xax

I'd say there was an, um, interruption of service, but that AFFN should hopefully be back on its feet soon. The most prolific posters are no longer posting, so that's probably the cause of the lull, at least.

Yeah, it should be showing up-- there was a change to the code to prevent people from using javascript to steal people's login cookies (among other issues), and one of the side-effects was that it stripped out all the style data for your story. We've got a final update that should fix the lingering side-effects (your case is kind of unusual because most people use tags without any styling, which is why it was the last issue we noticed), so within a day or two your formatting should show up again if it's not already. I'm sorry this has been such a tangle to resolve, and thank you for your patience!

Okay. okay. Evidently the fix was applied to the test site but not the actual real archive site. gg us, we are so competent. The patches for both the various backslash errors and for the original error cu-kid9 reported (missing HTML tags) are up on the live site now. Hopefully, this should be the last time this ever happens. If you were experiencing textual glitches such as backslashed quotes or random > characters in place of formatting tags, they should be gone now. If you do see any errors like that on the site, please contact me or manta2g so we can get them fixed (again).

Yeah, basically what it says up there. Ratings show up again (finally) Stories with new chapters will go to the top of the list, stories that have just been edited will not move Also, there is a slight formatting change-- update/publish dates now display as "December 15th, 2005" instead of "2005-12-15". There are also a few minor tweaks you probably don't care about. These changes will show on the main site after the Wednesday night backup. If you notice any weirdness on the latests page (or really, anywhere on the site), please note me and I'll try to get it worked out.

Oh, this is not going to end well. Time for closing words. Jaxxy is the one making the top-level decisions-- the overarching stuff, but regarding the site and the forums the mods have a fair amount of personal discretion, which sometimes doesn't help things. If you've got a concern you don't think Jaxxy would take seriously (or whatever), you can always try contacting another moderator, although there are limitations to what we can do. There are times when I would just like to sit back and cry out "But what about the porn?!" But now I'm a mod so I actually have to do stuff. Seriously, seriously I am going to try and polish the site up to make everyone's pornmongering as easy and enjoyable as possible. Generally speaking people don't like their noses rubbed in the fact that ultimately every web site is a dictatorship. A good administrator accepts that there's more than ownership issues here-- the users owe it to the admins for the site's existance, but the admins also owe the users for the site's activity, and acting like it's a one-way street is a good way to alienate the userbase. A healthy online community tolerates a lot of dissent-- you can never please anyone, but what will displease a lot of users more than most anything else is the dissidents not being able to voice their opinions, however unpopular they may be. (excerpting from the next posts because they're long) I agree. Although, you do have other options open if you want to talk specifically to the other admins. Seconding this-- this has been a tumultous time and there has been CHANGE and all that, but oh my god fffff I would like more reasonable discourse and less yelling at other users. Or something. You were probably mentioned in EveKnight75's post because you have been one of the most vitriolic posters in this thread and, as Eve said, if snowfall is considering Ravenbell as a troll she ought to consider you one too considering your recent posts in this thread have been highly inflammatory. Your first few posts were perfectly fine, but it's not acceptable to attack anyone who expresses dislike for the current administration team any more than it's okay to attack the current administrators themselves. I think there's a fine line between being open with the users and adding to the current disarray, but I'm not quite sure where precisely that line is. Ultimately, Eve's post was mostly in response to Snowfall's and had little to do with her personal opinions about Jaxxy & the new admins-- I think both posts probably ought have been sent in private, but they weren't. Really, people, there are advantages to talking it over in private. Then again, there are also disadvantages. Which brings me to my closing remarks! This thread contains a lot of debate about the future of adult-fanfiction.org from a lot of people taking many different positions on the issue. It's got a lot of community value and I'd hate to see this thread vanish as the resignations thread did, but this is getting uncivil and I don't anticipate any more illuminating remarks, just a slowing crawl of increasingly antagonistic remarks. So it's my decision (along with DemonGoddess061 explicitly and EveKnight75 implicitly) that this thread should be locked. The state of the forum rules are kind of in flux right now, but we're not okay with public posts personally attacking others. Try to be civil, even when you really don't want to be. As usual, direct all complaints to the person you're complaining about.

Okay, so I've gotten confirmation from Manta that the \' issue has been fixed, so it should no longer be showing up in any stories. If you see any remaining slash-related weirdness, please note me or reply to this thread.

I'm thinking about it-- I've been meaning to write more for years now, and I've heard that writing daily does wonders for your desire to write. Still, 50,000 words... the longest story I've ever written so far was somewhere around 20k, and that petered out and died before it was even halfway done. I guess I'll know by tomorrow!

*cough* The fancy 'semantic' version of <b> is <strong>. cu-kid9: If your <i> tags are being turned into <em> tags there's probably some code wizardry going on at some point... I haven't gotten a chance to look at the submission & editing code yet, but this has gotten confusing enough for me to take a look soon to see if I can give a more conclusive answer. snowfall: Well, I assume most people upload their stories having already formatted it the way they like, so a rich-text editor (something like TinyMCE, I'm assuming) would only be useful for fixing corruption (as in missing-tags corruption-- as I said above, the \' stuff should vanish altogether once it's fixed in the code). I'd like to stop the corruption altogether, both whatever this tags thing is (if it is a bug after all) and the stuttering thing. But then again, as a programmer and web designer I tend to underestimate how easy HTML is to pick up, so maybe a text formatter would be a good idea. At any rate, it'd be a seperate concern, because I don't think it's fair to have the users fix the techs' mistakes.

I'm pretty much a forum newbie and I don't post much (I had an account here back in... early 2006? but I never posted so it got wiped) soooo I probably am not going to be much help in regards to keeping the forums talkative. I mostly stick to writing & programming, and avoid the Forum Games forum like the plague. ...but hi!

I was wrong again (goooo me), the \' problem is still not fixed, but once it is fixed it should go away in all stories automatically, unless you've edited the chapter in question and not manually fixed it. I can't fix it myself (no direct access to the code), but I've informed Manta about it so it should be fixed within the next few days (she has RL stuff happening right now, so she's kind of busy). The AFFN code doesn't do anything special with encoded text, so if a story is uploaded with an uncommon encoding or if a story uses certain characters (high unicode, etc) it could potentially display weirdly. That'll go onto my to-fix list. That "two words merged together" bug Nana666 mentioned is the dreaded stuttering bug, and it's been around AFFN since the beginning. It's really annoying and basically my first priority (after fixing various security issues, that is) because it slowly makes everything unreadable. And e xample of the bug in action would be something like the sentence "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" being changed into "Lorem ipslor slor sit amet". Still no clue about the missing italics, sorry.

I also post my fics on other sites (LJ, FA, y!gallery, etc) and my own website-- I don't see much point to remaining devoted to one archive over others and I keep 'master copies' of all my stories on hand so I don't have to reformat them-- but these days pretty much all of my hits come from AFFN.

I think I'd be disappointed if there wasn't fanfiction written about my original works, but maybe I'm just kind of egotistical that way. I probably wouldn't want to read any of it, though. I'd say ultimately the highest praise you can get when you create something is to have other people want to add on to or rewrite it.

Oh, the \' and \" thing was totally my fault. Sorry about that D:. I rewrote one of the cleaner functions before looking at the rest of the program flow and etc etc etc, yeah. My fault. Sorry! I noticed it a few days ago, but I don't have direct access to the site's code yet, so I couldn't fix it. However, it seems to be fixed now, likely because Manta saw & fixed it. It would have appeared on pretty much every story, and now that it's fix, it shouldn't be showing up anywhere. (But please contact me if you see it anywhere!) Regarding italics & centering: The only thing I know that could do something like that would be one of the outstanding bugs that's been around forever, the dreaded stuttering bug. If you could link me to a story where it's happened, I could probably take a closer look and see what's causing it.

Let's see... you picked this avatar, right?: It looks like there's just a weird bug in the avatar display code-- I should be able to fix that pretty quickly (although, uh, it'll still probably been about a week before it really fixes, because the other tech is away for a bit). About more avatar choices, all you have to do to get more is make some and send them to us to add to the site, although we might change that system in the future to make it more streamlined for everyone involved.

You can redeem your Naught Points for wonderful prizes! or something. Mostly flashy gimmicks, like foeofthelance said. Specifically, anything in the IBStore, most of which change your title or icon.

Regarding messages not sending: the PM limit here is seriously 10 messages, including copies of your sent messages in 'sent mail', and I have no clue if you can continue to send messages once your inbox is full. If your messages aren't sending, AFAIK the only two issues I know of are 'sending to a banned member' or 'mailbox of reciever (and maybe sender) is full'. Regarding other people reading your messages: I have no clue if there's some admin-only board feature for messing with other people's PMs (if there is, I don't have access to it), but it's certainly possible to read (and maybe remove) them if you have direct access to the databases & some knowledge of SQL.

If I recall correctly, this has been brought up before but not really answered specifically yet. The latests page formerly sorted by last edited, so when you'd add a new chapter or edit your story your story would be sent to the top of the latests page. Evidently some people figured that out and started pointlessly editing their stories every few days to keep it on the first page and thus get more hits. There was a code patch to change that and I haven't seen its inner workings yet, but I think it's along the lines of, like, "when you post a new chapter, your story should move to be somewhere within all of today's updates (but not at the top of the list); when you edit a story it doesn't move" but like I said, I'm not totally sure that how it works. Anyway, it's on my to-fix list, so hopefully the latests page will be acting a bit more intuitively soon.

Wonder Twin powers, activate! Form of... a merged thread! I heard about this right when it broke and I'm still of mixed feelings regarding it. (do HP 6 spoilers still count? I guess): SPOILER :Dumbledore ends up dead and alone after falling in love with someone evil, and pretty much everyone else in the series ends up in committed monogamous relationships. On the other hand, gay!

Yeah, the second I heard of the new "only logged-in users can post reviews" rule I went to my user panel and checked the "let anonymous users review" box. But not everyone did that, and since it defaulted to not allowing anonymous reviews, there are a lot of fics there that do require an account to review.

As far as I know, it should be easy to make it so only accounts with stories posted show up on the 'member directory' list on the main site (well, maybe. it depends on how the seperate archives are set up, etc etc) by just adding, like 'WHERE COUNT({stories posted}) > 0' to the user query. Well, in practice it'd be more complex than that, but. I don't think there's a technical hurdle to listing only users with stories posted vs. reviewing/defunct accounts.

Re: Fujin, if I recall correctly she spoke in single kanji in the Japanese version, and, uh, the translation didn't carry that kind of language-specific nuance over. The main characters in FF8 generally act like realistic teenagers, which makes them (to me) pretty unlikable. I'm a big fan of Raijin, though. I'd like to see more stories where he's not, like, a big evil rapist.

I just posted a test with some of the tags listed here (among others). the result: <h1> through <h4> (various types of headers) ALLOWED <h5> and <h6> NOT ALLOWED <p> (paragraph) and <br> (line break) ALLOWED (duh) <b> & <strong> (bolding) ALLOWED <i> & <em> (italics) ALLOWED <pre> (monospace 'preformatted' text) ALLOWED <tt> (monospace teletype text) NOT ALLOWED <center> (centers text) ALLOWED <big> & <small> (change font size) NOT ALLOWED <font> ALLOWED <ol> & <ul> & <li> (ordered list, unordered list, list element) ALLOWED <dl> & <dt> & <dd> (definition list elements) NOT ALLOWED <blockquote> (for large quotations) ALLOWED <a> (anchor tag-- for links) NOT ALLOWED <del> ('deleted' or struck out text) ALLOWED <s> (struck out text) NOT ALLOWED <ins> (newly inserted text) NOT ALLOWED <table> & <tr> & <th> & <td> (various table tags) NOT ALLOWED and I also noticed more security stuff to note the admins about. D: But yeah, those are the various allowed and unallowed HTML tags as far as I've been able to see.

As far as I know from what I've posted, the only allowed tags in stories are <p> (for paragraphs), <br> (for line breaks), <b> or <strong> (both bold text), and <i> or <em> (both italicize text). There's also the <u> tag for underlining text, but I've never had need to use that so I don't know if it actually works. I think there used to be a list of acceptable HTML tags in the resources section, but since those have all disappeared I don't think there's authorative list anywhere right now.

I'm not an admin, so this might not be totally correct, but I think the "no excessive editing" rule was there as a stopgap until the admins changed the site setup so editing a fic didn't place it at the top of the 'most recent' list, because some people would repeatedly 'edit' their fics without chainging anything so they would constantly be at the top of the list and thus get more hits. Basically, you should be fine now, but if you want make sure try to time your edits so they take up less than an hour of time and don't, like, edit to update a chapter once every day for a week.

I'm not a mod, so this answer probably won't be correct in all (or maybe any) respects, but I think your problem might be due to an issue with the way OpenOffice & Word convert documents to HTML. I know when I tested out exporting a text document as html in Abiword, it added all sorts of gross 'dir="ltr" style="text-align:left"' stuff to all my paragraphs. AFFN might be choking on some weird export elements or properties like that, although that doesn't explain why it does let you add chapters after a few tries. I always use the "upload in text field" option when adding a new chapter, so I can be sure just what markup is there, but that generally means you have to add all your paragrahs tags & italics & whatnot by hand, which... is not the most fun. I can only suggest opening up those html documents and checking to see if they've got a lot of html gibberish-- you should really only be seeing <p>, <i>/<em>, and <b>/<strong> tags for most fics. But I could also be totally off my mark, so keep that in mind too, I guess. I hope this will be of some help! [EDIT:] oh yeah, and you also probably want to remove all the starting HTML from the document as well... Everything from the start of the file (which, depending on what kind of export it is, could be an <?xml> tag, a <!DOCTYPE> tag, or a plain <html> tag) to the <body> tag, and then the closing </body> and </html> tags at the end.