Mymysore dotcom(e) no more; it's dot gone

Those who have tried to access mymysore dot com in recent days would have confronted a blank page, with this explanation – ‘this site is under construction until further notice’. That’s pure poppycock. MyMysore site is dead. Our modest civic initiative on the web – MyMysore.com - became a ‘dot-gone’, with the dawn of 2007. I put it to death by instructing the software provider to de-activate the site.

It was case of euthanasia of a website crippled by terminal spamming. The spammers wouldn’t go away; and I didn’t have the staying power. My offer to hand over control of the site evoked no response. MyMysore dot com, though conceived as an all-inclusive forum, came to be perceived as website of, by and for a bunch of retired persons. Such perception defeated the very purpose of this civic initiative.

MyMysore site came to be dubbed as fuddy-duddy. Its critics said, among other things, 1) the Mysore site betrayed a middle-age bias; 2) it was run by a retired person who had nothing better to do; 3) was intolerant of views expressed by those other than his yes-men; 4) that Mysore could do very well without the considered opinion of GVK’s cronies; 5) the sky wouldn’t fall with the closure of Mymysore dot com; and 5) GVK was in the habit of announcing closure (of the site), only to garner support and sympathy.

My take is that our modest initiative on the web didn’t work, not due to a perceived middle-aged bias (I am pushing 68), but because of our failure to build up a critical mass, even of the middle-aged and the old. If only we had more of them who took to the site, raising issues, commenting on those raised by others, more often, we could have made a go of Mymysore dotcom.

At a personal level, the MyMysore experience has sharpened my interest in blogs and blogging. What’s more, the web experiment has indeed initiated a few people in Mysore into the fascinating world of blogging. And they include the oldies, who too believed they had things to say, but didn’t know how, and where they could have their say.

As for the spam and spammers that MyMysore dot com have had to cope with we had this interesting post by a certain Mr Mohan Singh. He had this to say:
I work in the States and a colleague of mine is a Mysorean and he mentioned the arguments and insinuations raging in this (Mysore) site. I read most of the posting here and they are really interesting. As some one whose job is in IT security area, here is a piece of information for those who are interested.
We have studied profiles of spammers. A spammer seldom presents himself ( almost all spammers in our experience are young men) as argumentative, dissenter , negativistic etc.. for the simple reason that focus will be on to him as a suspect.
But we found that it is one's friend for long years, colleague with whom one goes for a cup of coffee, jealous relative, a competitor etc.. who turn out at the end to be the culprits. Our company had had complaints from blog sites and on investigation we discovered that in more than 50% of the cases our suspicion ultimately narrowed down to the the person who ran the blog site or on his instructions his collegues spammed their own site to generate interest and attention. Cyberworld is an interesting world indeed.

Some of those who got initiated into blogging through the Mymysore site have moved to Mysore Blog Park. Also carried over from the demised site is Mysorean Directory that seeks to connect the Mysore-connected the world over.