The Last Post for the Nightline Association. How does that make you feel?

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Fellow geek, Nightline veteran, and general volunteering hero James Buller wrote a wonderful retrospective on his experience with Surrey Nightline, National Nightline, and the Nightline Association over most of the last three decades:

  • In 1997 I left a note in the Surrey Nightline pigeon-hole to volunteer and eventually become the Coordinator
  • In 1998 I emailed the leaders of National Nightline with a plea for support.
  • In 2000 I launched the first National Nightline website and email list
  • In 2003 I added the bulletin board online forum
  • In 2006 I led governance reform and the registration project that led to the Nightline Association charity
  • In 2007 I set up Google Apps for the recently established nightline.ac.uk domain
  • In 2008 We sent news via an email broadcast system for the first time
  • In 2025 All the user accounts and the charity were shut down.

So here’s my last post on volunteering with the confidential mental health helplines run ‘by students for students’ at universities, then the overarching association body.

I began volunteering with Aberystwyth Nightline in 1999, and I remember the 2000 launch of the National Nightline mailing list and website. It felt like a moment of coalescence and unity. We Nightline volunteers at the turn of the millennium were young, and tech-savvy, and in that window between the gradual decline of Usenet and the 2004-onwards explosion in centralised social networking, mailing lists and forums were The Hotness.

Nightlines (and Nightliners) disagreed with one another on almost everything, but the Internet-based connectivity that James put into place for National Nightline was enormously impactful. It made Nightline feel bigger than it had been before: it was an accessible and persistent reminder that you were part of a wider movement. It facilitated year-round discussions that might previously have been seen only at annual conferences. It brought communities together.

(Individuals too: when my friends Kit and Fiona met and got together back in 2003 (and, later, married), it probably wouldn’t have happened without the National Nightline forum.)

Screenshot of website 'NNL Bulletin Board', powered by PHPbb, featuring a variety of Nightline-related topics including Three Rings and a mention that registered user 'AvaPoet' (an alias of Dan Q's at the time) has posted today, along with 'Fiona M' and 'Kit' (mentioned elsewhere in this article).
Gosh, I spent an inordinate amount of time on this site, back in the day.

But while I praise James’ work in community-building and technology provision, his experience with Nightlines doesn’t stop there: he was an important force in the establishment of the Nightline Association, the registered charity that took over National Nightline’s work and promised to advance it even further with moves towards accreditation and representation.

As his story continues, James talks about one of his final roles for the Association: spreading the word about the party to “see it off”. Sadly, the Nightline Association folded last month, leaving a gap that today’s Nightlines, I fear, will struggle to fill, but this was at least the excuse for one last get-together (actually, three, but owing to schedule conflicts I was only able to travel up to the one in Manchester):

I had done a lot of the leg work to track down and invite former volunteers to the farewell celebrations. I’d gotten a real buzz from it, which despite a lot of other volunteering I’ve not felt since I was immersed in the Nightline world in the 2000’s. I felt all warm and fuzzy with nostalgia for the culture, comradeship and perhaps dolefully sense of youth too!

I was delighted that so many people answered the call (should have expected nothing less of great Nightliners!). Their reminiscing felt like a wave of love for the movement we’d all been a part of and had consumed such a huge part of our lives for so long. It clearly left an indelible mark on us all and has positively affected so many others through us.

Many people played their part in the story of the Nightline Association.

12 Caucasian people of a mix of ages and genders posing as a group in front of a Nightline Association banner. Dan is one of them.
I got to hang out with some current and former Nightline volunteers in Manchester, the smallest of the ‘Goodbye NLA’ parties.

My part in the story has mostly involved Three Rings (which this year adopted some of the Association’s tech infrastructure to ensure that it survives the charity’s unfortunate demise). But James, I’ve long felt, undermines his own staggering impact.

Volunteering in charity technical work is a force multiplier: instead of working on the front lines, you get to facilitate many times your individual impact for the people who do! Volunteering with Three Rings for the last 23 years has helped me experience that, and James’ experience of this kind of volunteering goes even further than mine. And yet he feels his impact most-strongly in a close and interpersonal story that’s humbling and beautiful:

I was recently asked by a researcher, ‘What is the best thing you have done as a volunteer in terms of impact?’. I was proud to reply that I’d been told someone had not killed themselves because of a call with me at Surrey Nightline.

I’d recommend going and reading the full post by James, right up to the final inspiring words.

(Incidentally: if you’re looking for a volunteering opportunity that continues to help Nightlines, in the absence of the Nightline Association, Three Rings can make use of you…)

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👋 Farewell, NLA

Highlights of yesterday’s Goodbye Nightline Association party in Manchester:

👨‍💻 Responded to Three Rings user query in real time by implementing new Directory property while at the event (pictured)
🤝 Met a handful of Nightliners past and present; swapped war stories of fights with students unions, battles for funding, etc. (also got some insights into how they’re using various tech tools!)
✍️ Did hilariously awful job of drawing ‘Condom Man’, Aberystwyth Nightline’s mascot circa 2000
🤞 Possibly recruited a couple of new Three Rings volunteers

Dan gestures at his laptop in a quiet pub function room, on which he's writing some code. In the background, two women are having a conversation.

Low points:

😢 It’s a shame NLA’s dying, but I’m optimistic that Nightlines will survive

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Dan Q found GC5C8N2 Church Micro 6331…Manchester – St Ann’s

This checkin to GC5C8N2 Church Micro 6331...Manchester - St Ann's reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’m in Manchester for the day for a social gathering related to a variety of the volunteering activities I’ve been involved with over the last, OMG-I’m-so-old, 26 years or so. After my train arrived I meandered via OK04B5 (nice to see the OC community alive and well here in Manchester!) to find myself some lunch, then dropped by this cache on my way to our event venue.

The location was spot on and I saw the cache rightaway, but needed to wait for a couple of Deliveroo drivers to finish chatting and leave before I could get to the container itself. Soon in hand, though. TFTC!

Under a shady tree and in front of a church, Dan throws a thumbs-up.

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Dan Q found OK04B5 The Beacon of Hope

This checkin to OK04B5 The Beacon of Hope reflects an opencache.uk log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I’m in Manchester for a volunteering-adjacent social event and, not often seeing OpenCaches pop up on my radar, visited this spot on my way from the station to the venue. So beautiful to see Manchester acknowledge its part in queer history, and a beautiful memorial to everybody who has died as a result of the AIDS pandemic. TFTC!

Dan, wearing a pride rainbow t-shirt, stands alongside a steel beacon in the corner of an urban park, under bright late-spring sunlight.

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Three Rings ❤️ NLA

Oxford Station. Catching a train to Manchester for a get-together in memory of the Nightline Association, which will sadly be closing this year (although individual Nightlines will doubtless soldier on just as they did before the Association).

Carrying a big ol’ bag of Three Rings swag to give to basically anybody who expresses even the slightest interest. 😅

Three Rings has been supporting Nightlines since before the Nightline Association and nowadays underpins voluntary work by hundreds of other charities including helplines like Samaritans and Childline. Feeling sad that the Nightline Association is going away and looking for a new and rewarding way to volunteer? Come chat to me!

Dan, with blue hair and wearing a black t-shirt, stands on a sunny train platform holding aloft a medium-sized tote bag.

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Portal 3kend

Never underestimate the power of people who are motivated by the good they can do in the world.

Today I was in awe of this team of unpaid volunteers who, having already given up their bank holiday weekend, worked through dinner and into the night to ensure the continued uptime of a piece software that enables the listening service of emotional support and suicide helplines.

In a conference room, Dan stands in front of a group of people working on laptops.

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Dan Q found GCA2025 Where’s 25? – Locationless Cache

This checkin to GCA2025 Where's 25? - Locationless Cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Happy 25th birthday, geocaching.

I’m spending the weekend volunteering for a nonprofit I founded (it’s almost as old as geocaching, at 23). We’re staying in a hotel at N 52° 36.184′ W 001° 53.869′. I’ve also gotten out to find a couple of local geocaches.

But guess which room number the hotel have given me…

Dan looks shocked as he stands in front of a wooden door on which a brass plaque reads 'Welcome to Fairlawns 25'.

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Note #26287

While adding an entry to OpenBenches (openbenches.org/bench/36677), I was struck by how much of an impact this woman – Jane Gregg – must have made on her local community.

In this community garden in Bampton, in the Lake District, a bench dedicated to her includes not only a plaque summarising her achievements but it’s also been hand-carved with the words “Jane an amazing human.”

Top of a simple wooden bench; an attached brass plaque on the front side can be seen, but is illegible from this angle. But on the top, somebody has carved "Jane an amazing human."

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Dan Q found GC1DH2A Knipe Scar – Haweswater View

This checkin to GC1DH2A Knipe Scar - Haweswater View reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

How delightful to find such a well-sized and well-placed geocache, and in such a beautiful spot. Some fellow volunteers and I are spending the week in Bampton, working on improving some software that underpins the volunteer and rota management systems of a few hundred different charities.

Never one to let a hard day’s voluntary work keep me from a geocaching expedition, this afternoon I took a hot brisk walk up the scar to find this (and hopefully next another nearby!) cache. Caught my breath sitting on a rock near the GZ, before pressing on. SL, TNLN, TFTC. FP awarded for such a delightful spot.

Dan examines his GPSr on a sun-drenched craggy hillside.

 

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A Surprisingly Shit Bathroom

This bathroom at the holiday home where some fellow volunteers and I are doing some Three Rings work, this week, has a few unusual quirks, including this surprisingly-shit bathroom:

  • The door has a lock… but there’s a second door which doesn’t.
  • Oh, and the first door’s lock doesn’t actually do anything. The door can still be opened from the outside.

Dan Q found GC1DH7W Knipe Scar – On the Edge

This checkin to GC1DH7W Knipe Scar - On the Edge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

A swift uphill scramble for my friend and fellow volunteer John and I, before dinner. We’re staying in a nearby farmhouse for a week of volunteer work, writing software to help charities. Beautiful view from the summit this evening! SL, TNLN, TFTC!

Two white men stand on a windy Lake District hilltop.

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3Camp 2025

I’m off for a week of full-time volunteering with Three Rings at 3Camp, our annual volunteer hack week: bringing together our distributed team for some intensive in-person time, working to make life better for charities around the world.

And if there’s one good thing to come out of me being suddenly and unexpectedly laid-off two days ago, it’s that I’ve got a shiny new laptop to do my voluntary work on (Automattic have said that I can keep it).

Black Macbook Pro whose screen shows a locally-hosted copy of the Three Rings web application, overlaid with a terminal running lazygit.

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Sabbatical Lesson #2: Burnout

If the most-important lesson I learned from my sabbatical was about boundaries and my work/life balance, then the second most-important was about burnout.

A matchstick, burned almost to the end.
Once all the matches have been burned, you can’t use them to light any more fires. It’s not the best metaphor, but it’s the one you’re getting.

If I were anybody else, you might reasonably expect me to talk about work-related burnout and how a sabbatical helped me to recover from it. But in a surprise twist1, my recent brush with burnout came during my sabbatical.

Somehow, I stopped working at my day job… and instead decided to do so much more voluntary work during my newly-empty daytimes – on top of the evening and weekend volunteering I was already doing – that just turned out to be… too much. I wrote a little about it at the time in a post for RSS subscribers only, mostly as a form of self-recognition: patting myself on the back for spotting the problem and course-correcting before it got worse!

When I got back to work2, I collared my coach to talk about this experience. It was one of those broadening “oh, so that’s why I’m like this” experiences:

The why of how I, y’know, got off course at the end of last year and drove myself towards an unhealthy work attitude… is irrelevant, really. But the actual lesson here that I took from my sabbatical is: just because you’re not working in a conventional sense doesn’t make you immune from burnout. Burnout happens when you do too much, for too long, without compassion for yourself and your needs

I dodged it at the end of November, but that doesn’t mean I’ll always be able to, so this is exactly the kind of thing a coach is there to help with!

Footnotes

1 Except to people who know me well at all, to whom this post might not be even remotely surprising.

2 Among the many delightful benefits to my job is a monthly session with my choice of coach. I’ve written a little about it before, but the short of it is that it’s an excellent perk.

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Note #25556

The final weekend of my sabbatical was spent, like the first one, at a Three Rings event. As a side activity to the volunteer work, everybody was asked to put their name on a paper plate and leave it on a particular table, allowing others to semi-anonymously add compliments, thanks, or kind words about its owner.

Dan holding a plate containing his name and a collection of compliments, listed in the full post.

Comments on my plate:

* Your my faveriot [sic] brother (gee, I wonder who THAT one was from 😂)
* Always seems to be doing interesting things. A maverick! Thinks outside the box
* Awesome
* Thank you for inventing this (a) system & (b) corporate model!
* Always smiley and excited
* Thanks for always pushing lots of new features!
* Puts up with idiots willingly and patiently
* You literally dreampt this whole thing into existence!
* Quirky
* Innovative solutions!
* Helpful in all ways!

Fabulous. I might wall-mount it.

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Note #25478

Just visited the Logos Hope, an ocean-going, volunteer-staffed floating book fair (run by a Christian charity, but it’s not-TOO-religiousy inside, if that’s not your jam) that’s coincidentally docked for a fortnight right next door to my hotel on Trinidad!

What a strange concept. Fun diversion though.

White and blue passenger ship docked alongside a building whose roof reads 'Welcome to Port of Spain'.

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