How would you guys feel about the site joining Reddit.com and other sites in a SOPA black-out on Jan 18th?

It would be for 12 hours and it would only effect the site and not the login ability of any software as to make the impact minimal to those kind enough to help fund the project. I'd still have to figure out the technical aspects of this.

SOPA is potentially a huge threat to the entire EQEmu community actually. If you do not know what SOPA is, you need to come out of whatever game you are in right now and google it for about an hour.
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Sorvani

wow, had no idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act

For the lazy:

More +

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Translated, this means if someone posts copyrighted content to Reddit (which happens daily) then GoDaddy can halt Reddit's domain name service and/or ISPs can prevent you from accessing the site. While doing this, GoDaddy itself is immune from such action. GoDaddy from what I understand helped author the bill and has since been the target of some social movements where many sites have moved their hosting and dns service to other providers. I have to admit that I have yet to move my services from GoDaddy.

The fear is that this seemingly minor change will severely impact the landscape of the internet. Sites like youtube, reddit, facebook, 4chan, digg, etc can't afford to function if all user submitted content must be vetted. Since these sites exist only because of the volume of traffic they get then user driven sites, social media, and chat sites will most likely cease to be what they once were, and out ability to express ourselves on the internet will no longer exist.

There is also the Protect IP act, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_IP_Act

Go for it man. SOPA is evil shit and the bastards that came up with it may hopefully one day fall in front of a bus.

The technical aspects have all been worked out. I only very briefly tested it in order to not disrupt anyone's browsing. It looks like all the pages will be disabled and replaced with the SOPA page. All paying members should still be able to log in to MQ as usual. The most ideal situation would be to disable everything, but I'd feel terrible doing it to our supporters.

It's over, I didn't set it up on a timer, but had to deal with some legal issues this morning so we were 2 hours late going live with the plugin. Everything seemed to work fine and sorry to anyone who was aggravated by the down time.