Until recently, OSCAR was *only* usable for "external" submissions commentary. However, as of this week, OSCAR has finally been extended to include the ability to process kingdom internal letters of intent. The biggest bonus to doing it this way is that the submissions herald need only click a single button to create the EXTERNAL letter of intent and submit things for Society-level commentary.

While a specific sunset date has not yet been set, we will be moving internal commentary to OSCAR at some point, probably quite soon. I strongly recommend that all commenting heralds take a look at Oscar at http://oscar.sca.org, sign up for an account and get acquainted with the site.

More as it happens!

Maol Mhichil Polaris

If you have programming savvy and want to help, or are just interested in tracking the development of the software that runs this site, the Baldric project is now living on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/baldric/

Bug tracking is sticking with Flyspray for now,but will probably move over to SourceForge? soon.

OK. We're using a new text formatter -- something I've wanted to put into place for some time so that people didn't have to learn raw HTML.

The downside is that it's one of the other -- in order to have 'safe' text that cannot, either maliciously or accidentally, contain 'dangerous' HTML code, the text formater has to pretty much strip out HTML. I can turn that part off, I think, if I have to, but I'd rather not.

This means some older comments may look odd. I apologise for this bit of growing pain. Update I'm going to go and try to fix what's in the February letter so it's not too hideous.

Update 2 I've changed my mind -- re-editing all of them is a pain. I've edited a couple just to make sure things work. I'm going to take out the rule that filters out HTML for now. However, when March commentary begins, the rule goes back in.

Please play with things. Reply to this message and use it as a sandbox.

When item status changes from 'Open', it will now get a 'status stamp' that will be displayed with the new status, e.g. 'Sent to External, 12-30-2003...'. Older letters whose status was changed before this will all have 12-30-2003.

In addition, the history is saved off, so eventually (not yet) it will be possible to click and see an audit trail of the status changes.

What does this mean?

It means that all the basic structure is in place to allow letters to be posted, items to be commented on, and, after decisions made, have their statuses updated.

In the coming weeks, I'll be adding:<ul>
<li><strike>Search/Browse by status</strike><span style="color: red">Done!</span></li><li>E-mail notification of updates</li><span style="color:red">70% done!</span><li>User interface cleanups</li>
</ul>Please use the bug-report link at the bottom of the menu to report bugs and request features!