Here’s what’s happened: I had to upgrade Monitor Duty to a newer version of Moveable Type. The old version was far too prone to sabotage. I’d disabled the “comments” section long ago because it was too-easily spammable; however, while comments weren’t on the site, they were still being generated every day by spam-robots. I was told that Monitor Duty was one of the most active sites on Powweb’s servers…and I KNEW that wasn’t due to our posting hundreds of articles a day!
I’ve had endless annoyances in restoring the site, many of them due to server oddities. Everything on Fanzing.com got moved to a different set of folders by Powweb, and I can’t just drag them back! It’s odd. I’m slowly getting the site restored to normal service and hopefully I haven’t ruined our standing on search engines. I downloaded our archives, but I didn’t do it properly…so it will take some work for me to transform them and get them back up.
Now, a few goodies:
You’ll notice that the comment section is back. Now, comments will not go through unless I approve them OR you have a Typekey account. Typekey is a free registration, and it’s simple. By making sure that commenters are either approved by me or pre-approved by Typekey, we’ll be able to keep the site civil and free of spam. I’m not giving you the URL to sign up yet because I haven’t activated the Typekey functionality for the comments, but that should happen shortly. If you comment and don’t see your comments appear instantly, it’s because I haven’t done approvals. I may only do that a few times a day, so don’t take it personally.
I will be looking for more contributors now that the site is easier to maintain and easier to publish. Some of our contributors were having problems due to their browsers; that shouldn’t be a problem anymore. If you regularly cruise for news and would like to contribute…see me. I’ll be posting more about this later.
Our blog now has categories and sub-categories! So now we can put all the company news on a second level under comic book news, and we can put reviews in the same blog but under a separate category! That should be much more fruitful.
Again, forgive the appearance of the site. I have our site’s old templates, but they needed some work and a new color scheme.
Here is our forum. That’s all for now!
One response to “Getting up and running”
Good to see MD up again. See you this weekend!