A recent threat on popular news aggregation site has sparked fury, outrage, irreverence, and rebellion amongst the internet protocol elite operators. With a common theme of “I heard what happened 25 years ago and came angrily to this thread to air my personal and significant grievances”, many contributors were quick to offer expertise as to how the internet protocol IP version 6 - “IPv6” to those fringe players in “the biz” - should have been developed, how it should have been backwards compatible with IPv4, or how there was no need for an updated protocol at all. The original post, claiming that “IPv6-only still pretty much unusable” posits that the total absence of IPv4 renders a system unusable which, at face value is completely correct. It does not, however take into account any transition tools that are associated with the “IPv6-only” migration path, and that is where the melee quickly begins.
Users were faster than an unsaturated 100Gig internet connection to point out that “IPv6 has been one of the biggest failures in the last couple of decades.” As user rexpertgamer9969 proclaimed in the coveted “first post”. It got worse from there, quickly citing the commonly referenced idea of IPv4+ which theoretically allows for backward compatibility to IPv4, if only the protocol zealots would allow it to blossom into a fully complete, backwards compatible, indefinite solution for the possibly unfounded problem of IP address depletion.
Quickly devolving into the primordial goo of a technical forum debate on any remotely controversial topic, many forum users had intricately planned and completely sound solutions for prolonging the beloved IP version 4 - which allows for complete security with the addition of network address translation (NAT). Of course, as with any controversial and deeply technical topic, much of the nuance was lost on the non-believers on both sides of the debate.
“Look, all we need to do is add ‘The Door’ for IPv4, and increase IP addresses via the ‘Door’. It’s quite simple, actually.” Forum user spooky_networker_OU812 confidently posted. “It’s all laid out in this draft I read, which is clearly a standard because it is posted on the same website that the standards are posted on. We just need to extend IPv4 to first 48 bits, or something. Then to 64 bits, I guess. Each ‘Door’ has a bunch of IPv4 behind it. The door has an address like a house or something. Just knock and the door and more IPv4 falls out. I really don’t understand why this is so hard to understand!" they exclaimed. “Whatever it takes, however much work it is for me to not have to deal with this other bullshit thing that has like colons and letters in it, we need to do it!” they continued. “I’ll never implement this stupid v6 thing!” Posted user grunkle_the_funkle. “If there is an option like IPv4+, and I get to keep my stuff and no one has to upgrade any servers or routers or whatever, then we should do that. I mean, my games will surely support IPv4+, and if I am first to the party with it, I’m sure I’ll have more bandwidth and be faster.” They continued.
As the debate raged on, many users of the fringe version 6 of the internet protocol became seemingly exasperated and ceased posting. None of the users promoting IP version 6 could be reached for comment by JFI reporters, likely due to their connections not supporting IP version 4.