Donor Update Letters

Letter 8 (2025-10-20)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment — donor letter 8
Mon, October 20, 2025

Contents of Letter #8:
1. Background
2. Version 5.2
3. Baha'i Library Offline
4. Updates to Inventory, Subjects, and Tags
5. Website archives
6. "Jonah Winters to-do" archive
7. Pilgrims notes
8. Internet attacks: DDoS and volume attack
9. New domain bahai-library-lists.org
10. Near-term updates
11. Versions 6 and long-term plans

Background:

Summary of Donor Letter #7, March 2025 (which was the first set of significant new features in many years).

• Citation export, bahai-library.com/ris. Our content can now be integrated with other databases using this common standard.

• Integration of bahaidata.org “Q” codes, allowing our tag cloud to be interoperable with the wiki network: bahai-library.com/Properties.

• Public can now add Tags and Chronology events

• Granular “advanced search”, bahai-library.com/advancedsearch

• Initial integration with the Inventory, bahai-library.com/inventory, allowing for a stable web link for every Tablet, e.g. the Persian Bayan bahai-library.com/inventory/BB00001, which can be cross-referenced with each Tablet’s Tag page, bahai-library.com/tags/Bayan-i-Farsi_(Persian_Bayan).

Version 5.2

By May 2025 Version 5 was 99% completed, following its 2024 beta, its 5.1 minor reversioning, and finding and fixing a few dozen bugs from the initial 5.0 code.

With the code for Tagging now mature and the infrastructure for the Inventory complete, it was time to add data. The summer was spent importing the entire Inventory database of 29,500 entries + its 661 Subjects + 1700 topics in the related Loom of Reality database + hundreds of new interlinked cross-references.

We also added over a hundred Word documents created by Mike Thomas — proofread, annotated, and sometimes updated versions of older documents, both of Writings and other published books — and in many cases were able to create new and better PDF versions.

By July our content was so greatly expanded that it warranted a new subversion, 5.2 (patch update 5.2.1 in October).

Our content becoming interoperable is a significant upgrade: we now have common-key codes both for exporting data (specifically RIS) and for automatically linking between websites (e.g. using bahaidata's Properties). We've long envisioned a goal of a central nexus for finding Baha'i material, a comprehensive starting point for search and research. This endpoint is coming into focus!

Baha'i Library Offline, versions 5.2 and 5.2.1

With the maturation of the code and the expansion of content, it was time to make a new version of the offline site. This is the version of BLO that can be downloaded, stored, and shared — all links and content are browsable locally on your computer with no need for an internet connection. This was updated in October with hundreds of new Tags and cross-links with the Inventory.

See bahai-library.com/blo_offline.

Updates to Inventory, Subjects, and Tags

Inventory updates are briefly described in the section above. We also (thanks to the tireless work of A. Bolhuis) created a network of tags correlating the Inventory with the Sacred Writings, Provisional Translations, and Tag Categories.

The broad Subject Categories created by Steven Phelps were also cross-referenced with our Tag cloud and then inter-linked with his "Loom of Reality" database.

These 661 Subjects, now lightly integrated with our 8,500 Tags and bahaidata's 7,000 'Q' codes, forms a vast but still-growing set of "web hooks" which can be used to inter-link disparate datasets, and allow users to browse topics across multiple websites.

We also went through the entire BLO catalog to add tags to a few thousand documents, and marked each and every item with either "has enough tags" or "needs more tags." The resulting list is bahai-library.com/tags/needs_tags. If you can help add Tags (a simple process of just reading documents and making note of the main topics) please contact us.

Because the Inventory tables are so large — pages like bahai-library.com/inventory/ALL or bahai-library.com/inventory/subjects/spiritual_transformation had up to 30,000 links in each single page — serving these from the database would have crashed the server as soon as we had more than 2 simultaneous users. So I've been running a series of "web crawls" to convert the large database-created pages to static HTML, redoing it once a month or so as more links are added. The bandwidth usage remains large, but there's minimal impact on the server's CPU.

I also crawled all the Abbreviations used in the database, such that pages like these can serve large amounts of data with minimal server drain: bahai-library.com/inventory/GWB (sources for Gleanings) or bahai-library.com/inventory/INBA (Iranian National Baha'i Archives).

Website archives

Inspired by the fact that we never archived kashkul.org [archive.org] (while it’s all in Wayback Machine, that’s not crawlable so we can’t easily restore its data), I spent a couple months running web crawls of most (non-institutional or corporate) Baha'i sites with unique historical or academic content.

The list is at bahai-library.com/website_archives.

A few of these sites have been processed to create a locally-browsable archive such that their pages can be directly added to the bahai-library.com filesystem (should they over go offline). These local versions have been password-protected to keep out of public view while the original sites remain online.

"Jonah Winters to-do" archive

As described in more detail in Bahá'í Library Online at 25, I started collecting academic and historical materials when I began academic study of the Faith around 1994. I was lucky enough to be on Talisman in its early days, when scholars were freely sharing their publications, draft papers, and various research materials. And when I started BLO in 1997, people began directly sending me their collections of work: published, unpublished, and sometimes raw data.

By 1998 I already had more material than I could process and I created an online folder called "The Bin", where I simply dropped everything I received. But this only stayed online for a few months, as it became apparent that much of the material in this Bin needed to be checked for quality, accuracy, copyright, and in some cases, even anti-Baha'i or anti-Administration content. So from 1999 until 2025 this archive remained locked away on my computer, un-sharable. I chipped away at this archive over the decades, especially when I was on plane flights and had a few hours offline when I could focus on sorting and comparing documents, but it was slow going.

By the 2020s there were at least 15,000 items in this "to do" folder: many duplicates, some not worth posting, some copyright. In late 2024 I made a concerted effort to "free" this material. After spending a couple months sorting for duplicates and removing scans of copyrighted books, the backlog was finally "clean" enough to share publicly. I created a "to-do / backlog" folder at archive.org/details/bahai-library-offline-files. This includes some complete data sets, like Don Calkins' huge life-long collection of biographical snippets and newspaper articles mentioning Baha'i figures, or a number of websites crawled in 2014, some of which have since gone offline but are not yet restored.

It is a great relief to have this content on archive.org — both my to-do backlog and the "Baha'i Library Offline" — because it eases any fear about passing prematurely without being able to share my data. I now periodically update the files in bahai-library-offline-files, including anything sent to me that's valuable but which I'm not able to process and post yet. If I should pass tomorrow and take my computers with me, nothing will be lost.

Pilgrims Notes, master list

We’ve been chipping away at this gradually for years, and am nearing the completion point of creating a Master List of Pilgrim's Notes.

I acquired a few sets of pilgrims notes collections over the past 30 years, as it’s the kind of thing Baha’is like to collect. They needed to be sorted for duplicates, corrected versions, formatted versions, original scans, etc.

The resulting table is at bahai-library.com/pilgrim_accounts_collection. This set was compared against what’s online now at bahai-library.com/Pilgrims and bahai-library.com/tags/pilgrims_notes. A team of three is now working on bahai-library.com/pilgrims-notes_us_archives_1898-1959, which will be compared against the first two sets linked above.

From an initial set of about 1,000 unsorted documents, I only have 12 pilgrims notes left to post. Some of these could be unique: not only never previously online, but also not known to the other collectors.

Internet attacks: DDoS and volumetric attacks

Unfortunately, in September we dealt with a bandwidth-hogging "volumetric" attack, then in October we had our first targeted DDoS attack.

The bandwidth volume issue was solved first by blocking the single offending IP — it could have been a web-crawling script gone rogue, or an individual without hacking skills attempting to take the Library offline.

Had this not been caught in time, all the sites on the server would have gone offline until the end of the month. I went through the logs to find a number of places to tune the HTML so that we wouldn't get hit so hard if it happens again. One culprit was the new page bahai-library.com/inventory/ALL* and many of the other text- and link-heavy Inventory pages, which I cut in half.

I also offloaded all large files, 100MB+ (mostly zip, some pdf and mp3 files), to archive.org. The only downside is that some were PDFs which now won’t be Google-indexed under our domain name, but most of these had optimized duplicate versions anyway, which remain local and hence indexed.

Resolving the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) issue was trickier. It was a direct attack on bahai-library.com and only on bahai-library.com, using a range of IPs from Singapore. As we got no ransomware emails, I presume it was from an individual or a nation-state opposed to the Faith.

My datacenter’s tech support was able to help by reconfiguring our firewall. For a week I closely watched the live server traffic to see which IPs to block, updated the firewall, and manually restarted the web-server repeatedly, sometimes every 10 minutes for hours. After a few days of that we’d gotten all their IPs, and then it was just another week of watching the server logs.

New listserver domain bahai-library-lists.org

Another datacenter surprise came in August: an email block on our mailing lists.

To introduce this topic, let me explain that we have two servers. My personal and commercial accounts are on a "virtual shared server" but BLO is on its own "virtual private server."

The shared server has the advantages of being cheap, and managed by tech support; its disadvantages are that it can be slow, and I have no control over its settings. This is the server which housed bahai-library-lists.com and all of our email lists, both the private ones for academics and historians and the public ones for general scholarly discussion.

The datacenter upgraded to a new operating system in August and, with no prior warning to account holders, imposed various anti-spam measures, one of which limits domains to 150 emails per hour. This meant that Tarikh (the current incarnation of the original Talisman), our most active list, began silently discarding emails; then, a later update automatically disabled all email sending for all lists once that limit was hit.

The simplest solution was to register a new domain and create a new account, which I did with bahai-library-lists.org.

While I could simply point the old domain to the new server, we would then lose the 2023-2025 archives. I can’t easily migrate Mailman, sadly; it is not like an easily-portable MySQL database, for technical reasons I won't explain here.

Of interest: part of why we keep registering new domains and creating new Mailman installations is so that no prior archives are lost when we move to new servers or new software. We still have the archives going back to 2003, back when the lists were using Lyris on the University of Buffalo network!

Near-term updates

In the remaining weeks of 2025, we will:

• Complete sorting the Pilgrims Notes collection;

• Import and organize the three websites currently holding material from Marian Lippitt's "Worlds of God" and correlate it with Steven Phelps' similar project Loom of Reality;

• Create a Master Database of Abbreviations (building upon bahai-library.com/abbreviations and bahai-library.com/phelps_bibliography_key_sources).

Version 6 and Long-term plans, 2026

With the codebase now so large and interconnected (the 5.2 code is roughly three times the size of 4.6 and the database has three times as many tables), I'm now considering a simpler refactoring of 5 rather than a wholesale rewrite. Given the extensive functions of the current code, it would be a prohibitively expensive job if we were to hire a developer.

By the time new bugs were fixed and all new functions working, it took about 19 months of largely full-time work to create 5 (including data and import for Tags, Inventory, and Q Properties). But its growth over that time was organic, with new functions tacked-on rather than being properly incorporated from day one.

Version 5 was coded in spring 2024 as an emergency stop-gap solution when our 2022-2023 redevelopment project failed and the site was just one month away from being taken offline permanently (the server and its OS were both past end-of-life). Its initial implementation prioritized speed over quality: its framework is not logical, its code full of duplication, and its admin interface inconsistent.

I propose to take the 500 pieces of code and functions that now comprise 5, lay them out on the table so to speak, create a flowchart of the stack (user interface → PHP → database → PHP → user), and re-organize everything coherently. At that time we can also redo the CSS for proper display on mobile. There were only two real reasons to consider a professionally-coded site — (1) maintenance without me, and (2) security — because:

1) My amateur code works, but wouldn't be scalable by someone else if I pass unexpectedly, due to its spaghetti nature.

2) I don't know how to write secure code.

But these are not important matters as long as I'm around. For security, I simply monitor Apache status and server processes to see which pages are vulnerable, watch for cross-site scripting, block IPs, make fixes as needed, and make regular backups.

A refactor of 5 (rather than a complete rewrite as 6) will partially resolve both issues without having to invest a likely 2 years and $20,000+ on a professional redevelopment; my messy codebase can be organized coherently (with extensive commenting), and I can better limit vulnerabilities. And, after doing this the last 19 months, I’m more familiar with PHP 8.

Letter 7 (2025-03-22)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment — donor letter 7
Sat, March 22, 2025

Dear friends,

Summary:

We can now begin inviting the public, including you receiving this email, to add data to the Library — starting with adding Tags and Chronology events. Email me if you’d like to help.

Background:

Version 5.09, December 2024, was essentially same as Version 4.5 but now fully refactored, with beta bugs fixed and all functions replaced (and a new Author and Tag system).

Version 5.1, March 2025, is the first set of significant new features.

Details:

This has been a goal since 2002: standardizing our content using some form of a “common standard”, and creating an interface for database interoperability. Now for the first time, bibliographers can integrate BLO content.

RIS records can be exported from any file, from any Collection (see bottom of any page), and from user-specified Advanced Search queries (example below).

2) Advanced search, bahai-library.com/advancedsearch — granular search has been a long-needed feature. Individual searches also provide a sharable web link. Here are some sample uses:

• Every Catalog item at the site can be sorted by title: bahai-library.com/advancedsearch/&srchtitle=isset&sort=title

• Reversing the order of that search shows all the titles in non-Latin characters: bahai-library.com/advancedsearch/&srchtitle=isset&sort=title&order=DESC

• Searches can be refined by date, journal title, language, publisher, etc. For example, here’s a search for any “pamphlet” by a “publishing trust” in the 20th century: bahai-library.com/advancedsearch/&srchdatekey=19&srchpubthiskey=trust&srchris=PAMP

• Or, for example, any article in French that’s either "published" or "unpublished": bahai-library.com/advancedsearch/&srchlg=French&srchcol=Articles&srchcol2=Articles-unpublished

• Searches can be saved as RIS by clicking the “Export RIS” button on the search page, so for example a writer could import into a paper any item published in the 2000s whose abstract mentions the keyword “physics”: bahai-library.com/advancedsearch/&srchdatekey=20&srchabstrkey=physics&sort=abstr

One advantage of this system is it allows for a single, stable web link for every Tablet, e.g. the Persian Bayan bahai-library.com/inventory/BB00001 , which can be cross-referenced with each Tablet’s Tag page, bahai-library.com/tags/Bayan-i-Farsi_(Persian_Bayan)

4) We have also begun incorporating the new site bahaidata.org, which is a central repository of links and data for use by the Baha’i wiki sites; see bahai-library.com/Properties.

For example, at the bottom of the above link bahai-library.com/tags/Bayan-i-Farsi_(Persian_Bayan) see the number “Q1002” and "Links to Bahá'í wikis.” We can, using this "webhook,” integrate our tag cloud with the wiki network.

5) User/admin interface — with a GUI in place now, we can invite people to join the site to add tags, add events to the Chronology, and upload files, either their own files or to help us get through our backlog of 14,000 items waiting to be checked or uploaded.

We especially need help uploading documents in Persian.

Please email jonahwinters@gmail.com if you’d like to join our team, and forward this invite to anyone you know who might be interested.

These are the last major upgrades planned, pending the hand-over to a future Version 6 team (who can hopefully recreate what I’ve coded, but with professional syntax).

Thank you,
-Jonah Winters,
on behalf of Twenty-seven Letters Foundation

Letter 6 (2025-01-14)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment — donor letter 6
Tue, January 14, 2025

Dear friends,

1) The remainder of autumn 2024, since our last email, was spent updating the Library with new content, expanding the Tags cloud, and fixing a number of bugs and patching holes, by the end of December completing Version 5.09 (bug fixes).

More details are at bahai-library.com/version_5

2) As a culminating task, we made a new (and improved) version of Baha’i Library Offline, which can now be downloaded via bahai-library.com/blo_offline (BitTorrent can be fastest).

Please download that, plus bahai-library.com/blo_database , to ensure we have multiple backup copies around the world.

3) The first new feature, hence Version 5.1, is the long-requested Advanced Search function: bahai-library.com/advancedsearch

The next features in progress are citation export, and creating user-specific functions to share editing and data input.

These are the last two upgrades planned, pending the hand-over to a Version 6 team, to be created later in 2025.

Letter 5 (2024-09-30)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment — donor letter 5
Mon, September 30, 2024

Dear friends,

Version 5 of Baha'i Library online is done! This email summarizes (1) completed updates, (2) upcoming changes, and (3) two things we need help with.

1) Completed updates; site status

All functions of the previous website have now been restored, and it's working on mobile phones. The live site is back at the primary domain bahai-library.com, and the April 2024 archive has been removed.

This follows our longest stable release period — Version 4 had been in place for over 12 years! (Version one was 1997-2002; two 2003-2004; three 2005-2011; four 2012-2024.)

Features restored include: Chronologies and search interfaces; Date, Title, and Author search; Series; Languages; RSS; Site map; font size script; Google search; all admin functions; links updated.

New features include:

1. new Tag database, allowing for expanded and interlinked subject indexing, including multi-tag search for documents;

2. Authority Control: author data is now in its own table, and standardized. This allows for easier author searches, including of alternate spellings and maiden names, and a database of author metadata;

3. Baha'i Library Offline: a portable, downloadable archive designed for use without Internet, hosted by Archive.org and BitTorrent, at bahai-library.com/blo_offline ; the site can be recreated with this data in conjunction with the database export; and

4. new Permissions table, allowing for better copyright attributions.

2) To do

1. The primary task remaining is to build a User database and user-specific functions, to share editing access. Once this is done, we can begin crowd-sourcing data entry, which has been our goal for decades.

2. Export and interoperability: creating MARC functions for bibliographic export.

3. Now that all functions of the site have been restored and new features are now being added, the need for a professional refactoring is less pressing. Planning for Version 6 is on hold until next year.

3) Need help with

1. We'd like to distribute our backup and site-restore data as widely as possible. If you use BitTorrent and have 70GB free on your computer, please download the files via bahai-library.com/blo_offline. Email me if you have any questions about this process, jonahwinters@gmail.com

2. We need help adding tags. Tags form a "subject index" for the Library, which can be more useful than the search engine — tags show what topics are covered in a document, not merely which keywords appear in it. This is an easy job, but one that requires some understanding of Baha'i concepts and history. Using AI can greatly speed up the process of selecting relevant tags, but it still requires a human eye. Email me to help.

Letter 4 (2024-07-19)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment — donor letter 4
Fri, July 19, 2024

Dear friends,

It’s only been six weeks since the last letter, but things have come into better focus in that time.

This email describes (1) the current site and (2) future plans. These same details are at bahai-library.com/version_5 and bahai-library.com/version_6

1) Current site:

• After four months of thought and programming, we're closing the books on the decade-long planning for Version 5. Instead, we are considering the interim codebase at bahai-library.org as being "5.0 beta", and are starting planning afresh with Version 6.

We have only another few weeks of refining the 5 code before it will be mature enough to move to the “production” site at bahai-library.com , replacing April's HTML archive.
• The last steps are (a) recreating a proper page layout for the documents and (b) setting up a new Author database (for "authority control").

• The Tagging system continues to expand and improve, and the RSS feed has been re-enabled.

• We completed the data migration started in 2003; only a few dozen items remained out of that initial 2,500 that were copy-and-pasted from HTML to MySQL twenty-one years ago. (We only did not migrate the HTML files in /writings/, as that directory consists of many thousands of small files and interlinks, which can't be easily recreated in the database.)

2) Future site:

• Likely around September, we will begin Version 6. But we have decided to go the opposite direction that we took in 2021-2023. Rather than attempt to create initial infrastructure for a feature-rich framework-driven site using AWS or a PHP framework/suite, which invites complexity, we will instead hand-code the simplest minimal MySQL-to-HTML interface possible.

  This is the same approach used for Versions 2, 3, 4, and 5. It’s worked, it’s fast, and it’s relatively inexpensive and easy.

• We will hire a PHP developer to recreate my own code, but with professional syntax. This will become Version 6, and hopefully ready in early 2025.

• We will contract for a specific, defined job that I and the Board can oversee. This will avoid the kind of large codebase that failed in 2023, and will avoid paying a developer the $10,000+ it would take to implement and customize a set of existing frameworks.

• I expect that with just a couple dozen hours of work a developer can create the basic functions we need, which I can then copy and expand on at my leisure.

Letter 3 (2024-06-03)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment — donor letter 3
Mon, June 3, 2024

Dear friends,

With appreciation, thank you for your support for the Baha’i Library Online and its ongoing redevelopment project.

Plans were delayed for a bit, but we've remained in constant progress behind-the-scenes, and have just started a new phase.

Some details are at bahai-library.com/version_5. Here’s a summary.

As mentioned in the last email, we’re now a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit group “Twenty-seven Letters Foundation, Inc.” We have a dedicated bank account, and as of February we now also have tax-exempt status.

Our transition to the cloud on AWS ended up not working at this time.

Instead, we have just moved to a new Virtual Private Server and are redeveloping the site using the same software stack it’s been running since 2003: PHP and MySQL on a private server. This is for the best, as PHP continues to be a viable solution for our website's needs, and easier to build than a cloud implementation.

For now and until the new PHP coding is completed, the website bahai-library.com is a static archive, in plain HTML, showing the last incarnation of Version 4.5. It has also been freshly archived in Wayback Machine.

We just completed the move to a new server and created an interim interface using the domain bahai-library.org . This will remain the “live” site, with updates and recent content, until we create a new version.

We have begun interviewing coders; if you know someone with experience in PHP, please send me their name.

Letter 2 (2024-01-20)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment project — second donor letter
Sat, January 20, 2024

Dear friends,

You are receiving this email because you have donated to the Baha’i Library Online redevelopment fund, or otherwise expressed interest in the project.

This is a brief update. At the end are some links from our first letter. We will send an email with tech-related updates next month.

• The site reprogramming/migration is once again underway!

• We are now a registered non-profit organization in the state of New York under the name “Twenty-seven Letters Foundation, Inc.,” and have a new website at www.27-letters.org .

• The foundation's board is comprised of: Jonah Winters, president; J. Michael Kafes, secretary; Alexander Meinhard, treasurer.

• We have a new bank account at Chase in Buffalo NY for “Twenty-seven Letters Foundation, Inc." and can now accept donations. Checks can be mailed to the following address:

Twenty-seven Letters
c/o Jonah Winters
12 Tasker Street
St. Catharines, ON, L2R 3Z8
Canada

(note: postage from the US to Canada is currently $1.60)

• If anyone should require it, we can provide our US mailing address, too.

• We can also provide ACH and Swift routing numbers for this Chase account.

• We have an IRS "Employer Identification Number” and will, soon this year, be able to issue tax receipts.

Thank you,
- Alexander, Jonah, and Michael

Letter 1 (2023-09-21)

Baha'i Library Online redevelopment project — first donor letter
Thu, September 21, 2023

You are receiving this email because you donated to the Baha’i Library Online redevelopment fund earlier this year, or otherwise expressed interest in the project.

We do not yet have any groundbreaking news, but progress has been steady (if slow). When the registration for our 501(c)(3) non-profit registration has been completed, we will email you again with more information.

This is a short email to let you know that work on the project has been steady throughout 2023, and your donation was very needed and appreciated.

• In March we reached our initial goal of US$10,000, which allowed our lead programmer to complete the data migration and “normalisation." We then raised a further $2,500 to fund the development of an API, which was largely completed in April.

• We are in the process of registering a non-profit with the state of New York. We submitted this application in May, but bureaucracy moves slow. They're processing it now.

• The initial migrated site (data only, no CMS or populated backend) is bahai-library-online.s3.eu-north-1.amazonaws.com [archive.org]. This snapshot is from February; we’ll be updating it this fall, and doing the final changeover hopefully in January.

• For those interested, some code and initial documentation is at github.com/BahaiLibraryOnline/bahai-library-online-serverless

• We have a new Facebook page at www.facebook.com/bahai.library.online

• We have a new Patreon account at www.patreon.com/bahai_library_online

• We migrated the email lists to a new domain, bahai-library-lists.com.

• Two videos, in which our programmer summarizes the migration and architecture, are at 27-letters.org/migration. These are informal and without context, but gives some idea of the shape of the project.

• Next steps: after we have the 501(c)(3) in place: completing migration of the backend functions, then creating a new front-end, and then adding features.

Thank you,
-Jonah