran out, and the administrator (Andrew) made it known that he wanted to resign. A fund-raising drive began to buy a new server; PaperThinWalls.com stepped up to offer hosting and an ilxor called Keith began writing software to migrate the old messages and run the boards with as little load as possible. After a month's downtime while the new server was purchased, configured and sent off to Canada, we reopened in January 2007, with Stet taking over from Andrew as administrator, and Pashmina as chief moderator.
In February 2007, we transferred to Keith's code, which was markedly different from the previous system. This code is often referred to as nuILX, although that term originally applied to the post-Greenspun boards.
The old code described pages in straight HTML, the new code uses CSS stylesheets -- a list of instructions to your browser about how the page should look. This means it's really easy to change how the boards look -- for different tastes, or for use on smaller browsers such as phones.
People have been working on stylesheets, and changes are rolling out often. You can now choose from multiple stylesheets, in preferences. If you want to add one to the list (even a comedy flashing zany one), drop Keith or Stet an email.
This is a hold-over from the old code, which kept track of two names for users -- both a username for logged-in users and a display name for all users. Because this code currently has one, migrating posts from the old system was not straightforward. If we'd used the displayed name to sign posts, it would have been confusing for posts signed with a random zing name. If we'd used the username, posts by logged-out users would be blank. To get round this, older posts are signed with the displayed name, and the username in brackets if available.
The code is changing and updates are rolled out, usually on weekends. Right now there's only one coder working on it, and he has a lot of demands on his time. If you have Java, Tomcat or CSS experience, your help would be appreciated. Drop us a line for a look at the code.
Feature requests are considered, but there are limitations on what can be done, including how well it will perform under ILX's load, and how difficult they would be to implement. You can always see the most cutting-edge version of the code at the sandbox (details below).
Freaky Trigger is an online music zine published and edited by Tom Ewing. It lives at www.freakytrigger.co.uk. ILM (and ILE) are its official message boards and sister sites, though they are not part of Freaky Trigger.
While a previous effort to rewrite the ILX software was getting underway, a version of the code was set up at ilx.thehold.net for testing. While the main site was down at the end of 2006, many ilxors used it as a home away from home. Now that the new code is running, it has been closed down.
The threads that were started there have been moved to a home at http://www.ilxor.com:8090/ILX/ (this address may be blocked by workplace firewalls) where the latest version of the ILX code undergoes testing. You'll have to register separately from real ILX to post there, but test posts are appreciated, yo.
There are a group of board moderators who are responsible for the day-to-day administering of their boards. They are headed by Pashmina, who is the ILX Moderator.
The ILX server is administered by Stet.
The ILX code is developed by Keith.
Over the years, many Ilxors have had a hand in keeping this place going. You could thank:
The current system is a Sun Fire X2100 M2, with a 2.5Ghz dual-core processor and 2gb of memory. ILX is a Java application, run under Tomcat on Solaris.
The server is in a snug berth in Dallas, Texas with hosting and bandwidth provided by PaperThinWalls.com
ILX's official domain is www.ilxor.com, but both ilx.wh3rd.net and ilx.p3r.net work. All three point at exactly the same server, and serve the same pages. However, if you share a computer, you can log in simultaneously as different users by switching the domain you use.