I've just sent out a mass email to all registered users of I Need a Parrot. In case you didn't get the email - here is what it says. It's nothing to worry about, the site is not going anywhere, but the stories which are causing problems need to be fixed.

"Thank you all for your patience with the problems we’ve had with the site. And thank you to those of you who have contacted me to let me know about specific stories still having problems.  As I said in my last email, there isn’t a lot I can do from my end to fix these problems and I’m counting on you guys to help. Authors, if your story has what seems like missing chapters or isn’t displaying, you will have to re-upload your story. From scratch, as a brand new story. It’s all to do with the little number after ‘sid=’ on the link to your story, the old version of the eFiction script apparently did not assign those correctly and now with the upgrade the script can no longer find the stories and/or chapters and this is causing the blank pages. Editing the individual chapters will not help because these new or edited chapters will still be linked to the ‘sid=’ number.

If you are unable to upload the story yourself, I am more than willing in this instance for you to send the story files to me (in .doc, .rtf or .txt format only please) and I can upload them under your penname. This offer is purely for those stories which are currently not displaying correctly as I do not have the time to upload stories for others on a regular basis given the amount of traffic this site gets.

Now comes the hard part, I understand that this may take some time to organise and implement, however by the end of March I plan to start clearing out the problem files which may result in your story being deleted. If you cannot upload before that time, please contact me and we can work something out.

It’s frustrating for the readers of the site to continuously encounter blank pages or errors when trying to read a story. I hope you will understand and support this decision. I am not penalising anyone or singling out individuals, I simply wish the site to go back to running smoothly.

Thank you for your understanding.

Shona xx"


Anyone know what the Italians call "The Slayer"? I have it down to l'Ammazza  or l'Ammazzavampiri  (I'd rather use just Slayer rather than Vampire Slayer for this) but I'm not sure if I'm grammatically right or not.