You're a Bureaucrat Now.

Heehee.

Sounds like the title for a punk song, but this is exactly the words Chris Phoenix used to make me feel quite happy and honoured...

About an hour or so ago, he granted me Bureaucrat privileges to the Wise-Nano Project, "a collaborative website to study the facts and implications of advanced nanotechnology," in the form of a Wiki.

Now, I'm absolutely not pretending I know a lot about Molecular Manufacturing, the subject of Center for Responsible Nanotechnology's interest, but I try to keep up, and I've been an avid reader of all things CRN posted from day one. (well, not really day one, but you get my drift...)

I think CRN does quite a nice job, esp. with their publishing of pretty detailed stuff, like Chris' own paper, Design of a Primitive Nanofactory, dated October, 2003 (Man, how time flies... I clearly remember reading it, somewhere late 2003, and being utterly impressed, heehee!)

MmmmKay, back on-topic.

So I was granted Bureaucrat privileges, not because I had some new, ground-shattering insights I wanted to expand upon in the Wise-Nano Wiki, but because I liked CRN so much and wanted to "give something back."

But what? I'm not a Credit-card holder, and anyway, just giving a modest amount of money is a bit futile, given the costs them greedy banks charge you for things that are as simple as hitting some keys on a keyboard, sheesh... (Ranting, aren't we?)

So, what could I do?

Easy: The Wiki was beset by spambots, and it increasingly looked like nobody had much spare time to do much about it alongside running CRN and its popular weblog, so after a fair deal of hesitating, I fired off an email to CRN, saying I felt it was a shame about those spammers, it being the only blemish on CRN's otherwise excellent web-presence etc. etc. yadda, yadda, yadda...

And whaddayaknow, only about an hour later I got a kind reply from Chris, saying that, indeed the Wiki was a bit dormant ATM, and he or no-one else had much time to keep an eye on it, and no-one had actually volunteered to do some spam-bashing, so he'd be more than happy if I would be so kind to...

etc.

(Maaaaan, this is becoming longwinded, I wonder if the coffee has something to do with it? Naaah... /TWITCH/)

So I'm a Bureaucrat, and promoted myself to sysop (weird how this escalation of privileges is possible under the Wiki-setup, IMO....)

And...

Errrr...

Well, I guess that's cool. :) For a dork like me.
Now I can bash spammers both at CRN's Wiki and the New Mars Wiki and Forums

Hmmm... SpamBuster's my middle name.