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The morning after the week before #comment24

The world record attempt finished at 6am this morning. Phew. We didn’t get the 100,000 comments we were after. According to the screenshot I took at 6am  it was 5,455 though there are potentially a few “non-qualifying” comments in there that I will have to check.

final comment numbers - snapshot at 6.08 am
final comment numbers - snapshot at 6.08 am

At this point in time I don’t know whether we will be accorded a world record for this one. There is no existing record to break and the 100k was an arbitrary target set by the Guinness World Records® organisation as one considered appropriate based on a different record category concerning Facebook comments. I will report back on this one over the next few days as the info comes in.

More importantly the current tally of funds raised is £5,809.50. This comprises 110 donations made online via just giving (includes a very generous £1k from zeninternet – thanks boys)  and also includes £2,360 worth of pledges made to me offline that I know we are good for (£2k is from Timico & £250 from ipcortex – both great contributions) .

The total funds raised is yet to be firmed up as money is still coming in and we did have an unfortunate mix up last night when a very generous donation of £500 came in. I had been expecting this from Kelway (another great company) but didn’t recognise the email of the donor. Turns out this £500 was an error made by someone in Argentina (!) who had meant to donate £5. He is in the middle of sorting out the error with JustGiving. Obviously we hope it all ends well for him and the £500 will in anycase be replaced by the Kelway donation.

All in all it was a very successful day with a good amount of cash raised for the very deserving cause that is the RNLI. There was a huge amount of support and goodwill surrounding the whole effort.

A more technical post regarding the nuts and bolts of the day will follow.  There are however some nuggets worth a mention.

Firstly was the huge amount of effort put in by many people wanting to help make a success of the record attempt. Comments were being made at a rate of about one every ten seconds at the daytime peak.  During the evening the number of unique commenters dropped but a number of people worked the night shift to keep the conversation going.

As I was going to bed we stood at around 3,500. In the short time between brushing my teeth and switching on the iPad the rate of comment started to shoot up. I thought we were getting spammed and for a short while began to actively moderate the stream. I have to say though that after a few minutes I realised that this was some high quality banter going on and I freed up the comments I had already marked as spam and removed the blacklist.

world record attempt comment numbers - snapshot at 6.06 am on Friday 6th Jan
the comments that came in bang on the 6am finishing line this morning

I am happy to apologise to those affected for a short while and recommend that you take a look at their stream from around 10.30 onwards. Thanks guys. The banter could not have happened during the day because of the higher number of people leaving comments. There is poetry and creative writing in them there comments.

One of the overnight shift who seemed to be there when I went to bed and when I woke up told me that he had even met an old university chum in the comment stream that he had lost touch with years ago – wow how about that!?

I’d like to thank every single sponsor and helper, no matter how large or small their contribution, for their efforts in making the world record attempt a great success.  Worthy of a specific mention are Gabrielle Laine Peters, Martin Geddes, Paul Hardy and Emma Firth together with Forlinux of Newark for their extremely professional assistance in building the technical platform.

Finally of course I need to thank Timico for indulging me in this whole project and for lending me their brand new data centre in Newark. Not many blogs get 144 core processors, half a Terabyte of RAM and 20Terabyts of SAN to play with not to mention the resilient 10GigE feeds.

If you are reading this and didn’t hear about #comment24 yesterday you can still leave a comment on the post here and donations to the RNLI are always welcome – hit the big green DONATE NOW! button in the sidebar.

 

 

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

7 replies on “The morning after the week before #comment24”

A superb effort by all involved, and a great amount of money raised for a very worthy charity.

I can see this fast becoming another of Tref’s annual events, to which I am all for and look forward to smashing 5500 comments and raising even more money for a discerning charity.

#comment24 #RNLI #TimicoUK

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