July 17, 2009 - PERMANENT Updates In 2009, we've been working on the website and PERMANENT, as follows: Permanent Space Development Foundation, Inc., was incorporated in May 2009 as a nonprofit corporation, so donations are now tax deductible. A new forum was started on July 17, 2009. A website overhaul is on the process, moving content into a modern Content Management System (CMS). The existing website has been fixed in many places where there were errors before (except Search still doesn't work). A new database for both contacts and volunteers is under development. You can go ahead and add yourself. This is good for testing and having real, practical data to work with. Any suggestions are welcome. Add yourself to our people database! The professional publications database is being worked on so it will be back on-line. After PERMANENT was developed continuously between 1983 and 2002, the website was not updated significantly from around June 2002. (The core of the website was completed in 1998.) The reason is simple: The author ran out of money, and there was precious little outside support financially, a few hundred dollars per month maximum, with an occasional albeit rare donation. (The last of those was $2000 in early 2004 which was used to spend time on updates and PERMANENT book mailings to potential philanthropists, so the last updates were in 2004.) In 2002, PERMANENT author Mark Prado and a PERMANENT volunteer, Sam Fraser, plus Mark's wife (a former journalist and writer), started a company, Export Quality Services Co., Ltd., which has been successful but consumed practically all our time. Our experience with PERMANENT volunteers over the internet in the 1990s and up to 2002 was very poor, with only about a dozen exceptions. There were a lot of time wasters who were great at emailing and commitments but flaked out once a simple task or goal was set. From what we've gathered of other nonprofit organizations, this is the norm, not the exception. Do be informed that practically all inquiries in this time period were lost. If you inquired, then please do so again by either our Contact Us form and/or our people database form.<, at at this time. Our mailboxes published on this website were overloaded with spam any time we checked them, and as our server mailbox got overloaded, we had little choice but to delete tens of thousands of messages all at once which did not have the keywords "permanent" or "space" in them. Even our guestbook was spammed by script robots, multiple times per day. The only people who got my attention for sure were those who Googled my alternative means of being contacted, i.e., those willing to expend a little bit of time and effort to find me in new places. As of 2007, I have a new personal website, and you can contact me there: MarkPrado.com For any emails, please be sure to put the keyword "PERMANENT" or "space" somewhere in the subject of your message. Otherwise, it may be overlooked among the spam. We need people to help us out, so inquiries are welcome! Archives - older news articles compiled for reference