Well, after much deliberation and numerous instances of fiddling around with corrupted database and system files, and after being prodded by site user Ixnay, I have started from scratch.

Nobody hates starting from scratch more than myself, and I even sought assistance from my web host, who tried to help. But, unfortunately, it was to no avail. I even tried uploading and importing a database file from this past September - again, to no avail.

I may eventually be able to recover some of the old stuff on the site by manually digging through a database file manually (which is always a very time consuming pain in the ass), but it's not a priority for me. I started to just resume from scratch on New year's Day, but I was hoping, even at that late date, to try and salvage some of the old forum postings.

The site had all but died, anyway, even before the screw-up, if I measure it by the number of forum postings. So, I don't expect any real surge of interest in the site, now that it is back up and running, again. Of course, with the new Flagship magazine website and forums never really gaining much traction (a consequence of Carol being hospitalized, no doubt), and with the PBM Gamer website drying up (due to Mark Wardell's extended absence - although Mark made a reappearance on his site on New Year's Day), this site becoming dysfunctional certainly didn't prove to be a boon of fans of the Play By Mail genre of gaming.

But, at least this site is functional, again. Or, at least, it should be. Try registering and posting, and check things out for yourself, if you happen to be a lurker out there on the Internet reading this announcement of mine.

On a positive note, however, I will be doing future upgrades to the software here using the Softaculous installer script, which will hopefully make upgrading both faster and substantially less problematic. This should equate to less human error doing upgrades, from here on out.

You may encounter some dead or misconfigured links. I will be trying to weed these out over the next day or two. You will need to re-register. Yes, I am well aware that re-registering sucks, but the only alternative is to not re-register, if you were a former site user, and just read the forum postings while logged on to the site as a guest/visitor.

Regardless of what you choose to do, welcome back to the site - and happy new year, to boot!