Above, you can see (and scroll across) a beautiful timeline of every interval between the 645Signpost issues, from2005-01-10 to today. Notice anything? Besides the tasteful graphic design, I mean.
Yes, that's right: this used to be a weekly rag! Not always – there was a102-day drought between February and June 2017 (and more recently a 63-day skip betweenApril andJune 2021). But the average interval over the whole period has been a little over ten days: with acouple ofexceptions, theSignpost maintained a weekly schedule until2016, when it switched to fortnightly publication. That lasted, more or less, until the"death knell" of 2018, when rumours of theSignpost's demise flourished; and it seemed to be in terminal decline, and we arrived at a sedate monthly schedule.
But things have been speeding up lately. We had a couple of thick issues in 2022 – so thick, in fact, that they broke thetubes and we had to frantically poke around in the source code of display templates designed to top out at 18 articles per issue. Take the"July" issue (published 1 August – yeesh!), with 22 articles in it. Not only is this too much for the templates, but we suspect it's a little much for the readers ... even for a Wikipedian somewalltexts are too high.
So anyway, we're going to take a shot at running the presses every two weeks, until we either run out of stuff to say (i.e. never), get bored of it, or become too employed to commit to a biweekly schedule (or is it semiweekly? It turns outnobody actually knows).
In other news, editor-in-chief JPxGfails to finish his sentences so gets them finished by his copyeditor is embarking on a deep odyssey into thedeepest recesses ofSignpost history to properly format old articles, fix broken templates, and remove random detritus accumulated over the course of 20 years of publication. So far this has involved oneBRFA,14 Python scripts, 19 years of updatedmodule metadata, 426 speedy deletions, and several thousand article reformatting edits. He claims he will have something to show for these efforts – by next issue, probably. In the meantime check out thesingle talk page for this issue!
Despite the rush to get this published, we have quite the full issue. Some regular columns don't appear, but not to worry: those columns are remaining monthly, so will appear every other issue. So, welcome to this[ NEW ERA| QUICKLY ABANDONED EXPERIMENT](delete as appropriate), from all of us at theSignpost!