Gunroom History

The Story So Far... (January 2025)

The Gunroom has been in existence since about the middle of 1995, running first on Majordomo then on various versions of L-Soft's ListServ software and now on Mailman 3. It was originally conceived and hosted by Patrick O'Brian's American publisher, W.W. Norton, as an adjunct to their web page created for O'Brian publicity. In his introduction to the original posting of his "Articles of Mail," Gibbons Burke noted that the list originally distributed between three and eight notes per day. 

In 1996, there were a total of 9,610 posts. From there the list grew, slowly at first, gaining speed after "the fillum," accelerating to a peak in 2006 with an astonishing 44,890 messages. We are now at a more manageable level, with 4,444 posts from 139 members in 2024. Yet the fundamental character of the list – a vibrant community marked by friendship, which prizes civility and adheres strictly to two topics of discussion, the writings of Patrick O'Brian and everything else – was set in the earliest days of the list and has remained the same.

Many familiar topics of conversation can be found in the earliest archive: music in POB, why the same book has different names in GB and USA, a tour of Great Britain for the POBsessed, gluppit the prawling strangles, Pulo Prabang, the most compelling scenes and reading group questions, among others.

Mike Trick maintained an archive with posts from October 1995 to the end of 2023. His archives have been replaced by the internal list archives, which are accessible to list subscribers. When Mike closed down his archive, he noted that it contained a staggering 621,844 messages from 4,014 individual posters.

In his conclusion to the 2005 data, Mike summarized these twin characteristics of the list well.

Overall, my take on this is that the gunroom continues to be an active, vibrant, wide ranging list with participation from a very large group. Worries about concentration of postings among the top posters seem unwarrented (about 30% of all postings come from those in the top 10, and that has been the case for years). I find this quite surprising: it doesn't have to be this way. For a list that has been around for more than a decade with a fairly high rate of change (compare the top 10 list from 2005 to 2003),based on the works of an author who is *spoiler alert* dead, the continued growth and vibrancy is wonderful.

Over time, Norton's tech staff gave less and less time to administering the list. List downtime grew longer in duration and more frequent, which disrupted the flow of conversation and sent some subscribers over the sides, never to return to the barky. Eventually, it became apparent to the Norton editor responsible for the list, Patricia Chui, that it was more trouble and effort than Norton wished to expend and it was announced that the list would be discontinued by Norton.

To provide a fix for the addictive qualities of Gunroom conversation and a lifeboat designed to keep those thrown overboard from permanently drifting away, Jeffrey Charles advertised his own mailing list, Lissun-BAG, to the entire list. That seemed to help for a while, but as list downtime continued to become more frequent and longer, the hue and cry of lissuns grew. Eventually an agreement was reached with Norton where a group of volunteer administrators would collectively receive the subscription list from Norton as the basis for a new list hosted elsewhere. Discussions were held (and lessons learned) amongst this new crew as various options were explored for hosting the new list. It was decided that Doug Essinger-Hileman's ISP (Powersurge) would provide the physical home for the list and accompanying website. Doug took it upon himself to register a new domain name for the enterprise. Larry Finch sent this notification to the list:

"As of today the crew of Gunroom LISTSERV hosted by Norton (PATRICKOBRIAN@NORTON2.WWNORTON.COM) has been pressed by HMS Surprise, specifically GUNROOM@HMSSURPRISE.ORG."

Larry followed this announcement with this note a few days later:

"As you may recall the original plan was to use our ISP's mailing list software. After looking into it, we found that it wasn't as user friendly or flexible as L-Soft's LISTSERV, the motive power behind the Norton list. Patricia Chui offered to transfer Norton's listserv license to HMSSurprise.org, so we re-rigged to use LISTSERV and ran some sea trials, which were successful except for a very annoying paragraph added to the beginning of each message announcing that we were using evaluation software."

And thus, in the summer of 2000, The Gunroom as we currently know it was born. And in true Gunroom fashion, within six months storm clouds were again gathering on the horizon. Doug sent this note to the Gunroom:

"PowerSurge, the current host of HMSSurprise.org and the Gunroom, has decided that they no longer are capable of hosting the listserv as a standard account, and have informed us that we need to find a new home for the listserv by Friday next, 19 January 2001."

It was time to move again. Breaking all known rules of common sense, Jeffrey Charles spoke up and volunteered a solution that met various criteria — ability to use whatever tools were desired to host the list, authority over DNS for the Gunroom and various auxiliary sites, and — best of all, it was free! Between the spring of 2001 and the fall of 2004 the Gunroom — both website and ListServ — was hosted by the not-for-profit group, spore.org, proposed by Jeff. The web pages evolved, some additional functionality was introduced, and — big commitment — a full license for ListServ was purchased in anticipation of the release of the fillum with its anticipated flood of new subscribers (which would exceed the limitations of the free license inherited from Norton). Smooth sailing seemed to be the order of the day.

Alas, by the end of 2004 mounting technical difficulties with spore.org's network connectivity, along with a general dispersal of the original founders of the spore.org project, led to a decision to find a new home yet again. A sense of pressing deadlines imposed by the owner of the spore.org bandwidth led to a relatively quick decision, with the majority of the list membership agreeing with the administrators' suggestion for a new home. The final proposal to the list, presenting the best option available with hosting/bandwidth provided by an anonymous angel was as follows:

"A member of Gunroom has offered a non-commercial server for the Gunroom's use. That is, it won't cost us anything, but it will be operated at commercial standards of service for the benefit of the Gunroom. Technical details are at the end of this note for those interested."

The generous and anonymous Harbormaster was Gary Sims, whose server we used until his death in 2013.

After Gary died, we used a cloud-hosted server. From 2013 through 2022 the mailing list remained on the same version of LISTSERV which gradually got more and more difficult to maintain. Upgrading the LISTSERV license was prohibitively expensive and the version we had wouldn't work on more recent versions of the operating system, stopping us from updating that. The complexity of the migration for both the mailing list and the web site was daunting. In 2023, David Smith joined the Black Gang and offered to spearhead the migration. Rather than continuing on a standalone host that the admins would have to maintain, the admins decided to look for a service hosting provider and settled on one that supported the Mailman3 mailing list. This migration included capturing the history of the Gunroom mailing list going back to 1996 (via Mike Trick's archives) and was completed by the end of 2023.

The first version of this accompanying website was created by Bill Nyden. In 2014, Jane Skinner took over the running of the website, redesigning it and moving it to Drupal. She revamped the website to a current version of Drupal in 2024, which is the one currently in place.