Notes on 2000 Summer Story Contest Archive

On missing stories

Entries are automatically assigned a serial number (actually two letters) when the arrive at the contest address. Among other things, this serial is input to the script that generates a story's web page. If you worked your way through the possible serial numbers, you'd find a few missing.

Matters are somewhat complicated by some problems I had along the line. Due to a hard drive problem, I moved the distribution bot to a different computer temporarily and accidentally used an old copy of the serial file. So some stories got already in use serials assigned to them. I fixed those numbers manually but didn't bump the serial count enough. More duplication. When I fixed it that time, I bumped the count too far and left a ten entry gap.

• am was a duplicate of ac
• bk was a duplicate of ab
• bi was replaced by dt
• bo was a duplicate of bn
• cm was a corrected version of ck
• cp was a duplicate of co
• dd was a duplicate of dc
• fc was replaced by fe
• fe was withdrawn in favor of wj
• fg was replaced by fh
• ge was replaced by gf
• gi was a duplicate of gg
• gj was a duplicate of gh
• hl through hu never really existed
• ic was a duplicate of ib
• ie was a large binary spam
• ji was a correction to iw
• jm was a correction to ix
• ju was replaced by jv
• kb and kc were a sig in search of an body
• mo was a misplaced query
• ot was withdrawn in favor of wm
• pi and pj were comments sent to the entry address
• po and pp were duplicates of pn
• qk was replaced by ql
• rc was replaced by re
• rg was replaced by ri
• rh was replaced by rj
• rq was essentially identical to rr
• rv contained a minor correction to ru
• tf was replaced by tg
• uv was a duplicate of sv
• uw was a duplicate of su
• uy was a duplicate of sw
• uz was a duplicate of sx
• vy was a duplicate of tl
• wk was replaced by wl

On author names

The perl script that does the initial processing for the archive attempts to extract a "real name" from the From: header of the original mail. If it can't find one, the username portion of the e-mail address is used. This default name is overridden manually if a different name is found in the Subject: header or in a byline or copyright statement within the text. If you want to change the name (or address) attached to your entry, please contact me.

Sorting by author is actually a case sensitive sort by address.

On categories

Categories are assigned manually based on the contents of the Subject: header and any statement about categorization made in the text. Stories may be assigned to more than one category. If nothing looks likely, it gets tagged as "Unclassified". If you aren't happy with the category assignment I've made, please let me know what you want it to be.