Hand Picked Lists Expired Early

While doing some routine maintenance to the Bonanzle database this evening, there was an unexpected error that caused hand picked lists created in the last week to expire early (i.e., now). Though the lists are supposed to expire after two weeks anyway, our apologies to those who created lists recently and had them disappear. That sucks. The good news is that one of this evening's changes was to make lists even more deeply indexed into the main search for the site, so when you create your next list, you'll get even higher billing in normal search results (specifically, if the searcher is looking for an item that is in your list, the search will now look for that -- in addition to the title, subtitle, and emphasis of the list). Plus, since the lists give extra weighting to newer lists over older ones, this is a golden opportunity to get your list featured prominently, with so little competition from other lists :) For the record, we would normally be able to restore a database error like this with the frequent database backups we make, but in a cruel cosmic twist, the database backups had also been messed up for reasons that go beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice to say, the backups have been fixed, and I suppose in some sense it is a good thing that if a weird collection of errors like this had to happen, at least it affected data that was understood to be non-permanent anyway... All items, users, offers, and etc. were unaffected by this glitch. Hope everyone is having a fun and safe holiday season!