All,

Happy 2024!

As you've noticed if you're here, Sitdiary is being renovated in a big way. That's not to say that it's being completely overhauled; the initial motivation in bringing it back to life is to give people access to their old stuff. Part of me felt for a long while that it was time to let Sitdiary kind of fade, but over the years, people kept reaching out here and there to ask whether it would ever come back up and I'd been noncommittal at best.

However, recently, hellboy (Christian) reached out to me (thank you, Christian) and let me know that people had formed a subreddit dedicated to Sitdiary and there was a bit more interest than I'd previously perceived. After digging into that a bit, it kind of inspired me to bring things back -- at least to the point where people could log back in and view not only their own private entries but also their friends' entries as well.

So, that's the short version of how we got to where we are. Now, with that said, let me address a few specific things:

Passwords

The old password system for Sitdiary was basically terrible and super easy to hack, so I made the decision to enforce a much tighter password protocol and encryption. Unfortunately, this means your old password won't work anymore.

The good news is that you can reset your password, supposing you still have access to the same email! Of course, if you don't have access to your old email, that's when you'll have to use the contact form and reach out to me directly and we can discuss it further.

Spam

As many of you know, Sitdiary was rife with spam for years -- a lot of it still persists -- and I am trying to think of a good way to cull it all. In the mean time, here are the steps I've taken to help mitigate it:

• I deactivate spam diaries on sight and have been doing so for a while.
• I've added Recaptca to key areas (password reset, contact forms) and will be adding them to registration when that's back.

Some of this is annoying, but it's necessary if we want nice things.

Images

I did migrate the old user images to a CDN, so they are technically there. The problem is that young Scott referenced them in such a janky way that it's difficult to consistently point to them from your entries (as you may have noticed). The second problem is that some just got deleted and are no longer reference-able. I'm still thinking through how to properly bring those back, but needless to say -- I'll have to bring back an image manager of some kind.

What's Available Now

• Login and password reset
• The random button (woo!)
• Reading public entries
• Reading private entries
• Reading friends-only entries
• Commenting
• Comment deleting (your own and others' on your own entries)
• Settings (limited)
• Email Notifications (limited)

Roadmap

Now, as far as what's on the roadmap:

• User profiles
• Open Registration
• Entries (creating, editing, deleting)
• Image manager (as mentioned)
• Friend manager (and friend-adding in general)
• Settings (full)

These are the core things I want to bring back and the survey I put on the site has so far indicated that opening registration back up is the biggest thing people want to see, so I weighted that at the top of the list.

Of course, I am open to ideas and feedback, so feel free to use the contact form to reach out or leave a comment on news or scott. I want the site to feel like it used to, but faster, less buggy and with WAY less spam.

All that being said, even if it never came back in a big way, it's been an amazing blast getting it to where it is now and hearing from people I haven't interacted with in years has been just awesome.

That's pretty much it for now. Thank you all for your patience.

Love,

Scott