I had a nice sit down over some tea with our tech, Mario the other day. I needed him to dumb down the problems we are having with the Eternity section of 750words, so that I could really grasp the time it is taking to fix for myself, and also be able to explain it to all of you.

Basically, in very dumbed down language (I don’t speak engineer, sadly), it goes something like this:

We switched over to different servers some time ago because there are so many wonderful people using our site and the data had become so cumbersome. Storage was ridiculously expensive. To streamline, we found another provider. In that switch over, a bug happened with the Eternity code.

Our Eternity section is very special. Lots of you have written to me alarmed because Eternity has declared your words sensual or violent when they were in fact, not. What you should understand is that the data is not based specifically on what you’ve written that very day, but based on ALL the data collected in your profile since you started writing your words with us. So, every day, every entry, it compares your writing to ALL the MILLIONS of other words you’ve written. For your data in comparison to other users, it’s looking at ALL THE WORDS.

So! Once the code is fixed for good, which we hope happens soon, the robots will have to look at all the words for all us users and recalculate your Eternity statistics. This will take a good while. Probably a month? But you know how robots are, right? They start to save and then run for a while and then you wake up in the morning and realized that they stopped sometime during the night and you have to start it again. Darn robots!

So! That’s my update as best as I can explain it. Please know that we are doing our best to fix things, even though scrapping the Eternity section altogether is probably the best fix of all. (Don’t believe we haven’t had fantasies about that).

The thing is, we really like our Eternity section, and hope to have it restored sometime soon.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience and (above all) HAPPY WRITING!