Hi everyone,

And welcome 2020 - We wish a great year for all of you esteemed members of PoetBay!  We hope this new year will be full of love-filled, happy, and peaceful moments for all. 

We're very sorry that we had to go for a while, but we've finally reached a bit of a break… and with the dossier we needed to deal with in the last few months somewhat out of the way for now (until March when a response is expected), and now with the new year arrived, it's put us in a focus to jump in again and finish what we started - to our great happiness, we want you to know.  We’ve been looking so forward to this time…

We can only thank all of you for your ever supportive understanding.  We’re beginning to gain back a bit more energy, and we’re getting back to finishing the remaining items of our issues list (www.poetbay.com/whatsup.php) :

    →  Figure a way to control the activity of webcrawlers, etc. to counter the

          bloated counts of our weekly readings on texts ;

    →  Finish My Tags menu tab and page on profile page

And the big one that may necessitate a downtime for PoetBay soon (for when we apply the fix.  It’ll be a downtime of the sort of a website maintenance, not hours or days on end, don't worry)

    →  The displaying of certain characters on the site is incorrect (which, for

          those interested, concerns the database and the character encoding

          configurations not setting properly... a bit technical) :

           •   Punctuation and accented characters are displayed as gibberish

                on older texts ;

           •   Punctuation and accented characters are displayed as a question

                mark on newer texts and comments (for some users) ;

           •   New lines (return), spaces, and accented words are also displayed

                as a question mark in private  messages' replies.

We realize the character issue is a bit of a pain, and we've been wanting to resolve it since we moved to the new server, but it's just that in a good logical order of things, it'd be best to fix the other things before we complete this one (to avoid problems).  Hence the delay on this particular issue.  Aside that, we hope to not cause too much disruption when we fix this one, so we want to find the least disruptive solution…  We’ll of course keep you informed before we go ahead with any fix that could impact your use of the site.

A bit of news to let you know that we haven’t dropped anything.  We'll be seeing you soon :-)

Until then, Happy New Year - from all 3 of us !  

Isabelle