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So, for some reason the body of my post did not get posted. Herein is what I intended...
My therapist's building has a Little Free Library in the waiting area.
Seeing as how they see a lot of kids and teens, the LFL is normally stocked with kids books...Clifford, How a Magnet Works, that kind of stuff. There are usually a couple of teen books, too. For adults, there's a Grisham novel and some kind of southern food cookbook.
Today, though, snuggled in between the children's lit I found Gabriel García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores.
So, of course, I took it upon myself to rescue this little tome from the LFL, lest some prude runs across it and raises a stink. Now, I just have to think what book to replace it with.
It appears that, when you click Preview, the text box goes blank, and you have to re-enter everything you just typed and Previewed. That seems a bit like a bug.
Yeah, what I do, Thorzdad, is CTRL + C before I hit preview, and then when I see the box is empty, I paste the text back, and then I can submit the post.
While we're on the subject of how metachat works...Whenever I make a new post, I'm taken to a mostly blank page with a cute comment and a word/character count (or something) in the upper left corner. But, the page never cycles back to the post or even the Metachat home page. It just stays on that character count screen. I have to manually return to the home page. Is that the way it's supposed to work? It's always been that way for me, so I just figured it's the way the site was built.
Yeah, that's the way it is supposed to work, or maybe better phrased as that's how it works.
Functionally, MetaChat is just no longer really supported. occasionally it'll crash and someone reboots it - I think chrismear may still be paying attention at that level - but it's built on some sort of archaic code and no one's really able to do anything with it.
The traffic is so slow I feel like we're in kind of a tacit agreement to let it die at some undetermined future point where it won't work with browsers any more. But if anyone is motivated to try for a move to another forum, there's nothing to stop that effort.
I've long thought about putting up a LFL in my front yard, but it would be directly subject to harsh weather with no possibility of protection. I think it would just end up being a tool for soaking books into pulp.
That's where the cladding comes in - build a basic frame around it with siding/cedar shakes/whatever matches the house, and you've got your own mini transformer house full of books that nobody fewer people can complain about!