Well, it looks like we're back up and running for good now. The forum and web site have been completely moved and Powweb is history. There are a few folks who have found their way back, but we're not back up to full speed yet.
The Old Host
I must say that from a database perspective, that was by far the worst service I've ever encountered in my years on the internets. I only mention this to save any of you the potential headache.
I won't go into the gory details, but just don't host your database there. The web site on the other hand was reliable and on very fast servers. So if all you want is a simple html site with insanely high bandwidth usage (10GB a day) and storage space (5GB) for fairly cheap, then go ahead, by all means. Still, I moved the website off of there as well.
New Stuff
First of all, you'll notice I've added a new forum, which you are now reading, called The Cork Board. This will be the place for public announcements of a more general nature, mostly related to the web site and the board, but not necessarily specifically to absinthe.
Now that we're on a more secure and reliable server and have a full perpetual license for the forum software, I feel I can put some energy into sprucing the place up a bit.
You will no doubt also have noticed a few new graphical touches and more of these will follow, but if you scroll down to the Fast Reply box (assuming you have enabled it here), you will notice that just below it I have installed a spell checker.
This handy little gizmo works with IE, Firefox and Opera, but chokes on Safari. I found that you may have to go into More Options or Post Reply rather than the Fast Reply box when using Opera. But 98% of you are using IE so I hope nobody has any problems with it. It is customizable, just like the one on MS Word and other applications, so you can save proper nouns and place names and absinthe jargon. It saves these in a cookie on your machine. As time allows, I will add proper absinthe terms to the database.
If you experience any bugs, malfunctions, weirdness or anything just seems misaligned or out of place, the wrong colors, whatever - in the forum or the website - please PM me about it.
Absinthe Reviews
I'd prefer not to write them all myself, but I need reviews for a few of the absinthes on the reviews page. Please note that this page is for absinthes we specifically recommend for new folks.
Welcome back and have fun!
P.S. Did everyone/anyone get the bulk e-mail announcement I sent out yesterday? Did anyone get it twice?
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