h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Why do people leave comments on OpenBenches?

I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic.

My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque, upload it to our site, and we share it with the world. Might sound a bit niche, but we have around thirty-nine thousand benches catalogued from all over the world.

From the start, we had a comment form under each bench. Of course, we pre-moderate any comments. That helps with our Online Safety Act obligations and prevents spam from being published. We don't collect any personal data, to reduce our GDPR exposure. Our comments are self-hosted using the excellent Commentics - which means we don't send people's data off to a 3rd party.

We thought that this would be used to tell us that an inscription was wrong, or if a bench had moved, or something like that.

We were completely wrong!

People use OpenBenches comments for all sorts of things. Of course, there are a few which provide details about the bench itself:

Other provide a little context about the person:

But those sorts of comments are hardly the majority. The comments break down (roughly) into these categories:

I want to know more about this person

I sat on this bench, searched for the inscription and found this site. I want to share my feelings

Thank you for putting a bench here

This has moved me

My heart has broken

I can't visit this bench, but I'm glad someone has shared a photo

Thank you for adding a photo

I don't know the person this bench commemorates, but I want to let them know they're still loved and remembered

That's nice

Hundreds of people sharing connections. Wanting to express their feelings. Understanding the terrible pain of loss and the hope that, someday, someone will think fondly of us.

You can view all the comments on OpenBenches.org.

Ran into a problem in prod?
Just generate a fake cloudflare error page and blame it on them - gives you time to fix.

https://github.com/donlon/cloudflare-error-page

#foss #devops #cloudflare #infosec

Fun conversation between me and @clmarohn of @strongtowns, motivated in part by my complaints about the transit chapter in his "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JziNvY6CxJo

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 The Electoral Commission has published a report on automatic voter registration pilots in three Welsh council areas; overall these seem to have been a striking success.

🗂️ The pilots used sources such as council tax data to identify people not on the register and add them.

📊 14,576 new electors were registered, with very high accuracy and very low opt-out rates.

🏫 A further 1,476 14-15 yr olds were also registered; they will be able to vote when they become 16.

https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/research-reports-and-data/electoral-registration-research/automatic-registration-pilots-evaluation

🚀 Still not too late to order DOCTYPE before Christmas but it’s getting tight for some parts of the world
Don’t disappoint the nerds in your life (including yourself)
https://vole.wtf/doctype/

News: Netflix to acquire WB.

Me: Ugh, that can't be good. I hope it doesn't go through.

Monkey's paw: [finger curls]

"I was ready to be sympathetic. Was there some other explanation for the wild inconsistencies I had found? Or was she a simple scammer who had found easy marks in the overworked, credulous editors of the journalism world?" https://thelocal.to/investigating-scam-journalism-ai/

Ig Nobel Prize winner buys a castle and donates it to the townspeople [La Voz de Galicia] https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/yes/2025/10/29/eminencia-reproduccion-asistida-construir-viviendas-asequibles-jovenes-compre-castillo-canyelles-26-millones-donado-vecinos/00031761739699694232264.htm

🆕 blog! “My Wikipedia account is now old enough to vote”

I have no idea what I was doing on the 28th of November 2007 but, apparently, that's when I first logged in to Wikipedia. Which means, as of right now, my Wikipedia account is 18 years old!

I didn't make my first edit until April 2009. That was for the nascent Ada Lovelace Day.

Since then, I've racked up a bit over…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/11/my-wikipedia-account-is-now-old-enough-to-vote/
⸻
#wikipedia

The best engineering projects are the super complex ones which you only hear about afterwards.

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-hidden-chemical-attack-that-forced-the-northern-lines-extraordinary-repair-85682/

TODAY on "Science Friday": The day-after-Thanksgiving specially selected highlights from this year's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/ig-nobel-prize-2025/

"Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly?” [Jim Propp] https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/is-matrix-multiplication-ugly/