i just committed an updated version of antville into helma CVS:

• private weblogs will not appear anymore in the weblog-list on the frontpage (also not here). that means that private weblogs are now "really" private, but: there now is an auto-cleanup mechanism that checks how long they have been private. if for too long the creator will get a warning via mail. if the weblog is not set public within some days, it will be blocked - that means that nobody except sysadmins can access it anymore. plus, there is now a special kind of "trusted" weblog that can stay private for unlimited time. it's up to the sysadmins to decide which weblogs are "trusted".
• antville is now capable to dispose inactive weblogs: if they're idle for too long, they're deleted completely. both cleaning mechanisms, blocker and disposer, are fully configurable: if and when to run, how much days before sending warn-mails etc. to configure them one has to edit the file app.properties (both auto-cleaner are disabled by default).
• from now on users can be defined as "trusted", which for now has the only effect that those weblogs that they create are also "trusted". but i'm thinking about implementing something so that sysadmins can limit the creation of new weblogs just to trusted users.
• those accounts that are defined as sysadmins now have a tool to search for weblogs and users, to modify them (i.e. change status to trusted) or to delete weblogs.
• every maintenance-action done by sysadmins is stored in a log-table in database, and this log can be searched too. also the things the auto-cleanup-mechanism does are logged.
• and the smaller changes are: i switched to use helma's new md5Encoder instead of using a javascript-library, and removed the "Antville" from all weblog-related pagetitles, plus some minor bugfixes and code-cleanups.

so much for now, i'll see that i can do the update here on antville.org tonight.

i'd say here at antville.org we limit the time for private weblogs to 4 days (then they get the warning mail), plus three days - and afterwards the weblogs are blocked. or is this too short? inactive weblogs should be removed after 100 days (the mail in that case would be sent 1 week before removal). what ya say?

change the default weblog page skin so that the title links to the weblog front page. The tiny "home" link is just a bit hard to hit sometimes.

there is a small problem with emails confirming membership

weblog-title is used instead of weblog-name in the link to the weblog see example: subject line is ok (for me) but the link is wrong here

Subject: You are now a member of pop-log! ... dm42 has added you (meaning your antville-account "popme") to the list of members of pop-log.antville.org

I used to get atleast 3 - 5 comments on my earlier blog. After the move to antville.org, I had written one nice article and was wondering, why there were no comments. Thats when my friend informed me that you have to register inorder to comment.

This is highly distressing.

As you people know, hardly 5 % of people who read an article comment on it. and only 1 % of that 5 % will comment if they are forced to register. All blog sites thrive because of reader comments.

Dont you think, you people should allow anonymous commenting ??

Please help me out if there is already a way to acheive this. This seems to be the only sore spot in an otherwise amazing site + application.

Thanks and regards. www.itismylife.com