Status Update 2005-11

October and November have been two quite busy months for us. The following is a short summary of the most important changes - a detailed list can be found at the Changelog.

A lot of bug hunting and fixing has been going on behind the scenes. The internal scripts and the database got quite a lot of tweaking and finetuning.

The entire Aminet tree needed some cleaning up as well. All archives have a proper architecture field by now, lots of (very) old archives were missing their readmes or readme files were shared between archives (foo.lzh and foo.lha both had foo.readme). We could even resurrect some ancient archives that were accidentally deleted from the indices years ago.

The mailing lists are back - if you want to get daily or weekly e-mails listing the recent uploads, just send a mail to aminet-daily-subscribe@aminet.net or aminet-weekly-subscribe@aminet.net. They do not carry information about a package's architecture yet, but we're working on that.

Aminet mirrors are on the verge to be rolled out properly. A new German mirror hosted by Costel 'Cyborg' Mincea is already online and can be accessed at de4.aminet.net for now. We're still missing a mirror in eastern europe - if you think you can help out, please get in touch with us.

The uploader's e-mail address gets obfuscated now, both in the web interface and in the actual readme. Please note that this field is now strictly required -not specifying an e-mail address may result in your upload getting deleted.

The statistics have been expanded aswell - we have uploader stats now. This month's most active uploader is Tony "I was born for SDL" Aksnes. If you want to compete with him, make sure your uploader field is spelled exactly the same on all your uploads.

The search function now supports Amiga wildcards: You can search for foo?.lha, foo#?.lha or even foo*.lha. Searching readmes should be quite a lot faster now aswell, though the database is still busy indexing all the readme files.

During the first six months of this year, we did have some problems: Packages didn't get moderated as regularly as we would have wished, we had database problems and the server went down several times. These issues should be solved by now - as far as we can tell everything is running smoothly. But please don't hesitate to drop us a note if you encounter any problems or just want to give some feedback. We're open to suggestions aswell: If you have an idea for improving Aminet, let us know.

Last but not least: October was a new record month for uploads and in November we surpassed the year 2003 in terms of uploads, making 2005 the first year Aminet's upload rate rises since 1997!