h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I go away for a few days, and everything comes back (eventually) broken. The forums don't work properly (and have naff bbc get out clauses at the end of them all). The pages don't work properly (unless they were originally written in guide ml). My user page doesn't work properly, and the links that it says it will convert are not converted. Also my picture will not display, and I am suddenly expected to learn guide ml overnight so I can get (most of) my page back. even then I can not include the picture of me without using some internal format that only h2g2 can access, and only by giving them copyright.
It's starting to look like a lot of pages might end up with "picture sensored by bbc online/h2g2" comments on them.
When are the bbc and h2g2 going to get their fingers out and convert h2g2 back into something that is easy to use.

I take it your pages were in HTML before. GuideML isn't really all that different from HTML, it just has stricter syntax rules and is all in upper case, and follows XML syntax so that all tags must be closed (including singular tags like which can be or for shorthand). Have you been along to the GuideML clinic?

External pictures (and indeed external content of any kind) is at present impossible for the Moderators to moderate properly, so unfortunately it has been disallowed and is very unlikely to be reinstated because the BBC need to cover themselves from a legal point of view. The plan is to allow Researchers some space on the h2g2 servers for image storage, but it is not known when this might be possible.

I also feel I should point out that the BBC do not take the copyright to anything on h2g2 - even if they do allow us images, the copyright will still be yours (assuming of course it was yours to begin with, which is the reason why external content has been blocked). The same for Entries and conversation postings. What the BBC do take is the nonexclusive right to publish your work in a myriad of forms, including ways which make them money. You can still publish your work elsewhere if you wish, provided whoever you publish it with doesn't mind not getting exclusive publication rights.

And as for ease-of-use... what's changed? Navigation's still the same as far as I can tell. Which bit of the forums don't work properly? Have you tried the lovely new single-page forum view? That does work differently, but it's much faster and I'm rather fond of it.

the two bits of the forums that don't work properly and are essential to creating new pages, is the refering back to older stuff (which you can't look at because it hasn't been censored yet), and other people mentioning relevent web sites, which you can't look at because they have been censored out of the forums. External referencing was pretty essential on some of the forums where I have been involved in the past, and not trusting us to see URL's and spot them as external, and thus no reflection on h2g2 or the beeb is a bit self defeating. how about getting the censors (sorry moderators) to be a little less keen with url removal.

That's an argument that's been endlessly repeated all over the site. It is possible that the URL policy may change in the future, however for the time being it's staying like it is and that's that.

As for referring back to old conversations, they will eventually reappear. Lots of old postings on my User Space reappeared the other day