Dear DemoNews readers and Hornet Archive users,

I have good news and bad news.

Good News : Music uploads will be moved out of /incoming faster than ever!
Bad News  : They won't be reviewed.

We no longer have resources available to rate music.  It has simply become
impossible to keep up with the workload.  For the past week, we (the archive
maintainers) have been intensely discussing many options about the future of
the /music.  Finally, a decision has been reached.

The entire /music directory (2.1 gigs in size) will be moved to a different
drive and symbolically linked through.  This change will be transparent to you
for the most part.  However, with the archive spread across 2 drives, we'll
have a total of 3.9 gigs _free_ to grow into.  Not that we will be using all
that space, but at least it is available (for now).  The HA search engine and
index files will still work as you are used to.

Music will not be rated.  That's the big news.  Rating /music is the single
most time-intensive and difficult thing we do, but the music scene has grown
too large for us to cope.  Hopefully you've found our free rating service
useful in the past.  I am sad it has to end.  If you would like to see how
/music has grown with relation to the rest of Hornet Archive over the past 1.5
years, check http://www.hornet.org/ha/pages/showit/plot.html. This link will
only be around for a week or so.

We will continue to accept new music uploads (as soon as our directories are
resituated).  There will be a new, very precise, upload form.  As a music
uploader, you will be responsible for filling it out correctly. Automated
scripts will be completely responsible for moving files out of /incoming/music
and out into the base /music directory.  More information about this will
appear in the next issue of DemoNews (to be released in 4 days or so).

At present, /music accounts for 71% of the Hornet Archive's drive space, and
_certainly_ over 71% of our manpower to maintain.  Including the offline
CDROM, our music archive is 2.7 gigs in size.  When I first became Hornet
Archive /music maintainer in December of 1993, it was 30 megs!  Needless to
say, the music scene has grown tremendously these past few years... much more
so than graphics, code, or demo scene proper.

The primary purpose of the Hornet Archive is : provide a central location for
the demo scene.  Not the music scene, the demo scene.  Archiving music is a
healthy sideline that we provide resources for, but it is not our main purpose
in life.  Dan Wright started this archive with a specific mission and I intend
to continue with it until my scene life has drawn to a close.