The SLF has been plagued…

The SLF has been plagued with technical difficulties this spring. The first issue was really my fault -- I wasn't paying attention, the domain name expired, and by the time I noticed the site had been down for two weeks and all e-mails sent to us were being sent into oblivion. Argh.

That was bad enough, especially since this happened during the close of the reading period for the Older Writers' Grant. But we came up with a plan for coping with it as best we could -- we reset the reading period entirely, and we were about to send out a ton of publicity trying to make as many people as possible aware of what had happened. But then our SLF e-mail started failing -- most importantly, the forward for the Older Writers grant applications. ARGH.

I spent three hours last night trying to fix it on-site, and failing. And then combing through 5000 messages of stored mail, mostly junk, trying to find any applications. I dug out quite a few addresses. And then I submitted a ticket to our ISP saying essentially WHAT THE HELL.

This morning I heard back from Aaron (hi, Aaron), saying this: "It seems the messages are being stored locally on the server as though there was a mailbox instead of a forwarding recipe. I do not see any problem with the forwards configured within your account, and will escalate this issue. You will receive another response as soon as we have more information available."

So, I guess we have some sense of what the problem is, but no idea why the problem exists? So we sit on our hands and wait. All I can say is, I can now see why so many of the old-school fiction editors resisted taking electronic subs. It would be very comforting having a big stack of paper manuscripts on my desk right now.

Sorry, everyone. Have patience with us, please. More info as we have it.

If you'd like to stay updated on Speculative Literature Foundation events, activities, and news, please do join our Facebook page. I'm planning to do a variety of projects this summer, and it would be helpful if we could more easily communicate with the SF community. Thanks.

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