Dear Yumi (and Lee):

After examining your contribution stack I believe I understand what happened. If Lee had contributed any more cards the same thing probably would have happened to him. The problem stems from an oversight I have been meaning to correct for some time.

One of nice things about Archipelago is that even though the packets I send out are identical, the program recognizes who you are and automatically stamps your new cards with your icon, places your name in the masthead, etc. It does this by using a global variable called username that derives from a field on the last card of your home stack.

When I send out intro letters to new members, I tell them to be sure that the username field in their homestack is set to their first name. What I think happened is that both Yumi and Lee failed to do this.

Yumi's case is puzzling because her hello card was OK; the one voice card created BEFORE her hello card, and all the voice cards created AFTER it, however, were flawed. (The reason you kept winding up at your first card is that without a username all your cards were given identical names and the go command was forced to choose the first occurance). I can only conjecture that Yumi created one card on her new hard disk (using a new, unlabeled home stack), created a home card from her old hard disk, and then created the rest from the new disk. Perhaps, Yumi, you were playing with the configuration of your new machine and switched back and forth at first. Is this possible?

ANYWAY, my program really should have caught this problem and corrected it. From now on it should. I have added a routine that checks the username and, if it is undefined, asks for your first name. The routine will automatically repair your home stack, if need be.

Please make sure that you have a single copy of HyperCard and a single home stack. Problems like this can occur if you have multiple home stacks especially when one home stack is labeled and the other is not. From now on, even if such a problem does arise, Archipelago should be bright enough to cope.