Well, it's been 2 weeks, so I feel obliged to update.

Unfortunately I've been quite busy in real life and so have been somewhat limited in the time I can spend on PA at the moment - a few people may notice my mobile phone posts from the train on the way to/from work.

However, I'm happy to report that integration of the new IRC client is going well, and I should be able to do basic integration testing on Saturday.

On the issue with new users being killed, for next round I'm likely to implement a combination of having production count slightly towards score, a variable cap rate and introducing bots at tick 0 (perhaps more bots, too), and making them slightly more intelligent.

Disband is still a tricky issue, and I've disbanded a few of the very small galaxies that were almost empty, though still not that many.

I'm looking with interest at blueemu's new design. Once finished, there's still a number of issues (including implementation) to be resolved, but hopefully these will be discussed this weekend. Based on that, we can see how likely it is to get the graphics implemented for next round.

I'm also going to try and migrate this blog over to our portal when I can; only I've forgotten my password and so will have to hack myself a new one when I have time.

Edit: as you can see, I've now migrated and all future updates will be here!