It has been awhile since we last opened up the Question of the Day archives to all for a day, principally because our grand plan remains the launch of an upgraded archive interface that would be permanently accessible to everyone. We don't want to give anything away (we'll be publishing the results August 20), but judging by the voting in the current Reader Poll, the latter seems to be something that would still be widely welcomed; however, we encountered a big hiccup along the way that threw a major monkey wrench in the works and has massively delayed bringing that project to fruition.
The virtual meteorite that hit us, back in 2008, came in the form of a SQL injection attack on the QoD database. For anyone technically inclined, you'll know what this is and for all those who aren't, we won't bore you save to say that it's a malicious attack, just like an email virus, that found a certain vulnerability in the security of our web-content database and, for no reason or gain to the perpetrator, deleted all the characters past a particular random number in certain features on our site, including QoD.
The chink in the armor has now been fixed, but the damage, in terms of truncated QoD answers, was devastating. One small bright spot in the catastrophe was that often we'd written the answer first in a different document before copying into the CMS (content management system) where we input QoD, so a good number of answers could be replaced in their original form. However, we were looking at documents written up to three years prior and not all had been filed for safekeeping, while some (and the current writer confesses to being particularly guilty here) had been written direct into the CMS to save time and annoying formatting issues that result from the former approach; hence, a good number of the longer answers I had researched and written had no back-up version to return to.
Anyone familiar with and fond of QoD knows that we aren't afraid to tackle in-depth questions and take pride in presenting comprehensive answers; to put that much work into an article and find half of it missing felt even worse than recently finding half the contents of my closet eaten by moths. Still, all you can do is take a deep breath and go back to the drawing board, which is what myself and my fellow QoDding colleagues have been doing over the past couple of years. A script was written to help find the damaged answers and, when time permits, we go in and re-research and re-rewrite the answers, a painful process which any writers out there among you can sympathize with, no doubt.
We're a small staff of writers, all working on multiple projects at any time, so it has not been an overnight process and we're not done yet, but we have made good progress. Some topical answers, like mammoth listings of all the Halloween parties that were taking place across town in 2009, for example, are irrelevant now and not worth fixing, but we still try to tidy them up when we find them, so they don't suddenly end mid-sentence.
So, that's the very long and sad explanation of why the QoD archives have not been opened to all lately. We didn't want to sound the fanfare for something we know people have looked forward to for a long time, and then present a product that we knew was badly damaged. However, we're as aware as our readers are that a long time has passed since we first threatened to throw them open, and our patience is wearing thin, too. The proto-version of the new archive search is far more sophisticated than the current one, and we'd dearly like to launch it sooner rather than later, so this is where our loyal QoD readers may be able to help us.
What we're considering doing is opening up the archives in the not-too-distant future, in the full knowledge that there are still holes in some answers. We'll then appeal to anyone who finds a damaged QoD to let us know the date and, more importantly, those of you who save and print answers of particular interest (we know you're out there!) can pass on the data so we can go in and make the necessary repairs. Consider it akin to sending the patient home before they're fully recovered, but appealing to friends and family to rally around and help with the recuperation process! Hopefully, together we can fix this.
We're still not ready to commit to a launch date for the new archives and feel there are still some technical improvements to be made to the search function, but we'd like to make it happen before the end of the year. In the meantime, perhaps we will open them up, with the current system still in place, for another 24-hour free-for-all. Now that our readers are aware of the issue, if we go that route, we'd certainly welcome any feedback about remaining damaged answers you come across. If they're ones we know we don't have originals for, we can then put the word out to see, if by some miracle, someone else has the missing words; if not, at least we'll know what still needs fixin' and we'll grab a beer or two from the office keg and then bite on the bullet.
