Well, as you might notice, several comments are now missing from yesterday's news post. This is because the server just crashed, and I had to restore from yesterday's backup.

Unfortunately I still don't completely know why it crashed. I have it narrowed down to a pretty specific area, but it'll take careful examination of the code to find out what exactly happened and fix it.

The good news is that the server ran for over a week without a hitch before that. And that was on my first attempt at real-world usage, so that's pretty damn good, IMO. Clearly the crash bug that occurred is very rare, so it probably won't happen again before I manage to find and fix it.

More good news is that restoring from backups works flawlessly. I've been rather uneasy about that whole system since it's very complicated, but this was by far its toughest test yet, and it had no problem. So, yay.

Well, all I really did today was tweak the files some. The major update is that you can now rate files. Once a day, rankings will be computed for all files based on these ratings, and files (other than "recent" files) will be displayed in order of rank.

The ranking algorithm actually uses Condorcet's Method rather than a simple average of ratings. This way, it won't matter if some people are harsher judges than others. For example, even though ratings are supposed to be on a scale of 0-100, I could perfectly well rate files on a scale of 0-10 personally and it wouldn't mess up the system. The only thing that matters is which files I think are better or worse than which other files.

The other thing I added is a progress indicator for large file uploads. It's a bit of a hack, but it solves the problem of not knowing if the upload is working or not.

Please press F5 now to make sure you have the latest stylesheet and javascript.

New features added:

• Large speed increases gained from a couple small optimizations (yay for profiling!).

• User profiles! You can now click on user links to see the person's profile. You can, of course, edit your own profile.

• User rewards! Avatars, sigs, and post colors are implemented, and can be set by editing your profile. Note that in the future, these will only be available to people who have reached certain levels of influence. However, at this time, I'm letting everyone use them for testing purposes.

I should probably make it clear now that I expect to wipe everything posted during this beta once the final version goes up. So, we'll back up to just having all the v4 data at that time. I wasn't sure at first if this would be necessary, but it looks like it probably will be.

The good news is that this means you are free to post random silly trash posts to test stuff! :P

It has come to my attention that a number of web sites (like, 50 of them, at least) have been stealing images from Fate of Io for display on their own sites. In particular, this image, by Gilgath, is very popular. Most of the offenders were weblogs. Some claimed to have created the image themselves. Others simply displayed the image to go along with some text. In all cases, they embedded the image by URL, meaning that fateofio.org's server was footing their bandwidth bill.

We've finally arranged our older submissions into a useful hierarchy and added links to each respective node. If you like, you can browse all of the archived submissions by starting from http://www.fateofio.org/old2/.

URL changed because crazy people were using Google image searches to find our images and embed them in their web pages, stealing our bandwidth. New URL is not searchable.