Bloomingpedia temporarily blocks IU traffic on February 13th, 2006

Starting on February 11th and reaching its apex on February 13th, there was a surge in the number of new users that were adding new articles and making changes to Bloomingpedia. This happened because the T101 - Living in the Info Age class in Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications was given the assignment of adding information to both Wikipedia and Bloomingpedia by 5pm on February 13th. This would not normally be a problem except that more than half of the content being added was not related to Bloomington. Articles started appearing for subjects such as Pebble Beach, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and Chebysheff's Theorem. A big problem was when someone moved the Bloomington article to an article called Ted Drewres, that gave information about Ted Drewres Frozen Custard in St. Louis, Missouri. Mark Krenz had trouble moving the article back and retaining the historical edits, but did so eventually. He started to protect major pages from being moved in the future.

At around 3:30pm, the number of changes started to come in faster than Mark Krenz and Chris Robb could handle and Mark decided to temporarily redirect people with an indiana.edu domain to a block page that explained to them what happened. The block was in place until 7:30pm when Mark talked to Thom Gillespie, the professor for T101, over the phone to figure out if these people making edits where his students. After confirming the students assignment with Thom and determining that many of them simply didn't understand that Bloomingpedia was for local information, Mark decided to remove the block for IU as well as the block placed within the wiki on the users that added questionable content.