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So, I've still been keeping up with my progress on the City '26 challenge, and I'll have a lot more to say about it in a couple of weeks when it's time for the first of the quarterly updates I promised about my 2026 resolutions. But in the meantime I wanted to discuss one question that's arisen in my mind as I've been working on the challenge. A question... of elves.

I'd said before that one of my reasons for choosing the city of Lüm was because I wanted to further flesh out the world of Curcalen, and that this could give me an impetus for doing so. And I think it has. There are still many questions to be resolved, but at least it's made me aware of them, even if I haven't resolved them yet. I don't know what form of currency is used in Djarvin (or anywhere else on Curcalen), or what language is spoken there (or anywhere else on Curcalen), or what calendar is used there (or anywhere else on Curcalen), and yeah, those are things I really ought to...

In a recent blog post when I analyzed how well I was doing so far with my New Year's resolutions for 2026, I said that I was adding two new resolutions, one of which, a worldbuilding challenge called City '26, I planned to make a place for on the Wongery site within the next week or two. Well, that place has now been made. My work on the City '26 challenge now has its own dedicated blog.

But before I get further into that, what is City '26? I did describe it very briefly in the first post linked above: it's a challenge where "participants create a fictional city over the course of the year, focusing on one area of the city each week, and adding a little information each day according to the prompts provided". Here's a graphic by Pete "Garblag" Lattimore, one of the creators of the challenge, that summarizes the whole thing:

You can also see more information about the challenge and its participants in...

For most of the first ten years of the Wongery's existence, the forum was getting constant spam posts. Dozens a day, from myriad users with gibberish usernames. The posts were held in moderation before being made public, so nobody but the Grandmaster Wongers ever saw them, but still, they were cluttering up the databases and made it hard for the Grandmaster Wongers to find the non-spam posts hidden among all the spam... or would have, were there any non-spam posts to be found, but it's the principle of the thing. So, in April 2023, I did what I should have done years before, and finally implemented some anti-spam measures, enabling a plugin that would require users to answer a question before registering. And it worked... apparently. Since I enabled that registration question, the forum hasn't been getting any more spam posts.

But it hasn't been getting any legitimate posts, either.

Okay, that's not entirely true. The forum has, in fact, received exactly five legitimate...