ROOPHLOCH 2023 round up

Well, October is here, September is gone, and with it another year's ROOPHLOCH has come to a close. It was a great year! Thanks to everybody who participated and helped keep the tradition alive. As always, I have prepared a page of links to all participating posts I know of. If your post is missing, please let me know!

ROOPHLOCH 2023 participating posts

This was the first ROOPHLOCH year that Gemini posts were explicitly allowed in addition to Gopher posts, and the first time that the event was announced on Gemini. Funnily enough, participation ended up being split perfectly evenly across the two protocols. I am aware of eight Gopher posts (from six distinct users, two of them first time ROOPHLOCHERs) and eight Gemini posts. That makes for 16 in total, which is not only more than the 11 we got last year, but is also the most posts we've had since the inaugural event in 2019, when we got...16 posts. So we have met our previous record but still not exceeded it. In another little coincidence, we also had exactly the same number of distinct users this year and in 2019, namely 14.

UPDATE: Stop the press! I had missed out on another last minute Gopher post from sundog dokuja! That makes 17 posts from 15 users, we have set a new record, and in the end we had more Gopher posts than Gemini posts, true to our heritage. I am thrilled!

On a brief personal note I'm really happy to report that not only did I finally manage to make a qualifying post myself this year for the first time in a while (I was let down in 2022 by the inability of modern telephones to accurately convey sine waves over very short distances, what a time to be alive), and not only that but I finally did something more interesting than just using my phone's WiFi hotspot. I've definitely raised the bar for myself in future.

There's lots of cool stuff to see amongst this year's posts. I am super impressed by the "solar powered tables" on a university campus which facilitated azul's post, I have never seen anything like that before. Spaceling used the Meshtastic LoRa platform, which was also new to me. Jone wrote a Gopher CGI program to facilitate making a post using a Gopher client, and then wrote that Gopher client in BASIC! ~ew and the Free Thinker both mentioned optical links in their posts as ideas/inspirations for future years. Maybe 2024 will be the first year somebody makes a non-radio post? I'm looking forward to finding out!