The results are in for this year's IRON NODER. All in all 529 writeups were submitted by people entering the quest, adding to the grand total of 754 writeups posted in November. Many thanks to all who took part!

Bitch Quest 2009

IWhoSawTheFace has got a new quest going on! Hone your Bitchcraft skillz and dive right in, girlfriend. Prizes for the best entries!

Calling all women!

Feeling snarky? Bloated? That dress won't fit? Your mother called complaining about the new man in her life? - and you can't get a date to save your life? The new beyotch in the typing pool, Little Miss Perfect? The way she's always getting flowers? The way the professor ogles you in class? Yeah, that's really disrespectful. He probably has a small penis. The way your day has just been ruined because... well, just look at it! Look at your hair! It's awful! You feel like crying. You feel like staying in bed. No, really, you feel like killing someone. Or both. And why is there no one around to serve you chocolates in bed? WHERE IS YOUR COFFEE?

The quest starts on the anniversary of that date which will live in infamy, November 13, 2009 and run through New Year's Eve.

IWho is running the quest and I, avalyn, will be your cruel overseer and/or harsh mistress. Give your literary whip a few good cracks and start being a bitch today!

Good day all Everythingians! The usergroup podpeople finally managed to finish the October Podcast, and we're already thinking about the next one! We'd like to have it out in time for the decaversary, but we'll see. In the meantime, however, we'd like to put out our semi-regular request for noders to read nodes for us. Do you have a computer with a mic? Do you like E2 nodes? Then you're perfect. Pick an E2 node you really like and read it into your machine. FEED THE MACHINE. We like .wav or .mp3 format. If you have audio you'd like to contribute to the podcast, /msg either The Custodian or Junkill and let us know, and we'll arrange to get the audio from you somehow.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! Why did I title this 'Podcast GTKY?' Because that's what we want! Are you a noder who isn't interested in reading a whole node for us, but would like to help with the podcast anyway? Or maybe you did read something, but found you like talking to the world via the podcast? Help us out! Here's how. We'd love to have more 'bumper' clips, sort of 'station ID' bits, for the podcast. So what we're thinking is this - do a quick reading where you tell us your nodername, when you joined E2, how you found it (if you can remember!), and maybe give us one bit of trivia or anecdote about why you stuck around. 15-45 seconds or so. Then send us that! If we get enough submissions, we'll do a decaversary section just of these noder voices. If we get not quite enough, or too many (we wish!) we'll end up using the remainder (and probably some of the ones we feature, anyway) as 'Station ID' clips during future podcasts.

So hop to it! Find a mic! DROP THAT SHIZZLE! And send a /msg to The Custodian, Junkill or anyone you know from podpeople and we'll happily push your recording out to the world.

Just some final trivia to close this off - a couple of the original podcasts have been downloaded over *seven thousand times* each. Several others have been downloaded over *three thousand times* apiece. Somebody is listening!

References:

How to contribute to the Everything2 podcast (except for part 4 - see above).
The Everything2 Podcast

I don't know if "decaversary" is a real word but such things have rarely bothered us here on E2, where we routinely play with words like unmorrissed and exosculate. At any rate, November 13th marks the tenth anniversary of the reinvention of Everything as Everything2, and with it the beginning of an unexpectedly long and sometimes wild ride for the pioneers of 1999 and for those of us who joined them along the way. Some of our fine members, with the connivance and full backing of Teh Management, will be marking this event in strange and different ways.

Jet-Poop, one of the grizzled stalwarts who can trace their origins to Everything(1), will be hosting the Everything2 Ten-Year Anniversary Contest for Fun and Awesomeness--sort of a quest on steroids. We're getting a head start on this one because it asks for creativity beyond and outside our little digital box. Just try to keep it legal--as in, we will not (overtly) condone tagging Norfolk Southern's rolling stock with the E2 logo...

More will follow soon. Watch this space.

-a.

E2 is participating in an online community research survey with Michigan State University being conducted by Dr Cliff Lampe. The pink bar at the top of the screen will be active for a short time until we get enough responses. If you do not want to see it anymore, simply click "no thanks" and it will go away forever.

As a reminder, Michigan State has provided us with hosting services for the last 3 years and this is one of the ways that we can help ensure that our community has a place to live and thrive in the future.

Thanks,

--nate

Yes, pageloads can take a long time. Sometimes they don't, though. I have no further ideas on how to make them better. If anyone reading this fancies themselves a MySQL optimisation whizz, please talk to us.

In the meantime, revoting is now a no-holds-barred flip-flop switchfest. Revoting doesn't grant the voter GP, but revoting down takes away the one XP that the votee had received with an upvote. The voter giveth and the voter taketh away. A revote also costs a regular vote, so perhaps there are few holds barred in our switchfest after all.

Enjoy.

Basics: We shut down the servers at 2014 UTC on July 8 to replace a failed battery unit. Two of the servers did not come up again. It appears that the room had a heat issue and some components got baked. The two machines, unfortunately, were those that handle the heaviest load. We had the capacity to compensate for one with stand-by hardware but not for two. One or more of us have been working on the machines since then, this being mostly nate, Swap, Kurt, and alex.

We restored some middlin' excuse for service around 0300 UTC on the 10th and took it down again. Right now and until we scrounge up some permanent replacements we have two loaners from Kurt, one of which is acting as the main database server. We're obviously still slow since we're working on what was an unconfigured system. We will quite likely bounce up and down numerous times before we achieve some decent performance. At 1200 UTC things were looking a bit better but not yet stable and we returned to the Word Galaxy after a few hours of trying. Halfways stable service was established some time around 0800 UTC as we flipped the switch on some significant database changes. We still have some work to do on the performance side of things.

Erm.

The direct linking syntax described in root log: May 2009 was changed, because it was giving us some problems with some HTML validation code that we want to use in order to make impossible to do things like mess up Cream of the Cool with a badly-formed writeup. The only difference is that the disambiguation tag with < and > has become a disambiguation inner link with [ and ]. For example, change [Swap<user>] to [Swap[user]].

We've already automatically converted all the old-style links we could find to the new syntax, but it's possible that a few may have slipped past our nets. Sorry for the noise.

Everything's Most Wanted is now automated

Okay, so I just finished fully automating the Everything's Most Wanted feature so that noders can manage bounties they have posted by themselves without having to go through the tedious process of messaging an admin several times. Hopefully this feature should be a lot more useful now. Check it out!

The five most recently requested nodes are automatically listed below. If you fill one of these, please message the requesting noder to claim your prize. Please see the main list for full details on conditions and rewards.

 

Requesting Sheriff	Outlaw Nodeshell	GP Reward (if any)
Oolong	Duodecimal	100
Auduster	Lake Baikal	10
The Custodian	John Hughes	100
e2reneta	John Lasseter	30
randombit	Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA)	N/A

(see full list)

 

Writeups about how we as individuals view and relate to E2 have usually been deleted, have occasionally been tolerated, but more often than not have been banished to the day logs. Unless you are/were one of the elite and allowed to use the soap box in the Editor Logs, a lot of useful commentaries have either been buried and forgotten over time or were never posted.

The management has set up Letters to the Editors: May 2009 for this month. If it is successful, we will do the same for coming months and will offer to create similar nodes to move older "noding about noding" content into. The idea is to have noders' opinions and insights regarding E2 somewhere where we can easily find them, read them, and revisit them. The rules are simply one user, one writeup, and try to make sense and not to call people too many names. Please also try not to start debates across writeups--rebuttals can wait until next month.

There was a trial several years ago, based on a suggestion by borgo and organised (IIRC) by Lord Brawl, in which Letters to the Editors could be sent to an e-mail address. The letters were then posted and debated within the admin group. This is no longer active and has been filed under Archived: Letters to the Editors.