I know you guys are a bunch of junkies. I'm trying to imagine what you all would do with all that extra time if TPTB really did take ATS offline, (myself included.) It would be mayhem in the streets, you would find a lot of your neighbors pacing aimlessly around their yards, as if noticing sunlight for the first time, right? Like the chimps that had not seen the light of sun for thirty years?

Anyways, serious question. What are you gonna do if they do close the site tomorrow? What kind of efforts would you go to to try and get it back online? The problem with the current world situations across the board is that we are all standing on the precipice of massive change in so many ways. What we tend to do is put things off until the last minute when they have already made their destructive impact on our lives, then we try and deal with them. In this case, after we have lost our beloved ATS, what are we going to do about it?

Please give thoughtful answers, I know the first thing you might do is start working on your tan, or clean the garage, but what after that, and more importantly, should we be doing it already? Any sites or links to groups that are making efforts in protest would be extremely helpful, as well as any well thought out ideas on how to make the most out of a little effort.

How do we get our ATS back on?

Perhaps you can find out if there are other singles in your area! I mean, ATSers, not singles, sorry. If the TPTB shut down ATS, there are other sites, maybe ATSers also visit there. However it would be awkward to suggest an ATS meet-up in your own city if there are only a few of you.

So, if you are worried about ATS getting shut down perhaps you should co-ordinate with other ATS members in your local area first. Then when the local ATS groups are established we have a sort of cell structure that connects ATS groups to their nearby counterparts and those counterparts hold the link to a city beyond their horizon.

Erm, Like if New York ATSers could no longer talk to Los Angeles ATSers on ATS, then maybe they can reroute their signal through a network of contacts going down the East Coast, bypassing Florida and then through Louisiana and Texas to Las Vegas and over the desert to Los Angeles. Then back again.

This is a subject of study by anarchists, how to secretly move messages around if TPTB want to suppress your use of electronic communication networks built on their infrastructure. I know enough theoretically to tell you how to set up this underground ATS pen-and-paper network, but I already have anarchist allies in place to get my messages out if I have anything important to say.

ATS is important, but shutting it down would raise eyebrows, the government could not bear to look the public in the eye about censorship.

I wouldn't really care if this site was shut down.
2nd

A first step would be to mirror the site elsewhere, perhaps several times, and in different countries, perhaps even Sealand. At its heart ATS is just a group of IP addresses. "Shutting it down" is as simple as blocking those IP addresses which does not even require a physical visit. On the other hand, the server site itself could be raided. So there are several different issues involved.

I would think the owners have done at least part of this, and it is the owners who need to do it. There's not a lot we can do as users.

Why would they close ATS? Think about it, this site has it's self set up so it really can't be legally shut down. This site is more heavily censored than any other i know of. So if ATS was taken down chances are most of the internet has been taken down.