The Online Safety Act 2023 comes into force Monday. This should be a good thing except that I now have to do a mountain of paperwork (correctly on the first try) to basically say, “yes, we moderate and no dangerous content is hosted here”.

Failure to do this could land a lot of fines in my direction. I hope this does not force me to shut down Author Buzz, but I do know that I will fight to keep us open and online.

Who knows what happens next?

It looks like there was a fat old spam run at our site recently. The spam accounts have now been removed.

If I missed any, let me know.

I’ve had to make a change to the way Author Buzz syndicates content to places like Mastodon. We used to have forum topics and replies in the syndication stream. I have now pulled it back to only posts to the main blog.

The reason for dialling it back was I noticed a lot of spam was getting cached in the wider fediverse. I’m not prepared for us to be a vector for spam so I made a change.

I hope you can understand why I did that.

I’ve finally gotten to the point of working out how to import all libraries in the UK. This will allow authors to (one day) list which libraries carry their books; and other things like that.

The choice before me now is do I make each library a type of post/page and then write a bunch of custom code to do the other stuff or do I make libraries some sort of taxonomy (categories or tags types stuff).

Libraries as taxonomy would allow quick and easy ways to connect a library with forums, forum replies, posts, blogs, and such. Then these items would show up on the library page.

On the other hand, libraries as a content type would allow for a lot more detailed information at the cost of easy integration with other stuff.

There are good arguments for both. I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I have started the process of revising the themes on offer to our bloggers. In particular, I want to remove themes that hide their best features behind a paywall and themes that have not been kept up to date.

I will do my best to make sure there are some fresh new, friendly themes to use. As always, if you have any requests – just ask.