Ow, nice catch!! It turns out it was just happening for the descendants of elves, but still.

So, I fixed that page, and also took the opportunity to put pictures of elven descendants as well as human. I find it interesting that out of Saralla's 120 descendants, only one is "important" enough in the story to have a picture so far -- and he's one of Lar's band! Poor old lady.

If it's any consolation, I don't plan on killing any "important" people until the story calls for it. So I don't think you could have seen any death dates that would have interested you. Mostly the only people with in-the-future death dates right now are the thousands of randomly-generated people, since I obviously don't want to manually keep track of killing all those people at the appropriate times.

But I certainly haven't entered any death dates for people we know, just because I plan on killing them at some point in the future. My outline is so often overthrown by events in the story that it wouldn't work out even if I tried. For example, until quite recently I never would have guessed that our imminent upcoming death would be the next person to go...

As for the forum posting... where's that smiley Stacy always uses... Yeah. That's the forum software, which I didn't write. It drives me batty. I wish I could fix it too. I will have a look to see if there's a more recent version of the forum, but even if there is I doubt they've fixed it. Otherwise I guess we will just have to poke the people with super-long "Random questions by" threads to see if they will start new ones.

The "not-so-good" reason is that I haven't gotten around to adding it back in yet. I have been trying to squash actual bugs first, not to mention keep up with the story.

But I just spent the afternoon dealing with the sudden influx of ugly, ugly porn spam, so something tells me I won't get much story-writing done today either. (Got some awesome Gwynn + Finn picture-taking done today though. I was grinning my way through that little session like a bear with a mouthful of bees. They both SO take after their parents.)

But! I will try to get the latest forum comment / forum topic on the story side today.

Who's descendents did you add?

Cheers, Lothere!

Also, I'm excited about this Gwynn/Finn chapter you speak of. Their interactions never cease to make me giggle.

This is something you might want to fix. As seen in FF 3.0.9.

Yup, it works!

Yay for bug-karma! I absolutely don't see spelling mistakes as long as what I'm reading is interesting enough (and lothere is, that goes without saying), so there's no way I can collect the Tiffany way.

Seriously, Tiffany, I think it does require a special talent to pick up on those repeated/omitted-word type of errors the way you do. No matter how many times I reread a text I just can't see them, my brain just helpfully "fixes" them for me while I'm reading!

When I posted my comment on Verso just now, I was redirected to this URL http://www.lothere.com/index.php/index.php/verso/page/61#comment-805

Thanks, Sofie. I have fixed those two bugs (I think) but I haven't uploaded the code yet since it's the middle of the week and I like to do that on the weekends.

Especially the second bug, that is one that has been driving me crazy for a while... I can't figure out how index.php keeps sneaking into URLs for some people. Is it because they have old bookmarks like http://www.lothere.com/index.php?p=14 or something? It's even more annoying because something like the list of recent comments is stored in a cache, and if the person who added the latest comment had index.php in their URL, all of the links in the recent comments section would have it too. Like a virus. It actually sort of worked if you had only one index.php but index.php/index.php/stuff didn't work at all, as you noticed.

Anyway I fixed it with a somewhat hackish fix, and I'm a little leery of releasing that and making links break all over the site. I want to test some more first.

WHOOPS! Sorry about that. It's fixed now.

Yeah I get an email whenever someone posts a comment, but not whenever someone edits a comment. FYI, in case you really really need me to read something. Sometimes I miss juicy stuff in edits because I don't always go to read the actual comment.

Okay,

1. My Avatar has disappeared and I don't know how to get a new one.

2. I'm not able to log in the chat.

That's under Demographics rather than People. Hmm maybe it makes more sense under people?

Anyway, click "Demographics" at the top, then "Names" in the middle, then "Random names" just below.

Aww, you were right, François! I did break the menus. I forgot to test as a normal user. It was working fine for me.

They should be working again! *distributes karma*

Is it just today that you are having problems? Occasionally the site is extra-slow, but today I have been using it and not seeing any particular slowness.

If you are reading older chapters it may be a little slower than the newer chapters, because the most frequently-read pages (i.e. the most recent chapters) tend to be stored in the server's RAM, but the others are saved in the database and have to be retrieved. Still, that should only take a few seconds at most.

The server is in the middle of the United States so distance may be a factor.

If you are logged in twice in the forum it may be because you are logged in one time to http://www.lothere.com and again to http://lothere.com. That happens to me sometimes too.

Sorry about the slowness. I am planning to move the site to a faster server one of these days, but that represents a lot of work, and mostly I just want to write.

Should be fixed now, right? I'm working on the site this morning, and most everything that was a blog-post type of thing was showing as a white page for four or five minutes.

I'm not sure if you know about this, but for some of the very earliest chapters where the preview pictures ought to go at the bottom of the screen, it just says "Error: Unknown file format." I thought at first that it might just be because I use Google Chrome, but it did the same when I tried it in Firefox. Example: http://lothere.com/chapter/26

You're partly right, Ann. For chapters without preview banners, I made an automatic-preview-banner-generator that takes a random image from the chapter and crops it to a preview-like size. However, there is something weird about the JPG images from my earliest chapters... they are somehow incompatible. Maybe I saved them with a weird version of Photoshop or something. So I will have to re-save the images and try again with the automatic thing. It's just that.... those early chapters are so painful for me to look at. *hides from 5-years-ago writing self*

Thanks, Sam. You're right, I should really take care of that because giant red scary error messages don't exactly inspire confidence in someone reading the story for the first time.

Funny you should mention that. For me, it doesn't load in Chrome. Weeeird.

Hi guys!

Haven't been participating in the forum or the comments in a long while, but I'm still following the story, and of course I'm still loving it!

I seem to remember a problem with the RSS-feed being mentioned some time a year or two ago, but I couldn't find anything about it now. The problem I have is with the chapter RSS, which keeps publishing every chapter twice. Anyone else have the same problem, or a solution? I've tried canceling the subscription and resubscribing, but it doesn't help.

Ugh, I just looked in my own Google Reader and I think I found another problem...

I think they might be showing up twice because it is catching both "http://www.lothere.com/chapter/1779" and "http://lothere.com/chapter/1779" and counting them as two different items. I will have to look into this some more.

Thanks for letting me know!