Difference between revisions of "0 of 0"

Revision as of 08:39, 5 September 2005

0 0f 0 was a nation created by problems with the NationStates server.

NationStates Down

On the 26th of August, 2005, players logged on to NationStates, only to find themselves confronted with error messages, '0 Of 0' nations or long lines of code. As people logged onto the Jolt forums, it quickly became apparent that almost everyone was experiencing these problems. There was widespread panic, with various threads posted by concerned players in the Moderation and Technical forums. These ranged from the relatively calm to the near hysterical, the latter mainly from players who feared their nations might be altogether lost. Rumours that NS had been hacked were started, but largely - and rightly - quashed. Some feared that they had been DEATed for rules infractions.

Every available medium was used by the Moderators to inform people not to log into their nations. Aside from the forums, where an Announcement was made, these included messages in the topics of IRC channels such as #nationstates and threads on off-site forums of regions and alliances.

NationStates Up

By the following day, order had returned. It emerged that the problem was largely a rerun of a diskspace error that occurred earlier in the year. With the game finding itself running out of space, it had attempted to create new space by writing over existing accounts. Fortunately, SalusaSecondus was able to restore all but 3 nations. A backup had occurred shortly before the crash, meaning that little data was lost. SalusaSecondus also produced a news item announcing that the code would be changed to prevent similar problems occurring in the future.

0 of 0

The name '0 Of 0' is a reference to the naming of Borg drones, from the RL television series Star Trek. The nation created by the error was in fact simply called '0', but also resided in the region '0', which contained 0 nations - something of a contradiction. The description of 0 contained a bare minimum of information, with most customizable fields, such as national animal and currency set to '0'. 0 was classified as an 'Inoffensive Centrist Democracy', with UN rankings of 'Good' in all categories.

The UN Resolution

During the crash, the UN resolution at vote was Repeal "Protection of Dolphins Act", proposed by Omigodtheykilledkenny. At first, it appeared that many delegates had been deleted, and there was some speculation as to whether the crash would skew voting on the resolution. However, once nations had been restored, the vote tally was returned to normal. Furthermore, the common practice of larger regions such as the feeders to withhold their votes until shortly before the deadline ensured that the larger delegate votes were not disrupted. In the event, the repeal was defeated by a hefty majority.