u/1805trafalgar

Tee-hee, I just find this amusing. But am I wrong and there are more than two? Who else is a "The"?

Bilbo's age is what it is. But presumably The Gaffer was working in the Shire a very long time to learn as much as he did about potatoes and everything else and he'd kind of retired by the time the story really begins. Sam refers to him as being old and losing his sight somewhat. So how old are we talking? Lobelia was 100 by the time we meet The Gaffer and I feel our Gaffer is older yet?

Model Ship World is a website at least 20 years old 100% dedicated to being a forum for ship model builders and has at least 20,000 members. It's a place where builders post "build logs" of their projects in which every step of the construction can be documented with photos and text and it contains subheadings for all related aspects of the ancient hobby.

Recently (last winter) they suffered a catastrophic data loss in which all of the user provided content including all 20 years of build logs were erased by hackers, and there WAS NO BACKUP with which to restore anything, they went back to year zero. members started re-submitting their old material and the website slowly got back on it's feet. A few months later the real drama began: It emerged that Model Ship World (hereafter "MSW") was owned by the Nautical Research Guild (The NRG) but run by just two personalities, and about a month or so ago these two personalities announced that they were splitting off from MSW to make an IDENTICAL rival website indistinguishable from MSW and calling it Dry Dock Modeler (DDM). THAT'S the drama. The new website is exactly the same as the old one and uses the same web templates and architecture and format, it looks exactly like MSW. Even the rules for members is the identical text cut and pasted from the first website.

A couple of weeks ago this story broke on reddit on a model building subreddit. The first post from the Original Poster just asked "what is going on" and then within the first day, a newly created reddit account APPARENTLY from Drydock Modeler gave a convoluted explanation of why they felt the world needed a new carbon copy version of an existing website, but very few of the points they raised appeared to really explain the need for a new website. For instance they claimed the MSW and the NRG required fees from the users in order to access the content on their websites and that their new website would be 100% free. Which is fine except that there WERE NO FEES on MSW and never had been. It costs money to join the NRG but you did not need to be an NRG member to fully enjoy everything on MSW. (The NRG was the pre-internet group you joined to get their physical newsletter and which provided about 70 years of hobby related content you had to subscribe to get copies of, if you wanted to see it)

The opening of this topic of the new website sparked a flurry of branching reply comments in which MUCH TEA was spilled. Some replying ALSO had day-old reddit accounts and must have been NRG members or disgruntled MSW members. Within two days whoever had created that new reddit account that was speaking up for the new website deleted all of its posts so there now remains no public explanation from the makers of the new website. Weeks later there is still no explanation explaining why the new website was created and even more surprising, neither of the two websites acknowledge what has happened and there is no discussion about the split on either site. Clearly the inside story concerns who did what to whom on the old website but nobody outside reddit is discussing the split.

https://modelshipworld.com/ and https://drydockmodeler.com/ are the two websites involved.

It's still early days so I expect a lot of tweaking of the official text on the new website will take place, but I still found it odd that the new website has not actually taken the obvious step of using it's own language to set itself apart from Model Ship World. Copying text verbatim for the website rules strikes me as odd.