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Greetings to the Populace of Ansteorra from your Kingdom Webminister, Hersirkona kolfinna inn kyrra Otarsdottir!

Many of you may have seen posts, comments, emails, or chatter related to our Kingdom Websites and Discussion Lists in the last week or so. I bring to you word of what’s going on and what happens next.

tl;dr: Website storage was full; Webministers across the Kingdom are amazing and responded fast; storage is good now; no disruption of service. Mailing lists aren’t working right now; we have a plan to migrate and restore function to the Kingdom; More updates soon.

Website Storage

Act I – The Context

The Kingdom of Ansteorra hosts our WordPress site through SiteGround as a multi-site instance. This means we own the Ansteorra.org domain and we can create an unlimited number of subdomains for it — these subdomains are what you know and love as our websites! That multi-site hosting allows us space to store media, images, etc on all of our sites. However, that storage space is 1) shared across the domain and subdomains, and 2) it is limited.

On July 23rd, 2026 — we reached our storage capacity. Our storage provider gave us 5 days to reduce our storage consumption or risk disruption of service across any/all of our sites.

I want to be very clear that the Kingdom reaching storage capacity is not the fault of any one individual. The things that eat up the most storage are images and PDFs. The same way we each accumulate old files on our phones or personal computers, we inevitably accumulate old files in our websites. Sometimes you have to do a review and get rid of old files, and that’s what had to do here.

Act II – The Response

Because of the 5 day deadline from our hosting provider, I needed to free up space, fast. I started reviewing our Kingdom-level sites and sent an urgent request to Webministers across Ansteorra asking them to do the same within 2 days — if they see old or unused images/files, delete them and if they have PDFs/docs/images that they need to keep, upload a copy to Google Drive and then remove the file from the Media Library.

We have a LOT more storage space in Google Drive than in WordPress, and we can use our Drives to link and embed PDFs, images, Sheets, Docs, and more on our webpages without using up any of our WordPress storage. Moving files to Google Drive frees up space on our sites AND lets us keep the files we still want to display.

I am very happy to report that when I checked our current storage use for our WordPress hosting this afternoon — we have dropped from 102% usage to 14%!! That. Is. Incredible!

I would like to thank and commend every one of you who took such quick action to move your media files and pdfs away from WordPress and into Google Drive. You have literally saved the Kingdom sites from a disruption of service.

Act III – The Future

We need to continue to balance the limitations of our website storage against the very real need to keep our websites visually engaging and informative.

To keep us from slowly eating up our storage space for our websites, I’ve asked our Webministers across the Kingdom to please continue to move any PDFs and unused/old images out of the WordPress Media Library and prioritize storing them in Google Drive.

To keep our sites engaging and pretty, I’ve directed our Webministers to start using more features like WordPress Advanced iframe Blocks and the Embed from URL options to embed graphics, Docs, Sheets, PDFs, and more. If you or your Webminister wants help embedding cool graphics or docs on your site, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me!

I’ll be reviewing our Webminister training and Handbook to see how best to update our training and guidance. I think there are easy ways for me at the Kingdom level to do better about periodically reviewing storage usage, and ways to improve how our training covers this. If you’re in the Department, look for updates from me about that sometime soon.

Discussion Lists

Our mailing list hosting provider Dreamhost is sunsetting support for Discussion Lists. Their initial announcement and notifications said that they would start by not supporting new lists and wouldn’t impact existing ones right away. But, in the last week it has become clear that they have now also disabled support for even existing discussion lists.

This is why folks across the Kingdom are seeing error messages saying that “No such list…” exists.

From the admin side of Dreamhost, we can still access the lists, archives, and subscription info. That is really good! Our amazing Ansteorra Server Admin Emma de Fetherstan has already saved what we need to migrate and restore the lists under a different provider. She is already testing the process to migrate our Discussion Lists to our Google Workspace. The goal is to re-create our lists, repopulate subscriptions, and restore Discussion List for everyone.

While we sort out the details of migration, our Ansteorra, Group, Order, etc mailing lists will remain not working.

If you need to make announcements to the entire Kingdom, please make use of our Kingdom Facebook Page and Kingdom Discord server. OR, if you want to make publicly-visible announcements like this one, reach out to me and I can help get your info posted to our Kingdom website.

When we do get them up again, there will likely be changes to the interface, how you subscribe, etc. Look for updates from me soon with more details on that. I will let the Kingdom know when Discussion Lists become available again!

Ever in service,
Hersirkona kolfinna inn kyrra Otarsdottir, OP
Ansteorra Kingdom Webminister
kingdom@webminister.ansteorra.org

July 2026 Ansteorra Virtual Round Table happens on July 18th!

Saturday, July 18, 2026 from 8am to 5pm!

This event will be hosted virtually using Google Meetings.
The draft schedule is available online and we are looking for volunteers to be Hosts for our various meeting rooms.

Round Table leads will help you log into host accounts and you’ll have support throughout the day of the event as well.
You can volunteer to host meetings you need to attend anyway!

Hosts will be responsible for

• joining your assigned meetings on time
• monitoring the room
• keeping an eye on chat and video and respond to disturbances (muting mics, kicking people if necessary, etc.)
• joining the host messenger group to stay up-to-date with day-of happenings

If you’re interested in helping our teachers and officers, please sign up! Complete instructions will be provided to volunteers via email.

https://ansteorra.org/round-table

In Service,

Hersirkona kolfinna in kyrra Otarsdottir, OP
Kingdom Webminister, Round Table Tech Lead
kingdom@webminister.ansteorra.org

Request for Your Commentary -> Proposed Changes to Principality and Kingdom Law

Their Stellar Majesties and Their Serene Highnesses seek commentary from the populace of Ansteorra on two proposed changes to Kingdom and Principality Law related to entrance requirements for the List at Coronet Tournament.

All commentary must be sent to trm@crown.ansteorra.org AND coronet@vindheim.ansteorra.org by Dec 11, 2024.

Change #1: Changes to Section 2, Subsection 1.A.1 and Subsection 1.A.2 of Kingdom Law

> Principality coronet list will be changed from happening in the months of June/December, to being held in the months of January/July.

Change #2: Addition of a criterion to section 4.2.4 of Principality Law
> Entrants must be affirmed to have at least one year experience on the workings of the principality and kingdom.  Acceptable experience is at the discretion of the Coronet.

All commentary must be sent to trm@crown.ansteorra.org AND coronet@vindheim.ansteorra.org by Dec 11, 2024.

Crown Tournament Format and Expectations

Greetings to our Stellar populace!

With much thought we have determined the following format for our Crown Tournament to be held on December 7, 2024.

We will begin with pools of round robin, single fight, and the number of pools will be determined by the number of entrants.  The top 8 individuals with the best win/loss records will advance to a single elimination bracket.  All rounds in the single elimination bracket will be a best 3 out of 5. Weapon style for all fights is bring your best, but no dagger.  Weapon style legality should be verified with the Kingdom Earl Marshal.

In order to enter our Crown Tournament we will require the following to be met as of the Wednesday before the Crown Tournament, December 4, 2024 at 11pm.

• Completion of the December 2024 Ansteorran Crown List Registration (only one of each pair needs to fill this out).
• The Society Corpora minimal requirements for entrance into Crown Tournament.
• Both fighter and consort must submit completion of the Winter Crown Tournament Entrance Quiz with a score of 70% or greater. Re-tests are allowed.
• Established residency in Ansteorra for at least 2 years.
• The fighter must have a valid authorization as a heavy fighter for a minimum of 2 years.
• Attended all of the following within the last 2 years as of the day of Crown Tournament:  Financial Policy Class, Seneschal Class, and at least 1 DEIB Class. (Note: These classes are available online.)
• Has read in its entirety Corpora and Kingdom Law within the last year.
• Be able to exhibit a good working knowledge of SCA structure, kingdom structure, the powers and responsibilities of the Crown, and other major kingdom offices as defined in Corpora and Kingdom Law.  
• A member of any bestowed peerage order who will speak for each member of the competing pair during presentation to the Crown during Crown Tournament procession.
• Be a member in good standing within the society and kingdom. 
• Be acceptable to the Crown. 
• Any member who has any current sanctions as of the day of Crown Tournament will not be allowed entrance into the list nor will they be allowed to have any impact on the list (marshaling, list table, etc.).

– Jean Paul and Gilyan, Rex et Regina Ansteorra