The slow slog of converting posts from the old site onto the new site continues. I’ve now finished everything up through the end of 2009.

Some good stuff from 2009:

Fixing Munchkin Quest: Some house rules that helped fix the pacing problems of Munchkin Quest. At the time, I was very hopeful that this game would become my go-to dungeoncrawler. Unfortunately, it didn’t prove a keeper in the long run: The game is too long for its shallow mechanics and the end game bogs down. It was defunct at my table even before Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon came long. But if you’re going to play Munchkin Quest, I highly recommend this easy fix to the gameplay sequence.

A Nomenclature of D&D Editions: A one-stop guide to all 10 editions of D&D, including the covers of each edition.

Reactions to OD&D: This series received the bulk of its entries. Basically my early thoughts on reading and playing White Box-only D&D from 1974. A lot of this stuff has been influencing the design of Legends  & Labyrinths.

Don’t Prep Plots: This is the core manifesto for how I design and run RPG campaigns. Everything else — the Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, Adversary Rosters, Megadungeons — are just various means to achieving this end.

Halls of the Mad Mage: The Halls of the Mad Mage twist back on themselves in impossible spatial contortions. Here you’ll find everfalling rivers, endless stairs, and mobius chambers. A one-page dungeon that won Best Geometry in the One Page Dungeon Contest.

Stripmining Adventure Modules: Buying an adventure module can be a gamble. This is how I hedge my bets.

So You Want to Write a Railroad?: A sarcastic inversion of Don’t Prep Plots.

In other news, the arithmetic captchas for authenticating comments have proven to be a huge success. I was having 500+ spam comments hitting my spam filter every single day before implementing the captchas, which made it impossible to sort through them looking for comments which had erroneously been filtered. The math problems have essentially eliminated the spam. There’s apparently one guy from Russia who comes by every day and posts a single comment, but that’s it. (Apparently my posts on proxy translating The Seagull have convinced the Russian spammers that this is a Russian website.) This has allowed me to salvage more than a dozen comments in the last month that would otherwise have hit the bit bucket.

Finally, apologies to anyone who may be waiting for a reply to an e-mail you’ve sent. Since launching the new site I think my e-mail address has been easier to find and my inbox is insane. I’m hoping to have some time in the near future to dig through everything in there and catch up, but right now it’s completely swamped. Sorry!

Comments have been re-opened.

As described here, WordPress has developed a bug where it periodically closes commenting on every post on the site. At this time, there is no solution and WordPress’ development team appears to be pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. The only solution right now is to wait for it to happen and then turn the comments back on manually.

If you come to the site and comments are turned off on any post, it’s an error. If it’s not too much hassle, feel free to drop me a quick e-mail so that I can fix it.

Thanks.

I’ve added a captcha-esque math test to the comment system in an effort to cut down on spam.

The spam filter is working great in preventing comments from actually getting posted, but it’s leaving me with hundreds of comments to scan through every day to make sure legitimate comments aren’t getting lost. That’s too heavy a load and it’s resulted in several comments getting lost forever.

If you have any problems, please drop me a note so that I can fix it.

WordPress 3.0 has apparently developed a bug where it will periodically close commenting on every post on the site.

This apparently happened within the last 48 hours here on the Alexandrian. I don’t notice because I’m logged in as an administrator (and can, therefore, post normally even to posts where comments have been closed). I was getting a little bit bummed out when nobody had anything interesting to say about the last few posts, but I got downright suspicious when even the spambots stopped frequenting the site.

So if you’ve had something you’ve been wanting to say, I apologize for the momentary outage. If you happen to spot this in the future, please take a second and toss me an e-mail so that I can fix it ASAP.

The Alexandrian, as it currently exists, is a glorious mess of amateur HTML and half-assed javascript. It’s difficult to maintain and impossible to renovate. Plus, I can’t actually schedule posts, which means that the site takes a vacation whenever I do and stands unnecessarily vacant on frequent occasions.

Oddly, what’s really prompting this post is the commenting system, which was originally built around HaloScan and has been completely borked ever since HaloScan got bought out (and then bought out again). Honestly, I’m not really clear on how it’s still working at all.

In any case, starting today the Alexandrian will be updating to a WordPress installation. Here’s what you need to know:

(1) The RSS feed will no longer be updated. If you want to access the new feed, click here. (In a few days I’ll be attempting an XML redirect from the old feed to the new feed, but this apparently doesn’t work with all feed readers. If you want to be sure to continue you subscription, subscribe to the new feed now.)

(2) The address https://www.thealexandrian.net will resolve automatically to the new site. Shortly after this post goes live, https://www.thealexandrian.net/index.html will be replaced with a redirect page. If that re-direct isn’t working for some reason (most likely because I screwed it up), simply navigate to https://www.thealexandrian.net and you should be good to go. Update bookmarks as necessary.

(3) All the other links on the old site will continue to work, but will no longer be maintained. If something stops working for some reason, I’m not going to worry about it. So while older links won’t generate a 404 error, if you want to link to the Alexandrian I recommend linking to the new site.

(4) I’m currently in the process of converting all of the old content over to the new site. This is an ongoing process and it’s proven to be a lot more time-consuming than I’d anticipated, so I’m not done yet. Right now I’ve converted all of January 2011, and everything up to May 2008. I’ll be continuing to fill in this gap as time permits, and you may see some weird artifacts cropping up here and there while the work continues. (For example, I intermittently forget to retro-date a post before hitting the “Publish” button — so you may occasionally see an old post appear on the homepage and then vanish again a little later when I realize I skipped a step. Sorry ’bout that.)

(5) I’m manually transferring an archive of all comments posted on the old site to the corresponding article(s) on the new site. I’ll continue doing that for awhile as new comments crop up on older posts, but at some point I’ll stop doing that. (Hopefully I’ll be able to decommission the old commenting system at the same time so that it can no longer be accessed.) I’m fairly certain that some older comments have already been lost due to the distinegrating HaloScan/Echo system, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to recover those. (EDIT: This has now been confirmed. For example, all of the original comments for my remix of Keep on the Shadowfell have disappeared. Makes me a little sad.)

For the most part, from your POV the new site will probably end up being largely indistinguishable from the old one. (At least, after a potential period of working-out-the-kinks.) If you’re reading this today on the new site, you should already see a few key improvements:

– A search function (currently at the top of the right sidebar).

– Integrated commenting so that you no longer have to try to guess to figure out where the article associated with a comment is located.

– New RSS feed includes the full text of all posts.

Things I’m hoping to implement in the future:

– Re-establishing permanent “content shrines” and the upper crossbar navigation panel (albeit in improved forms). For right now, you can still access the older versions of the Creations, Politics, and Reviews page. You can also access the old Bibliography page.

– Theme-switcher for those who miss the old white-on-black theme.

If there’s anything else you’d like to see on the site, leave a comment. (But you’ll have to go to the new site to do it.)

UPDATE: As of 6:40 PM, we’re having some migration problems. When you view an individual post’s page, both sidebars are appearing below the post. Everything appears to display correctly on the rest of the site. Debugging now.

UPDATE 2: As of 7:40 PM, the problem appears to have been fixed. In addition, you will no longer be required to log-in in order to post. If you run into any additional problems with the new site (broken links, weird formatting, etc.) please leave a comment on this post to let me know. Thanks!

UPDATE 3 (2011/02/02): Still tweaking the settings and filters for the commenting system. Trying to find the right balance between “I need to approve every single comment” and “website overrun with spam”. There’s likely to be some fluctuation over the next few days which you may or may not notice in terms of how quickly comments appear on the site. (The goal is to have legitimate comments appear immediately with a 0% incidence of spam. This is, of course, impossible. But it’s a nice goal.)

UPDATE 4 (2011/02/09): Archives are now complete through the end of 2008. 350+ posts. I have apparently written a lot of stuff for this website over the past 5+ years.