Comments have been restored.

I finally got the hosting company to update the PHP on my server so that  I could install the latest version of WordPress. That also let me update my plugins. I don’t know if this will solve the periodic problem of all the comments on the site turning off, but it does drastically reduce the odds of the site being hacked. (Which, sadly, just happened to a different site I run.)

On a purely positive note, I’ve got a full slate of material scheduled for July here at the Alexandrian. And I’m hoping there’ll be a couple more beefy essays wrapped up in the next couple of days to add even more.

On an almost purely negative note, there will be an update on Legends & Labyrinths tomorrow.

I’ll also be at GenCon this year, this time with a little more forewarning. Anybody running a game I should check out? Even with proper preregistration this year I managed to get into precisely zero of the events I signed up for, so I’ll be roughing it with generics again. Hopefully I won’t be literally cutting my phone in half this year.

Last year I played in a great Star Wars event called Lord of the Hives. Threat Detected is running the scenario again this year. I recommend checking it out.

I generally eschew the “I’m so sorry I haven’t been posting!” sort of posts (since I believe that most people don’t actually care and would rather just see the next substantive post pop up in their RSS feed). But I’m making an exception here because I know there are some people waiting on specific updates.

The short version: There is a very nasty flu going around Minneapolis right now and everyone in my family got hit with it. My mother was hospitalized with it; my wife is on Day 12 of it (and she caught it after being sick with a sinus infection for 9 days); my brother and sister-in-law have caught it; and my stepmother-in-law also has it. Personally, I’ve spent most of the last nine days running 102-degree fevers and fading in-and-out of patchy coherence. I’m definitely on the mend, but today was the first time I’ve been able to to do anything resembling constructive activity… and that’s only been in a handful of 10 minute bursts of energy.

So, generally speaking, this has sucked.

Long story short: I’m going to be working to get things back on track, but I’m basically behind on everything now so we’ll see how it goes. Expect some L&L updates in the next few days as I continue to mend. Expect actual new content for the Alexandrian to be a bit further out.

For right now, though, I’m going back to bed.

This is a site maintenance post. I’ve had a handful of people report a problem where the images in the left sidebar overlap onto the main text boxes. It looks like this:

(Thanks to stm for the picture.)

The problem is that (a) as far as I can tell, the size of that left sidebar should be specifically set and (b) I can’t actually replicate the error, which makes it almost impossible for me to fix it.

So, if you’re seeing this error please reply to this post and let me know what operating system, browser, and screen resolution you’re viewing the site with. The more specific you can be, the better. (For example, I’m specifically using Windows 7 Home Premium (Service Pack 1, Version 6.1, Build 7601) with Firefox 16.0.2, Chrome 23.0.1271.95, or IE 9.0.8112.16421 with Update Version 9.0.11 and a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024.)

The problem has been reported with:

• Mac OS X 10.4 with the Camino browser at 1024 x 768
• Ubuntu Linux with Firefox 10.0, but also Firefox 9 and Epiphany (gnome web browser)

This site is currently getting bombarded with spam. The Akismet filter is catching most of it, but the spam filters are filling up faster than I can review them. This means that the spammers appear to have figured out how to beat the math captcha. I’m not sure if I’ll be switching to a different captcha or simply removing the captcha entirely.

Either way, this means that if your comment hits my spam filter (i.e., doesn’t show up within 5 minutes of you hitting the “post” button) then it’s almost certainly been lost forever. This generally only happened about once every six months, so I’m not too worried about it. But I hate to see anyone take the time to write up a response to something and then have it disappear into the ether. Please e-mail me if you’re having persistent problems with a particular comment you want to make.

I’m also testing out a social sharing bar that will appear at the bottom of each post. What do you think?

As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s a bug in WordPress that periodically closes all comments on the site. Worse yet, I can’t see that comments have been closed when I’m logged in.

I just fixed the problem again, but this has been happening a lot lately. I’m not sure if it’s due to the lack of posting on my part, because the site is currently getting hammered with spam, or if it’s just WordPress being random.

But if you see it happen, drop me an e-mail and I’ll get it fixed ASAP.