SIB: Our First Year Report
(A message from one of the webmasters)
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Well bugger me dead, it's been a whole year since the fateful day that Stop It Boys made its first appearance on the Web.  So I've decided to write a bit about the past 12 months - it's the least I can do to acknowledge the fact that we've survived this long.

It was that photo of Wade sitting in SC05 that made me do it in the first place.  I'd gotten my hands on a copy not long after it was taken, and I would continuously tell Wade that one day his mug would be famous worldwide because I was going to put it on the Internet.  He probably just thought I was just being stupid and I wouldn't get around to it (come to think of it, I thought the same thing) but, as luck would have it, a Wednesday came around where I didn't have to go to work and had nothing to catch up on at school, so I set myself the task.

I had a ball of a time that day, scanning in the back of Chris's geography book that he lent me, writing down all the Justin Quotes that had found their way into the book, putting those phone calls that Kerin recorded of Graham onto their own page, making a collection of stupid pictures (such as the one of Wade mentioned earlier), reliving the times when we made those PowerPoint cartoons and of course, transcribing our song "Oh Gay We."  By late afternoon, it was all uploaded on Geocities and waiting for its first visitors.

Nothing much, I thought, just a bit of fun and maybe something to get people talking and laughing about for a while.  How little I knew!

For the first three or so days, everything was cool.   People liked it, the guestbook was filling up and I was getting great comments about it, and although people like Justin were getting a bit of shit (because of the Justin Files), the effort seemed quite worthwhile.  Until I heard that the principal had seen it...

Big Mistake #1: Writing the name of our school on the front page of Stop It Boys.
Big Mistake #2: Allowing public access to stuff that certain people found offensive.
Big Mistake #3: Allowing the site to become so popular (we got over 700 hits in less than a week!)
Big Mistake #4: Putting the whole freakin' thing on the Web altogether.

So here I was, in the principal's office, never (or hardly ever) been in trouble before and I'm being told that what I've done could even be considered illegal.  Wow, how about that for a shock to the system - after all - the whole motive for the SIB Web Site was to make people laugh and by no means to offensively shame or put down anyone.  Apparently it had received three complaints!   It was recommended that I remove the page before further action was taken.

That's what I did - I went straight into the computer room at school, logged on to Geocities and deleted everything in the SIB folder.  And I was pissed.  Not so much because of my run-in with the principal (after all, who could blame her anyway?  One of her students was showing the world that her school was full of these weirdos who write absolute shit into the back of their books and compose songs about homosexuals!) but with my new-found knowledge that there are some people in the world who don't find humour by laughing at themselves.  I mean, look at our group for example - we would pole root someone, he'd be a little shitty at first but then he'd see the funny side to it, have a laugh at himself and go and get back whoever the pole-rooters were.  Days like those were some of the most memorable days in my schooling career.  And now all of a sudden there are people who don't find laughing at themselves funny.  'What's gotten into this world' I was asking myself - are we all turning politically correct or something?

I'd decided then that I won't mess around with the powers of the Internet again.  The SIB Web Site was gone and that was that - if anyone tried to remake it I would stop them because it was my fault they got the idea in the first place, so I'd get in trouble again.  I was even so determined not to log back into the SIB account that I freely gave out the password.  And that's where Jarred saved the day.

I was a bit apprehensive at first when I saw that SIB was back online.  Jarred had been lucky in that the files were still stored in his Temporary Internet Files folder, so he was able to re-upload them to Geocities.   However, this time, he got rid off the material deemed offensive, he created an all-important Disclaimer and he decided that it would be best to remain anonymous as Webmaster.  If only I'd thought of that!

It wasn't long before the design was given a facelift and frames were added to the page, which helped a lot in the navigation department.   He came up with a few new ideas for SIB, such as the Competition, the Stop It Boy Of The Month, the SIB Hall Of Fame, the Drugs section (oooh yeah!) and added a few things that other people had made up such as Eric's "German Shit,"  Harrison's "One Liners,"  Phil's Funnies and Sproggermutherfucker.  The site was now well and truly back online, and no more complaints were made about it (that I know of, anyway!)

I'd decided around this time that if we could manage to keep the content based around people who did find this sort of stuff humorous that maybe there was a light at the end of the tunnel.  I broke my vow and did a little bit of work to SIB such as guestbook archiving and adding the Quotes and Daimon's Gilbertfest 2001 pages, so when Jarred got too busy with work (he had left school by now) I chipped in and redesigned SIB once again.  The current look has changed only a little since then.

That was back around late July or early August 2001, and in the following months, SIB grew quite a lot with people adding material on a regular basis.  The Picture Page received a good taste of camping pics, cruisin' pics and school-related pics, the Audio page was designed which offered sound clips recorded by Chris's tape recorder, the Schoolbook Archives were re-added, the Message Board created, the SIB Memories Page created, as well as numerous other updates and additions.

And here we are - one year, three Geocities accounts, 3600 hits, hundreds of Guestbook entries, a SIB-Inspired Page (The Bare Worm Project) and countless amounts of good and bad comments later.  To think that it was all going to be given up barely a week after it was put online makes you wonder where we'd be today, doesn't it?

To finish up, I have to thank Jarred who brought us back up at our lowest point and continues to maintain the site today, and thanks to the various people who log in from time to time to do an update.  A big thank you also to all of our supporters, both local and overseas, especailly those who are actively involved in our activities and help by recording and letting us know about material worth putting on the site.  Much appreciated.

For the year to come at Stop It Boys?  Who knows?  We might get bigger - there's a whole new world of emplyoment and/or further study in front of most of us.  People have moved away (eg. Eric) so hopefully we'll get a wider range of visitors from different parts of the world.  There's lots of opportunity for new material.  Then again, we might slow down a bit because we'll no doubt be busy.  But in any case, we'll do all we can to retain our space on the Web because if I don't say so myself, we surely have the best public archive of the "teenage life" genre than any other group around the world.  We fucking rule!

STOP IT BOYS!