Sorry about broken links after “disruptive” software upgrade to MSL Master website

On the surface, it may not look any different. But MSL Master website had just went through a massive software upgrade over the weekend. I was told that there were many benefits that this new upgrade would bring. However, an immediate problem is that the upgrade seemed to be able to rewrite old URLs, and my tech support guys couldn’t figure out why.

I admit that it is very very “disruptive”, a fitting term used so often in the technology community. And I’m very sorry about the problems that readers will likely to experience when browsing the website, a ton of “404” pages.

Technology has improved all our lives, and at the same time, has caused endless headaches.

I still remember the time when I got my first PC and I was able to use the telephone dialup to get on the internet. 

I was so excited. But headaches also started. I quickly got frustrated with those small pop up windows that informed me that, “something can not be opened”, “something is not responding”, “some error occurred”, and so on.

From that point onwards, there has always been some kind of technology related issues, despite all the updates, patches or bug fixes. 

Therefore, when my tech support informed me about the URL issue after the software upgrade, I couldn’t get upset with them. It seems to be that unforeseeable problems are a permanent feature of technological development. 

The only thing I can do is to apologise to anyone who relies on this website for information related to Chinese language and culture.

You’ll likely to experience the following pain:

• If you’ve bookmarked a page before, that bookmark will likely return a 404 page;
• If you’ve linked to one of the articles in MSL Master website to your own website, that link will likely become a broken link and return a 404 page;
• If you click a link in an article for further reading, that will likely return a 404 page.

I’m very sorry about all these problems. 

What you can do is to press the home button on the 404 page and navigate through the menus to get to the article.

Or if you are generous with your time and don’t mind waiting, please send me an email and tell me which article you’ve bookmarked, linked or would like to read, and I’ll send you the latest URL for that article.

Very sorry about this disruption!