User:Mountain Blue/announce

This is a draft.

There is no Conservaleaks version 4.

There might not be for several more weeks.

Conservaleaks version 4 is out

I'm releasing Conservaleaks IV, the [linkety link] revision.

There is no new material; the new version merely fixes bugs and improves readability.

I haven't been following the 403 situation too closely but I think most of us agree the Conservapedia is effectively winding down. Of course they will technically continue to blog for many years to come, but then again so will Steven den Beste and Eric S. Raymond. The new revision is meant to be clean and browsable enough to be accessible to posterity; to kids five years from now who've just met Andy on a list of marginal historical Internet cranks.

Therefore, this:

1. Previous versions were cumbersome to browse because many pages had just one or two messages on them so you had to click and click and click and click. Many threads had broken into fragments on their way to us and were spread out over several pages each. Many threads consist of just one of two messages in the first place. The new version fixes this:
   • Broken threads have been glued back together.
   • Pages show multiple threads now. It is still possible to see single threads in isolation. The default view, however, tries to present as much text on each page as reasonably scrollable.
   • Existing links and bookmarks continue to work. Existing links and bookmarks to thread fragments that no longer exist as separate pages now redirect to the reconstructed complete thread.
2. In previous versions threads still contained many trailing quoted messages and signatures the parser had failed to recognize and remove. On the other hand some legitimate parts of messages had been mistaken for trailing quotes and cut. The parser has been rewritten from scratch; to the best of my knowledge the new versions contains the entire actual text and virtually zero remaining gunk. The leakerator used to be a festering pile of ad hoc REs. Now it almost looks like a proper LR(1) parser if you stand very far away and squint real hard.
3. Many posting timestamps were wrong or misleading in previous versions; they had become truncated or corrupted due to lossy forwarding. Many pages would give dates and times relative to four or more different time zones, all of them questionable, except for the clearly nonsensical.
   • Posting dates and times have been repaired.
   • Dates and times are now shown normalized using Pacific Time. Dates and times appear in either PST or PDT in the default view, depending on the time of year. There is an option to use either Eastern Time or South African Time instead. The HTML source also still contain verbatim copies of the unreconstructed originals.
4. [more efficient use of screen real estate without overly long body lines]
5. It is now possible to bookmark or link to specific individual messages.