When linkfarm bastards create accounts, such as balls and linkman, please don't link to their personal page to point it out to everyone - it only feeds the googlejuice and therefore makes them more effective. Just rate their diary 1 and DON'T CERTIFY THEM (a "real" user cert'ing them, even as an apprentice, gives them more trust - just say no).

DV, I'm surprised to hear that - I'm always impressed that you do find time to respond to all mails and answer stupid questions like mine - thank you for the excellent libxml2/libxslt.

this is outrageous, what evil plot will they hatch next?!?

My fucking account has vanished again!
Sending this will probably erase someone else's account, since it seems to be due to disks filling up and losing data because of faulty error handling.

Advogato account problems

Accounts that have disappeared include Stevey, skx, salmoni, ncm, returnoftheredi, dorward, hereticmessiah.

Note that certs for an old account are still shown on the other person's page, but not on the new account if it gets recreated. e.g. at the time of writing this negative's page shows he certified salmoni, but that was before salmoni recreated his account, so his new account doesn't show that cert. Similarly, salmoni certified this account, but then it disappeared and I recreated it, so my page doesn't show the cert. God knows what that's doing to the trust metric. [Update: looks like the tmetric page crashes apache, so the answer might be that the trust metric is no longer being updated]

Possible causes could be that someone has found a way of corrupting an account by certifying it (or giving a diary rating) or that the disk is hopelessly knackered and is losing files. But I'm just guessing.