Conbledegook:About
From Conbledegook
The Conbledegook File was created by Alex Holden to help neofans who are thinking of attending an Eastercon for the first time to learn some of the confusing and obscure vocabulary that fans have developed over the past sixty or so years they've been running cons. I wrote the first draft of my fanspeak glossary after I had been to my first con (Interaction, the 2005 Worldcon), but before I had been to Concussion, my first Eastercon. By the time I attended Concussion I was already involved with organising both Orbital 2008 and Beyond Cyberdrome. When I returned to the glossary (which I had stored in a file called Conbledegook.txt) a few months later, it was clear that I was going to have to rewrite many of the entries in light of new insights I'd picked up at Concussion. I was planning to simply convert the glossary to a huge static HTML page and ask people to email me every time they spot an error or omission (I'm sure there are many), but then I realised it would make much more sense to copy the example of Wikipedia and give fans the ability to edit and improve the glossary themselves. So here we are.
You can access the site at either conbledegook.org.uk or fanspeak.org.uk, whichever you prefer. If you want to give somebody a link to a definition, simply add a slash and then the page name, for example http://fanspeak.org.uk/Eastercon or http://conbledegook.org.uk/Beyond_Cyberdrome (spaces are replaced with underscores).
At the time of writing, the site is running MediaWiki 1.6 on top of Linux 2.6, Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 4.1. The front-end web server (Troy) is a quad P3 Xeon 700Mhz Compaq Proliant with 512MB of RAM, and the back-end file/database server (Bender) is a quad P3 Xeon 500Mhz Dell PowerEdge with 1GB of RAM and a hardware SCSI RAID-5 array. The database is backed up nightly to an off-site server (Marvin). If the site seems slow at times it's probably because the servers are located in my office and connected to the Internet via a piece of wet string an ADSL line with only 256Kb uplink speed, and lots of other traffic shares the same line.
The spider's web photo doesn't have anything in particular to do with fandom or fanspeak, it's just a nice picture I pulled out of my photo album when I was looking for something to replace the default MediaWiki logo. I know, the favicon is pretty rubbish too - what can I say? I'm no artist.
