ROOPHLOCH 2025 round up

October is here! And thus, that's a wrap on ROOPHLOCH for yet another year. If you made a qualifying Gopher or Gemini post before the end of September 2025 in your timezone but have not yet notified me of the URL, please do so as soon as possible! All of the posts which I know about so far have been listed at the link below. We had another good turn out this year, and I'd like to thank everybody who participated for helping keep this fun little tradition alive.

By my count there were 8 Gopher posts and 14 Gemini posts this year, making for 22 in total. Not quite the dizzying heights of last year's 33 (exactly two thirds of it, in fact!), but more than we had in 2023 and indeed the second highest turnout in ROOPHLOCH history. It's hard to be disappointed by that!

A highlight for me is that at long last we've had the first successful non-RF based ROOPHLOCH post! Long time participant The Free Thinker (freet) used a pair of homebrew tripod-mounted devices using LEDs, lenses and photodiodes to optically beam his post 17m to a waiting WiFi-equipped laptop. This is the kind of stuff that I always hoped ROOPHLOCH would inspire when I first had the idea, not to downplay the value of participants who don't craft bespoke curiosities like this, of course!

In addition to modulated light, we had both amateur radio and LoRa used once again, and on the exotic computer hardware side we had an AlphaSmart Dana Wireless. There were also posts in Polish and Spanish - I think perhaps non-English content is a (welcome!) ROOPHLOCH first, as well.

Thanks again, and I hope to join many of you again next year for ROOPHLOCH 2026!

UPDATE: make that 9 Gopher posts, 23 in total. I missed agk's post, written literally in a cave. How's that for "internet underground"? Subterranean phlogging is the kind of thing I never dreamed somebody might do when I first had the idea for ROOPHLOCH, but am delighted to have seen it happen.