• When you look at an idea in a category that has subcategories, those subcategories are now listed on the right side underneath their parent category in the top right corner of the page.
• And when you look at the full idea list of a category that has subcategories, its subcategories are also listed, first, on top of the page.

• If everybody encrypts all the time, that makes the people who need encryption safer, because their traffic doesn't stand out as extraordinary.
• It makes it slightly harder for, say, bad ISPs or people who spy on your traffic to inject ads into your halfbakery browsing mid-streams, or harvest your traffic to show you more relevant ads later.
• If everybody encrypts, the places where you're insecure can be flagged as insecure and stand out more.

For now, it's sort of limping along -- reads seem fast enough, writes happen but are really slow, and I haven't yet figured out where the time actually goes.

Also, my new landlord has a hard limit on the amount of execution time a process gets to just run, and rebuilding our search index takes a bit longer than that -- so there's going to be some work making a big brute force thing into something incremental that can be spread out.

But it's so much better than the ... nothing ... of the last three months!

At this point, as a user, you should be able to view your account, and view your ideas and verify that they're all there. People should be able to follow pointers to ideas on the halfbakery and see ideas, not just a black hole. Don't try to add ideas or notes yet, don't edit your user account, or vote on ideas -- that may be technically theoretically possible if you get past my safeguards, but it will be slow, and chances are you'll damage database or lose your work when/if I roll back the site.

Two requests:

• If you have a public halfbakers' forum that formed in the last three months that you would like to tell people about, send me a pointer (to bakesperson@gmail.com) and I'll mention it here.
  • UKHB aka The 1/2 Hakery is an impressive piece of work, with logins and ideas and annotations and everything!

• Even more patience! We're definitely going to get the site back, and I'm sure there will be a couple of glitches no matter what, but the slow write situation needs to be fixed first. (Worst comes to worst, by giving more money to a different provider. But maybe there's something stupid wrong. There's just so much stupid to choose from.)

Naive as I am, I expected my old registrar and domain name service provider, Network Solutions, to keep serving the DNS entries even while the registrar change was in progress; after all, I'd paid them to do that until the beginning of June.

Ha. As soon as their responsiblity for the halfbakery.com registration ended, Network Solution's DNS stopped resolving www.halfbakery.com to 158.130.4.33. Instead of the old halfbakery IP address, their name server started to publish the IP address of an ad-hosting boilerplate site completely unrelated to the halfbakery and out of my control as "halfbakery.com". So, that's what people saw instead of the site, for about 24 hours.

a	annotate
l	link
g	vote aGainst
f	vote For
n	vote Neutral
o	ok (submit)

If you would like to be an illustrator, talk to the site maintainers.

The first injections had sometimes created duplicate annotations, typically at the end of the list, all from the same day. I wrote, and ran, a tool that may have removed those dupes.

Search works again, ideas have their names in the titles again, and the user-page automatic URL markup no longer eats the surrounding punctuation.

As [krelnik] points out, the id numbers for newer users and ideas have changed, and views that depended on them may do weird things.

A lot of people have trouble logging in with old cookies. With sartep's help, we've finally tracked down that bug and fixed it.

Some of the older accounts had no permission flags and were treated by the halfbakery as if they were search engines. All users now have normal human permissions.

The search page no longer forgets that a user is logged in. The search database will be out of date for a little while, while the restorations are going on.

What a mess.

This system is still barely limping along (it still has the bugs I fixed in 2004, for one), so please be a little patient with bugs. I try to fix what I can, but it'll obviously take a while until things are back to normal.

If you had an account created after 2002, and you want access to it, please send a short, informal request to <bakesperson@halfbakery.com>. Include your password, if you remember it.

[Update: No, everthing wasn't back to normal - the user table was trashed. I hope that was connected to the crash; if not, we have a problem. As always, thanks for complaining.]

On Thursday, that changed to difficult and major. Rather than just skipping a few entries, a linked chain of entries pointed back into itself, causing traversals of that chain to loop forever. That was behind the time-outs users experienced when adding annotations and ideas. (When new text is added, the search data structures are updated, and those updates got caught in an endless loop.)

Since the sending of cookies to a site is controlled by simple case-insensitive string matches, this means that people going to, say, "half-bakery.com" see a site, but don't get their cookie sent by their browser.

XXL and XXXL people can now order t-shirts that fit them.

They were (or, will have been) a disconnected part of the halfbakery that doesn't lend itself to structuring other than alphabetically, and there is already a site on the web that does that. If you have ideas in these categories that you want to preserve for posterity, please move them over to the nice folks at www.pseudodictionary.com. I think you'll find them hospitable, now that they have message boards and an "all your words are belong to us" motto on their t-shirt.

"RON POPEIL WANNA-BES TAKE NOTE: You'll find more infomercial fodder than you can shake a Poket Fisherman at in the Halfbakery. Whether you'd like to market pockets for nudists, fat-eating bacteria, vanity postage stamps, edible Post-it Notes, frozen toast, or Carni-Food (meat that's shaped to look like vegetables), you're sure to find "the only product you'll ever need" -- several of them, in fact. Why live any longer without chocolate lard?"

There is a top 10-ish list. There will not be a bottom 10-ish list.

All ideas have been regrouped, and will probably move around more in the next days.

The alphabetization has been fixed to skip punctuation (like double quote marks).

When one selects "Create an account" without fililng in the "User" and Pass" fields, all one got back was a "500 internal server error"; that's fixed now, too.

If the halfbakery looks bad on your platform, and you want to spend some time trying to make it look better (and paticularly if you have ideas on how to do that from the server end!), send me email and we'll hack our way around things.

In other news, there's now an "are you sure?" screen after the delete-idea menu option, and a new overview screen that mixes recent modifications with an alphabetical index.

There's a new welcome message for new accounts encouraging users to edit their description; no leading white space in the by-date ideas list; no trailing white space in the links list; editing an annotation now HTML-quotes the annotation's text correctly.