Downtime
Faithful readers: the e-mail barrage about phonoloblog being down the past few days has been overwhelming. I can’t possibly reply to it all, so I’m just going to apologize here to each and every one of you for depriving you of your phonolofix. I can’t promise it will never happen again, but I can assure you that I have no intention of allowing it to happen again…
OK, I’m kidding. No, not about that last bit — it’s true that I have no such intention — but about the e-mail barrage. Exactly two people wrote (evidence for binarity?), and neither one of them was Ed (which was surprising, because he has apparently not had anything better to do). I guess the remaining mass of readers relies on the RSS feed and don’t visit the blog directly, so they didn’t even notice we were down. (Should we post more often? Nah, this isn’t Language Log, just all things phonology.)
Anyway, the deal is that the security of our server (camba.ucsd.edu) was somehow compromised by comment spam and the like. This came to the attention of the systems security folks at UCSD, who brought it to the attention of the Linguistics computing staff — big thanks and props to Ezra van Everbroeck and even more to Marc Silver for doing what it took to bring things back online quickly and safely. If you notice anything that doesn’t seem to have survived the change-over intact, please let me know and I’ll take care of it if I can (or I’ll very politely ask Marc and Ezra for help if I can’t).
