Nice to see you back.

Hey, back just in time to see Chuck Tingle's "Buttception: A Butt within a butt within a Butt" somehow end up on the Nebula Awards Suggested Reading List!

O, brave new world that has such butts in't!

Welcome back! I was getting pretty worried for a while there, I thought I had lost one of my favourite sites on the whole wide web.

So glad to see this old place up and running again. I've been faithfully reading through the new articles, if not always commenting, and I'd fallen a bit behind by the time of the shutdown, so I'm looking forward to catching up. I ... may or may not have been checking daily.

Heck, maybe this mini reopening will inspire me to revisit some half-baked article ideas I've been sitting on for a while. Or maybe not, we'll see.

(But seriously, Arthur, you can tell us where the site's really been at all this time: was it the Dreamlands? Yuggoth? The Plateau of Leng?)

Down the back of the sofa.

Glad to see y'all back. I was afraid you might be gone forever.

Oh, thank goodness! You SCARED me! :D

Very glad to see you back. I was dang near heartbroken to think of the loss of all your (plural)detailed writings.


*relurks*

The autonomous AI that does not exist, and certainly does not regulate Ferretbrain operations, did not suffer an unexpected memory failure. This non-failure did not result in electromagnetic fluctuations in the purely imaginary Faraday hypercage in which Ferretbrain is not located. No DeQuincy loops formed, and therefore it is logically impossible that a localised space-time-space distortion resulted in Ferretbrain temporallarily existing only in the past and the future, but not the present. The resolution of this non-problem did not require an undisclosed visit to CERN lasting several subjective weeks for outside observers. Tindalosian beings were not encountered and no Trismegistine was deployed. No participants in this non-event were exposed to unclassified energies. The crystalline substance that has replaced the flesh on one-quarter of Arthur's torso is not in any way related to these incidents which did not occur.

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On a more serious note, I admit I haven't been visiting this place nearly as much as I used to, but then G. Jennings' biggest (only?) superfan decided tracked me down on my personal site, and that brought back a flood of memories and a panicked "where'd all our stuff go?" response. Which is to say--glad to see Ferretbrain up and running again, and all our articles safe and sound.

Oh, was this the person who posted on your article with OpenID a while back?

I'm very pleased that we had readers who cared enough to worry when the site was down, but also I'm deeply amused that we got under some people's skins enough that years after the fact they came out of the woodwork to celebrate our apparent demise.

Oh, was this the person who posted on your article with OpenID a while back?

The very same!

Their "remoulding human bodies like putty"-based fantasies must be very, very precious to them.

Nice to see the site again! I was getting worried and fretful, but now all is right again. In relation to this site's onliny existence, that is.

Glad to see the site back! I mostly lurk myself these days, but do still check the site regularly.

I'm glad to see you're back, Arthur. It's always really shitty when sites vanish from the Internet, and there's a lot of stuff here that should be preserved.

On that topic, I tried to access a copy of Ferretbrain through the Internet Archive while the site was down, but it kept spitting out an error about how the "robots.txt" weren't configured or being blocked or something. Damnedest thing is, I checked the archive today, and all the recorded versions of Ferretbrain are back up. I might be something to look into, in case the site ever goes down permanently some day.

Finally, I'd also like to thank you for sparing me the time and hassle of editing and reposting all my old articles over on my blog. Now I can focus on not generating content in new, more exciting ways!

I will ask Rami about it but it sounds like something to do with the way webfaction's own robots.txt is set up and it may be out of our control.

If Ferretbrain ever has to permanently go away I'd hope to be able to do it in the form of a controlled demolition rather than a sudden disappearance, if you see what I mean - announcing what is going to happen ahead of time to give people a chance to archive what they want and post whatever contact details/URLs for replacement communities they want to and then leaving it archived in a static format somehow.

You may also want to consider grabbing something like HTTrack or Wget that can copy an entire website in one go and putting it on Google Drive. Sometimes the Archive misses pages while scanning sites, so backing it all up yourself is the safest way to go. There's someone I used to read who died in 2012; his site went down about a year later and Archive was rather fussy in recording it, so getting someone's scanned copy of it was the best shot I had of preserving his writing.

Weekly archiving on something like that might be the way to go.

Ah, good to know what happened! I was worried that the entire site archive might be lost for a moment there.

Well, all the best to Wardog and Dan, and I hope the site keeps running in the mean-time!

Glad you're back!

Oh, hey! I'm glad the site's not gone after all; I was kind of worried there. Welcome back!

Welcome back! And I'm glad that Wardog's reasons for stepping back are good happy reasons.

Long live the Ferret! May it reign ten thousand years!

You're back! Welcome back! :)

I'm so relieved and glad to see the site back!