After a brief hiatus that seemed closer to an eternity, I'm pleased to report that the dot is back and all is good. A big "Thank You!" goes out to Chris McDonough and Jim Fulton of Zope Corporation, Chris Withers of Squishdot fame, and the wonderful Zope community at #zope for their excellent support throughout this matter.

Sorry guys, the dot went down again this weekend after 51 days of uptime on the new server. We suspect that the problem is an overworked harddrive. Bero is on it (bonus: woo, we have ext3 now), but you can expect minor flakiness as we fully work out the issues.

Lately, we've been spending some time improving the dot and implementing new features. While our efforts are far from over, we thought we'd announce a few of the things we've done so far. Dre has finally implemented one of the most requested features of the dot: You can now receive timely email notification of dot-headlines, or, depending on your preference, you can receive the full text of the dot-stories. As if that wasn't enough, I went ahead and implemented Flat Forty. Flat Forty can be thought of as a poor man's flat mode with a twist: You can now view the 40 most recent stories and comments globally. While mostly useful as an administrative trollbuster, we think you might enjoy it too. We hope to optimize Flat Forty eventually so that we can provide an efficient timely dynamic generation of the page. Read on for some dot fixes...

As many of you have noticed, we have had a lot of downtime lately brought on by some severe server problems. With our regular server admin away on a well-deserved vacation, we have been forced to move to a new location, at least for now. The new server, bero.org, is owned and operated privately by our friend Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, but is hosted on the excellent network and resources of Red Hat Europe. I would like to extend a huge thanks both to Bero and to Red Hat for their support!

As the Dot has been getting more and more successful, and more and more popular, we've been attracting script kiddies and trolls like flies. As Dre previously reported: "On March 13, 2001, at 1:33 am EST, someone using the anonymizer.com service succeeded in putting malicious Javascript code into one of the posts. While the code was relatively harmless -- it changed all links on the page to point to a shockingly disgusting porno site -- we feel this security lapse requires us to disable all posting until the problem in the Squishdot code is solved." This news has been out for a while in all the wrong places (1, 2) and is attracting attention. Read on to see what we're doing about it.

For what has seemed like an eternity, but really was closer to a week, our beloved dot, as well as the kde.com sites, were down. Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Dre and MieTerra, the server has been moved across the country and is again up and ready to serve. Many thanks to all those who made generous offers to host or help us in the meanwhile. In particular, thanks go to Dave Belfer-Shevett of Stonekeep Consulting, Joshua D. Drake of the Linux Documentation Project and Guido Bakker of Synnergy Networks. Over the next few days, while the DNS updates, we will be attempting to catch up on all the KDE news. Meanwhile, we have reposted the news items previously featured on the mother site during our downtime.

As some of you may have noticed, lately we've been getting more and more postings at KDE Dot News. With the increasing number of comments, we've also been getting more and more complaints about the fact that KDE Dot News automatically switches to threading when the number of articles in a forum goes over our global threshold. We've been trying to tweak this global threshold to satisfy everyone, but that seems to have been a lost cause: Forums with too many nested articles take a while to download for people with slow net connections and aren't convenient for a bird's eye view of the responses, while forums which have switched to threading are painful for people who want to read each and every response. As of now, the default threshold has been set to 40, but I'm pleased announce that I've also implemented configurable thread thresholds. Just look to the right of this article or any other, and you should see a more or less self-explicit config box -- your preferred settings should be stored more or less permanently in a cookie. If you find any bugs, or have any comments or feedback just use the forum or, failing that, email me. Enjoy.

Effective 12:00 p.m. EST January 5, 2001 the IP address of KDE Dot News is scheduled to change from 216.186.210.168 to 64.22.20.150. Although we expect the transition to be a smooth one, you may experience difficulties accessing the site by the regular hostnames (dot.kde.org, news.kde.org, www.kdenews.org, etc...) around that time; using the new IP address in lieu of the domain name may help. Update: 01/05 7:31 PM by D: The ISP experienced technical difficulties in making the change and hence the transfer has been postponed until mid next week. We'll keep you posted.

Based on feedback we've received in the last week we have made some changes to
APPS.KDE.com. Most significantly, we have
introduced internal frames to replace framesets. This approach works great with Konqueror and IE, but works optimally only with JavaScript enabled; Netscape 4.x does not support internal frames.
We have also added the ability to browse categories and conduct searches
based on KDE version without having to visit the "Configure" tab. If you
have any more suggestions for improving the site, please let us know!

The KDE Desktop Environment project is pleased to announce the launch of KDE Dot News, a news and discussion site dedicated to KDE and supported by the KDE community. KDE Dot News is the response to a large and growing demand for a KDE-specific news site.

We hope you will like what you find here, including KDE development and user news, discussions, feature articles and more. The only catch is that we ask that you help us out by actually submitting articles. Read on for a few more details.