Updated Post...

A fix was released to the live-site today that resolved a number of issues identified by our founding user base. Mike provides a fairly complete list of the changes that would be visible to end users. Of the issues listed as top priorities in my post on bugs, all have now been fixed.

One of the issues present on both posts, the "Space Unavailable" problem, only affected a few users that signed up the day MSN Spaces went live. By the time we got the fix out today, we estimated the size of that group to only be a small fraction of a percent of our total user base. However, nearly all of us who began blogging the day we went live knew or had contact through our spaces with people desperately trying to hold on to "that cool space alias" as they waited for this problem to be resolved. Making matters worse, most of the people that ran into this problem were our diehard enthusiast. The ones who saw the press release the night of the December 2nd and jumped on the possibility of being the first.

A personal thank you to the users who lent us the patience to correct the problem. If you were one of those unlucky few please add a trackback to this post, linking the readers to your space. For everyone else, please visit these new spaces in the trackback list and give them a proper welcome to MSN Spaces and the blogging community.

A note for those with recovered spaces: Please take a moment and check out the following attributes of your space. It's unlikely, but these anomalies *may* exist as a side effect of your space's recovery.

1. Your space may be defaulted to "private". Please check (and if necessary change) your privacy settings if you wish to expose your content publicly or to your buddy list.

2. If when viewing your space in "author mode" (your logged in and see the settings and customize tabs in the upper right) you see any empty modules; ones with no title and no contents. Select the customize tab and remove all your lists modules (Book/Blog/Custom). If present, these will just be empty default list modules generated when you created your space. These would have never had any list entries in them, to begin with. Once you've removed them and saved you can just return to customize tab and add 1 to N more lists back. Now they should look normal.

3. When entering a blog post, ensure you have a list of defaulted categories. Try adding a new category, and try adding the category module to your space.

Looking at preliminary results, we may never see these problems in any of the recovered spaces. In the event that you do and the workarounds listed for #1 or #2, or you encounter #3, please feel free to leave me a comment on this post.

Thanks again.