A few of you may have encountered some unintended problems with this website lately.

Some time ago, I started automatically expiring inactive accounts. This was to weed out the stupendous number of spam registrations that this site gets (most of which don't result in anything happening).

More recently, I made it much more difficult to register for an account in the first place. This was to combat the same problem, especially because the number of spammers who were manually posting spam was on the rise.

These two policies are obviously redundant.

I then promptly disappeared for over a month, and was unable to process new registrations or deal with expired accounts. Great planning, I know.

For now, I am turning off automatic account expiration. Also, a much newer and better version of the software underlying this website is almost ready for prime time, and I hope to transition to that as quickly as possible. Some of the custom features I've had coded for this site will go away (unless I hire another programmer), but I get the impression they weren't used much anyhow.

Transitioning to the newer software will, unfortunately, require that everyone with an account sign up anew (I've got some ideas for dealing with spam registration more elegantly); it will also require that the "useful links" be re-entered by hand. If you would like to be a Hero of the Republic and take on a chunk of this re-entry work, contact me and I'll allocate a chunk to you. I expect the transition to happen in mid-November.

Ryan Ginstrom has completed the 神様の業 of putting the Honyaku list archives online in a searchable database going all the way back to 1995 at least. This represents a huge body of knowledge and is a great service to the community.

I have placed a search box that will directly search the honyaku archives on this site—just use the "search list" field on the right. Or you can go directly to the honyaku-archive site and use the advanced search if you prefer.

There was a bug in the user profile code: some information was not being recorded. This has been fixed (fingers crossed). If you've created a profile, you may want to edit it to make sure it's complete. If you've never created a user profile, you are welcome to do so. Make sure to fill in the "General" "Interpreting" and "Translating" tabs as appropriate to your work.

The following is a sample of the data I translated in preparing the sections on special effects (擬声音・擬似音) during the process of rendering The Five Star Stories into English and which now appears with illustrations in the Appendices to the published series.

I've started putting the glossaries back online. Right now, they're just static pages, but eventually I hope to get them set up as proper database tables.

If you're a registered member of this site and know how to format a table in HTML, you can create a glossary yourself--just select "page" under "create content" and assign it to the correct glossary category (right now, just J>E and E>J, but I'll consider other language pairs).

This site is set up to automatically delete the accounts of people who don't sign into it at least once in a three-month period. This is done to ensure that profiles are kept current, and more importantly, to clear out the astonishing number of spam-registrations we get here. You need to actually sign in, not just visit (if you can see your username at the top of the left column, you are signed in) for the site to know you've been here so you avoid account deletion.

It appears that I configured this feature incorrectly, so the "deletion soon" warning was sent at the same time as the "account deletion" notice. A few of you have already been bitten by this. I apologize. I think I have fixed it, but if it continues to be a problem, please let me know.

Benjamin Barrett is now on board as an editor. He was probably the most prolific contributor to the previous incarnation of this site, and I'm glad to have his help again.

I need a few volunteers to check suggested links and job offers. This will be a very small time commitment of a few minutes per day.

Very few site members have registered language pairs. There may be some confusion about using the language-pair menus.

After you select a pair of languages from the pop-up menus, click the Add pair button. This registers the language pair, and lets you add multiple pairs.