First of all, I want to apologise again to the 160-odd people who have been waiting to have their accounts activated, some of them since December! I could make a glib remark about patience being a pre-requisite for entry but, frankly, it had gotten quite ridiculous.

Factors in my work and personal life conspired to overwhelm me to the point that I was terrified to look at my inbox to see what's been waiting! And the longer I've let things slide, the more heavily it's been weighing on me. Hopefully most of you would have successfully received your fresh passwords and been able to log in by now, following last week's activation marathon.

A couple of members have left recently and requested their posts and blog entries removed, one citing "uncomfortable" emails as a reason.

Please be careful of what personal information you make available in your profile - and that especially applies to female members. Most of it's voluntary or optional, and I recommend against revealing your real name, specific location or any other details that might expose you to potential abuse.

I promised several weeks ago that I'd look into doing something about the ongoing chatroom problems.

So I've now installed Flashchat. You'll notice there's now just a single link in the menu. I kind of see it as an interim solution but, suffice to say, it craps all over Gabbly and Chatzy.

It's integrated into the rest of the site, so you should automatically be logged in with your Tantalism details. If not, the username and password are the same as you usually use. The potential downside of this is that anonymous guests aren't able to join in. But that could also be a blessing in disguise, as it prevents roaming idiots from jumping in randomly and causing trouble.

Anyone visiting the site on New Year's Day may have noticed everything going haywire. Well, that was me attempting to upgrade to a newer version of the content management software.

It didn't go as planned and I ended up pretty much wiping out everything. For a while, even the whole database was gone. Fortunately, I made backups!

So, we should be back how we were. Hopefully nothing's lost, but if you notice anything awry, please let me know by making a comment below. I'm going to do a lot more testing before I try anything like that again...

Just in case anyone's wondering. Sorry there haven't been any major updates lately, but with work and Christmas, I've been very busy. But it's good to see there is still some activity here. In particular, there's an interesting new poll.

If I get a breather between Christmas and New Year's, I'll finally look at making some changes to the site and putting up some new stuff. In the meantime, everyone have a great holiday, and I hope you all get what you want from Santa — even if you've been naughty...

If you dropped by in the last 24 hours or so, you may have noticed the site was down for a while. Don't panic! That was due to an upgrade of the PHP environment on the hosting service. Fortunately, it all seems to be fixed and working again now. We now return you to your normal programming.

I've added "solo" categories for male and female. This also encompasses situations where the subject's sexual preference is indeterminate (which would generally be because of the lack of a partner...) And I've changed "general" to "general erotica", to more explicitly indicate the intended content. It's for stuff that's related and of interest, but not really the main focus. In the case that prompted this, it's about solo, forced orgasms.

First of all, there's now an "about" page, as suggested. It needs work, but it will do for now. At least it has a terrific Oscar Wilde quote! There's a new link to it in the banner.

I've bumped up the number of items which appear in this main area from ten to twenty. Interesting articles were disappearing off the bottom a bit too quickly for my liking.

Also, the "taxonomy list" which appears at the top of a story has now been moved down to a line of its own. Just for the sake of neatness.

And I've disabled the default avatar. Gorgeous as she was, I thought it was starting to look a bit tacky and, quite frankly, a bit distracting.

Following this advice, we now have a nifty hierarchical navigation menu, over yonder in the sidebar. Huzzah!

This will hopefully alleviate some concerns with the segregation of male and female centred content. Not that there is any male content yet, but it may happen at some point. And, of course, you can narrow the focus down to suit your own sexual preferences.

By the way, I want to take this opportunity to point out that those categories are meant to describe the content, not its intended audience. That's probably not immediately obvious, and I should set up an FAQ of some sort.

There's a new "recent posts" link in your main user block (the top block in the sidebar), or the navigation block if you aren't logged in. That will help you easily locate content which is new or has new comments since your last visit.