We're back!

In case you haven’t been keeping track, The Wikipedia Review blog was deleted on June 3rd after it was targeted by a nasty “zero-hour” SQL-injection attack, apparently emanating from China (though there’s no way to know for sure, of course - this is the internet, after all). The attack took advantage of a security vulnerability here in WordPress, so because we’re very cautious and paranoid about that sort of thing, we decided to wait until a newer, safer version was released before restoring it. WordPress 2.6 was released on July 15, but of course we had to wait an additional two weeks in case any new bug reports appeared, which would hopefully be accompanied by patches or other updates.

Oh, come on, who am I fooling? I was just lazy. I’m ridiculously lazy - always have been. The fact is, I hate dealing with web applications. Debugging and tweaking takes waaaay longer on the web than it does on the desktop, even if you’re using a local development server. And these PHP-scripted systems are invariably a mess, no matter how you slice it… Sure, WordPress is better than most, but it’s still a crap shoot as to whether you’re going to get any of it working in a reasonable amount of time. When I upgraded this installation we lost all of our categories, for example. Turns out the database now calls them “Terms,” and they’re organized into a “Taxonomy.” Great!

Anyway, where was I…? Oh, right. First, the blog now looks slightly different - the once-blue header is now more drab and plain-looking, in keeping with our new philosophy of keeping things boring simple, straightforward and to-the-point. (Oh sure - the truth is nobody ever got around to upgrading the old theme to make it compatible with the new version.) Second, for security reasons we’re no longer allowing new user registrations via the front-end - if you’d like to become a Wikipedia Review blogger, livin’ in vida loca, you’ll have to go through either Kato or myself for the time being. We’ll probably go ahead and make Derktar and Dogbiscuit admins too, just so we can say we have four. Besides, they’re good people.

Finally, I’d just like to say how much I appreciate everyone who helped make our blog what it was back at the beginning of June, and will be again, with any luck whatsoever. I’d also like to say how little I appreciate the people who compelled us to delete it around that time. Hopefully that sort of thing won’t happen again, but if it does, next time we’ll be ready for ‘em. With chainsaws!