Kotaete Net

» see kotaete-net.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kotaete Net opened on 1 July 2002, at two in the afternoon, and it was a stranger arrangement than it looked. The terms named Microsoft Corporation in America as the operator. Microsoft Japan ran the secretariat out of an office in Yoyogi and was the entity that announced it and later buried it. The company actually keeping the thing running was neither of those: a Tokyo firm called ServiceWare Corporation, whose small badge sat in the sidebar of every page, and whose booth at a Tokyo trade show that June had exhibited the site as a customization of its own call-center platform.

What it did was ordinary and useful. People asked computer questions and other people answered them. It covered Microsoft products but explicitly went wider, to personal computers in general, and Microsoft aimed it at beginners, naming women and older users in particular. You signed in with a Passport account. One of the three ways to ask a question was a mode called just-tell-me, for people who could not describe their problem well enough to categorize it.

Microsoft was not answering. The terms said plainly that this was a board between members and that Microsoft took no responsibility for verifying anything posted on it. The expertise came from users, sorted into volunteer ranks by the secretariat, and the company's contribution was the servers and a prize cupboard.

A site like this existed in every country, and in Turkey it was a forum rather than a product. I spent those years on the Turkish hardware boards, on the answering side of the thread, which is the side that never once thinks about who is paying for the machine the thread lives on. Microsoft was paying for this one, and the receipts are the reason there is anything to read here.

~ the case file ~

~ a hundred and five days ~

On 23 June 2006 Microsoft announced a renewal. The stated problem was success: users had said that with more of them signing up the site had gotten heavy and slow, so the fix was a move onto SQL Server 2005 Enterprise 64-bit and ASP.NET 2.0, which would spread server load more efficiently when everyone showed up at once. The site would go down at 23:30 on 30 June and return at midday on 5 July.

It did not return on 5 July. By 18 July the trade press was describing it as closed. On 22 August Microsoft finally explained: a loop in one program's logic had driven four production servers to something near 100 percent load. Going back to the old setup was not available either, because development had slipped far enough that the backup plan had, in Microsoft's own phrasing, effectively ceased to exist. The company was careful to say the new database and the new framework were not at fault.

Kotaete Net came back on 13 October 2006, 105 days after it went dark, and it came back as a beta on a leash. Weekdays only, nine in the morning to seven at night. Closed at weekends and on public holidays. A maximum of two hundred people on the site at the same time. The favorites feature stayed switched off. An upgrade bought to let more people in at once ended with a cap on how many people could be in at once, and Microsoft said it would share the lessons with its partners and developers once things were stable again.

~ what the points could not buy ~

The currency was GP, gift points, and the table was unusually detailed for a free board. Registering paid 300. Signing in paid 10, once a day. Your first question of the day paid 100, and the rate halved for the second before dropping to 20 for the third. Marking an answer as the most useful paid the answerer 100. You could attach a bounty of between 100 and 300 to a question, and you could not award it to yourself. The ceiling on everything was 1,000 a day.

Two of the rules have teeth. If a question timed out unanswered, the answerers who had tried got 5 points each and the bounty was confiscated by the system. And points were perishable: they expired on an annual cycle with no carryover, and the balance of anyone who stayed away for 90 days was wiped. None of it was ever convertible to cash, which the terms stated flatly. GP bought lottery entries for computer accessories and household goods, and nothing else.

~ nothing was carried over ~

The notice is dated 29 May 2009 and signed by the Kotaete Net secretariat, and it is a short document with a hole in the middle where the reason should be. It thanks everybody and moves to the dates. Prize entries closed on 30 June at 17:00. The site ended at 18:00 on 30 July 2009. The prize pages lasted one more day.

On the archive it was unambiguous, and it used bold type to be sure: posts would become unreadable after 30 July and would not be handed on to any other service. Points would not transfer either. A companion notice pointed people at a Microsoft-badged Q&A service running on OKWave and at a Japanese Microsoft Answers due that summer, but those were directions to somewhere else, not a destination for anything that had been written here. Seven years of people explaining to each other how to get a printer working went off the internet on a Thursday evening.

Microsoft kept the domain for about five more years. In February 2010 it was still a Microsoft IIS server, redirecting to the company's Japanese forums. By November 2014 it was redirecting to a Bing search for its own name. Some time after that it became a parking page belonging to somebody else.

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