xax

Okay, I've sent you an email.

In the interest of saving you so much hassle, DemonGoddess, I do feel obligated to say that it should be possible to automate the conversion process -- IIRC, the old "auto-formatting" system just checked for the presence of certain formatting HTML tags (br and p) and if there weren't any it would call nl2br or one of those PHP formatting functions to make the story text look right. It would be simple enough to write a script that would page through all the stories before a certain date, do that same formatting check, and then if it applied do the auto-formatting and update the story with the new text, so that it's saved in the database with <br> tags instead of newlines. The only downside to this is that all those <br> tags would show up if the author tried editing the story in the future, but it sounds like that's effectively what would happen the way you're doing it too, only with <p> tags? A more fancy auto-formatting routine would be able to wrap all text in <p> tags too, I think, so even that shouldn't be a huge issue. I just weep to think of you spending months and months patching up a huge quantity of old database entries when a script could do it all in an hour or two.

Well this is an unexpected surprise. Welcome back, Apollo!

Oh, that sucks. But it's good to hear you're on top of things! Well wishes to all of you helping keep the site up and running. If there's anything I can do to help or anything like that, just let me know.

There is still a 'Challenge' content code in the list when a story is submitted, which might lead people to believe that they are allowed on the archive.

I vote IRC channel.

Just putting my two cents in here as site tech: There's not any technical reason to remove the */OMC or */OFC categories. Like the quote in Jaxxy's email says: (I am assuming that's DemonGoddess061 speaking there, as she is the one doing all the reorganization) On the one hand, yeah, I can see how those categories don't fit in with the rest of the canon character pairings because it's very broad, but on the other hand it does appear that the userbase enjoyed having those categories and there are already a whole ton of Harry Potter pairing subcategories-- I don't think adding a few more would make that much of a difference. I'd suggest adding categories like "Snape/other female character" for any canon character who has many pairings with either minor characters or fan characters.

As far as I know, they just keep track of your post count-- you get more and more as you post more. I think they're new (or new-ish) since the forum software was upgraded.

Well, on the system settings page there is a setting called 'Reset Player Stats for players that Opt out of ibProBattle' (and it's turned on), so that might be the reason for people's NP reserves being zeroed out. p.s. This battle RPG thing is... interesting. I'm trying to limit myself to only attacking other moderators.

I've been able to successfully post chapters with around 10k words. I know the database can handle far longer chapters than that-- it should be able to accept 50k word chapters, even, although I don't know if the server has been ever tested to that degree. Most likely, it's an error with the text sanitization code. Check in your author panel (edit the chapter in question) to see if the chapter is still 'broken' at the same point it is when you view it on the site. If it isn't, please post the area where it breaks here. If it is, uh, post here and I'll think about it more. The only other think I can think of offhand that could cause a problem like that is if you're using a slow (like dial-up) or high-latency (like satellite) internet connection, and the data transfer is timing out or being aborted midway through. oh yeah, p.s. Knorg: I don't think there are any rules about minimum length, although personally I think if you're posting, say, 15 100-word drabbles you should probably group them together if you can. But I don't think mods are going to step in and force you to do so.

Evidently when the archives were split up, it was decided to only show the archives that held story content-- I think the Resources archive is the only one so excluded from the listings. The Resources archive has more-or-less been totally replaced by the Author Resources forums and there might be plans to totally remove that archive in the future, but I'll talk to Manta2g and see what can be done about listing your resources posts on your user page.

Ooh, ooh, I can be all authoritative about this! Adding more subcategories is totally possible-- there's actually code in the testing area that allows infinite subcategories right now. However, unless there's a mass outcry from the users, we're planning on upgrading the search function and adding some sort of sorting/tagging ability (probably based on better Story Codes) so you can filter in on stories you're interested in reading, instead of adding deeper subcategories. Part of the reason for that is to reduce redundancy-- for example, let's say you're looking for a good femslash romance in any category. If we add more subcategories, you'd have to check down in the Yuri/Femslash -> Romance subcategory for each major category. If we make a better search engine & categorizing schematic, you could just select "Romance" and "Yuri/Femslash" and get all the results over all the categories.

I fully support a person's freedom of (and freedom from) religion, and I think any government shouldn't do anything supporting or opposing any religion. And hopefully this won't spark a giant flamewar, but... uh, evolution isn't theology. It's science.

Current plans are to replace all the date/time displays with a more readable date-- that "2008-01-05 23:08:03" example of yours would instead read as "January 5th, 2008". We're undecided about listing hour:minute:second of the update, but if the authors want to see that then we'll display it as well. The 00:00:00 problem is due to some remaining issues with the update process-- depending on the way you add chapters to your stories*, sometimes the site will note the hour:minute:second of the submission and sometimes it will not, which translates over to having an empty timestamp if it doesn't. I've fixed the problem, but the fix isn't live on the main site yet. But yes, soon we'll have better update code and time listings. * For the record, using the "Add chapter to this story ->" link at the bottom of any of your stories notes the full update time (and correct latests page position), whereas using the author panel "Add Chapter" link does not note the full update time.

The way story sorting works is that each story has the date and time it's been last updated stored, and when you look at a category you get an ordered list, based on that date, of the X most recently-updated stories. However, the way it used to work (and still does sometimes, sadly) is by storing the date but not the time of the update, which meant that every story updated on any day was tied with all other stories also updated on that day. When there's a tie, the sort order is more-or-less random, but the order only changes when there's an update to the table. Hence, your stories jump around each time someone updates their story. I can't immediately fix your problem due to administrative issues, but give me a week or so and I'll alter the timestamps on your stories to have them order correctly, always.