I just finished dealing with the last of the bugs I uncovered last time and this was a NASTY one. As I explained last time, a subtle bug has been causing a problem in the scripts of the arboretum tree button on root cards whenever earlier cards had been discarded in the harvesting process. Affected cards will identify the wrong card as root of the current tree.

This bug has been present ever since the tree buttons were first installed back in volume 16! It wasn't discovered largely because no one ever pushes that button. And even if the button was pushed the error was so subtle that it probably would have gone unnoticed. Nevertheless the bug needed to be fixed because I am planning on introducing a revised version of tree cards and I will be depending on the accuracy of that button.

I wrote a special program to scan through all the affected volumes and compile a list of affected cards. To my dismay the program found no less than FORTY TWO inacurate root cards. And many of these cards were the source of substantial conversation trees. When a root card goes bad EVERY card in the ensuing tree goes bad as well. So I had to track down and repair well over a hundred cards.

This has been done and the bug has been zapped and should not trouble us again. But I am now faced with another problem. Since cards as far back as volume 16 were affected I cannot easily transmit my corrections without re-releasing volumes 16-23. Frankly, I doubt if anyone in the group would ever notice this bug so there's not much need to re-send all eight volumes.

On the other hand, I hate to have even microscopic flaws out there unfixed. Also, I have been thinking for more than a year now about someday reformatting and re-transmitting ALL of our voice volumes as part of some kind of commemerative edition. This would entail a great deal of work on my part, but it would be nice to have the ancient volumes in the new format with all the new features.

Do any of you guys have any reaction to this? Would you like to see a re-release of, say, the first 25 volumes? And if so, do you have any suggestions about HOW to transmit such a massive collection (we're talking at least a dozen 800K disks). Maybe I should wait until we all have the new floptical drives. Any ideas?