Two years ago, I wrote Lesswrong 2.0. It’s been quite the adventure since then; I took up the mantle of organizing work to improve the site but was missing some of the core skills, and also never quite had the time to make it my top priority. Earlier this year, I talked with Oliver Habryka and he joined the project and has done the lion’s share of the work since then, with help along the way from Eric Rogstad, Harmanas Chopra, Ben Pace, Raymond Arnold, and myself. Dedicated staff has led to serious progress, and we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So what’s next? We’ve been running the closed beta for some time at lesserwrong.com with an import of the old LW database, and are now happy enough with it to show it to you all. On 9/20, next Wednesday, we’ll turn on account creation, making it an open beta. (This will involve making a new password, as the passwords are stored hashed and we’ve changed the hashing function from the old site.) If you don't have an email address set for your account (see here), I recommend adding it by the end of the open beta so we can merge accounts. For the open beta, just use the Intercom button in the lower right corner if you have any trouble.
Once the open beta concludes, we’ll have a vote of veteran users (over 1k karma as of yesterday) on whether to change the code at lesswrong.com over to the new design or not. It seems important to look into the dark and have an escape valve in case this is the wrong direction for LW. If the vote goes through, we’ll import the new LW activity since the previous import to the new servers, merging the two, and point the url to the new servers. If it doesn’t, we’ll likely turn LW into an archive.
Oliver Habryka will be posting shortly with his views on LW and more details on our plans for how LW 2.0 will further intellectual progress in the community.
I attempted to sign up using my LW 1.0 username and a newly generated password. I was told that an account already existed. I then said I'd forgotten my password and was told that a new one was being emailed to me. Some considerable time later, I have not received any such email. I do not believe any such email arrived and was binned as spam.
Is this a known problem? Is there any way to find out whether I did actually get sent a password-reset email, and if so whether it bounced?
[EDITED to add:] Nor did I receive any sort of password-reset email before doing the above.
I apologize!
I noticed a bug with your user account in particular in our logs, though I am not exactly sure what caused it. I fixed it now. Sorry for the inconvenience. Requesting another password reset email now should work well. And if anything else goes wrong, always feel free to ping us on Intercom in the bottom right corner, we are currently on high-alert and so are responding within 5 minutes (and usually respond within the half hour)