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November 6, 2016 Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive. The news posts are always posted to the forum as well, and one does need to register to talk with staff about the news post. Click the forum link! Software Upgrade Thank you to all of you for your patience through the process. We all appreciate it! The front end has a few more things to have done. Currently, manta2g is developing a new menu which will be mobile friendly/accessible. After that, she'll be working on selectable skins. Of course, the other bells and whistles you've all asked for as well, such as one click add to rec reading, currently reading, and etc. These are all on her to-do for that. PHP has been upgraded to version 5.6.x. ALL the software is compliant, up to version 7 of PHP. The forum has been updated to the latest version. The bug tracker is now here. The Black Diamonds from Hell This is a result of the character conversion, and the many, many character sets which lived in the database at the time. What happened was, where the character sets were not latin1, as they should have been, the conversion changed the character set to ANSI (Western, Windows-1252) instead of utf-8. The good part, is that means that the data was not lost, as I was expecting. The bad part is the damn diamonds. I’ve written up something to show you HOW to change your browser encoding so that the diamonds show as the punctuation that they are. In the meantime, we are going through each story manually, and finishing the character set conversion. This is time consuming, so please use the information at the above link. The only subdomain that is finished with the finalizing of the conversion is books. I’m currently working buffy, and the other gal is working in cartoon. Once I finish in buffy, I will move on to celeb, and so on. I will let you know as each subdomain is finished. Ad Blockers Our banners are embedded in the site skin. They do not pop up or under. As we use banners to pay the bulk of the site expenses, please consider whitelisting the site in your ad blocking software. We’d greatly appreciate it! Unlimited subcategory levels With this ability FINALLY in place, I’m starting to implement it. Where you see this, such as in the books subdomain, where I’ve already moved Anita Blake and Twilight back to their parent categories (where they should be, after all), an empty category will display the latest listing. Be sure to click the menu at the left to get to the story listings for the categories. Non posting categories are, by their nature, EMPTY. Manta2g has told me that she will make it so that the non posting categories will not display the listing where they are children of top level categories. This should make it less confusing. Reviewing We’ve made some big changes to the review process. The biggest one is removing the REQUIREMENT of inputting an email address to make an anonymous review. Now, you simply leave the review. Just remember to add your pen name where it’s asked for, so that the author knows who it is! While I’m on the subject of reviews, I’d just like to remind readers that the authors get paid nothing for what they do. I’m not saying leave a review to fluff ‘em. What I AM saying is that at least acknowledge you read what they wrote. Maybe it’s an old fashioned thing because I’m an older gal, but I feel if I’m going to take the time to READ something, I’ll take the extra minute or so it takes to acknowledge I read the chapter (or in some instances one shot). When I have more time to be more verbose, I am. BUT, even when I don’t HAVE a lot of time, I still at least say that “hey, I read it, and thank you for the update” or something along those lines. To the authors, a reminder that you can set or unset whether or not you receive anonymous reviews in the first place. Not all authors want anonymous reviews, which is why the option is left TO the author. The author is also able to set or unset whether or not to receive an email when a review is left. Story Tags One of the other things we do, as we go through each chapter, is to go through the story properties and remove the non-searchable characters from the tags. With the search made to where you can search with two or more characters, instead of four or more; this made it so you can search the tag field itself now. In order for it to work properly, this means that the ‘/’, ‘&’, ‘-’ and other characters like that that are not searchable have to be removed from the tags themselves. i.e. M/M becomes MM, M/F become MF, etc. Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales This is the forum where they all are listed. This is the current one. These are open ended, so if one set of words doesn't work for your muse, look at others! Funding Status As always, we appreciate and thank everyone who can donate. It's certainly not required of the users, but every little bit helps! I'm in the process of setting aside an emergency fund, equal to 3 times the monthly expenses. That will be noted on the donation page as well. Deletion notification For Accounts When deleting an account because the user is underage, a plagiarist, or whatever else would be a reason to delete one entirely, we do NOT send a notification. For Stories When deleting stories, this is done for non compliance with the ToS. Stories are HIDDEN long before they are deleted. The user is told there is an issue, and given 7 days to comply before the story is hidden. Upon hiding, the story is left for 30 or more days (it ends up being more when I have a heavy work load IRL) before it is deleted. If the issue is CORRECTED, the story is restored to public view. Disposable email Disposable emails are not checked, and we don’t allow registration with them. Upon finding an account registered with a disposable email address, it is deleted. Broken resource links Thank you to the users who thwacked me with the information that they weren’t working. I feel terrible, I should have looked when the forum had its last big upgrade. I saw the change in path, and it just didn’t occur to me to check the linkage in the site pages. Sorry about that, but it’s now fixed. Email address visibility By default, the email address is hidden when you register. It will only display if you put it in the bio area of your profile. Tech Bits Archive Cleanup Now, because of the new tools that I (and other staff who do this with me) have at our disposal, this should proceed at a much faster pace. For example, I fixed a 52 chapter story with errors from the old crash in 4 ½ hours last week. That same story, fixing it the way I had to before, would’ve taken me roughly 40 hours to get the exact same results. The new tools make it so I cut out several steps in the process, as I no longer have to do this all directly in the database itself. It also means that the people who help me with clean up, can help me with this part as well, not just finding the issues and giving them to me, which is what we did before. Something which I do want to stress with you all, is that I completely agree with what was said during the restoral after the big crash in 2005. It’s really not the responsibility of the users to fix all this. It’s the SITE’S responsibility. This is why I don’t insist that people fix it themselves. Does it help to have users do this to? Sure it does! But, I don’t expect it, as it’s the responsibility of the site. Tech support, directions given Just to reiterate, when I email out step by DIRECTIONS on how to do something, that is exactly what they are. Not suggestions, but directions. If followed as stepped out, it works very well. This means that the user must follow them in the order the steps are given. Please remember that the authors you read do like to hear from you! Leave them a review or two, and let them know how they're doing! DemonGoddess061 P.S. On a PERSONAL note! My team won the World Series! I’ve been waiting my entire LIFE for this!!!!! Okay, I’m done spazzing about it for ya. - DG

October 2, 2016 Firstly, I'd like to welcome all the new users we're seeing daily! Glad to have you here! Please do familiarize yourself with the Terms of Service and Content Guidelines. This IS a moderated archive. The news posts are always posted to the forum as well, and one does need to register to talk with staff about the news post. Click the forum link! Software Upgrade Thank you to all of you for your patience through the process. We all appreciate it! The front end has a few more things to have done. Currently, manta2g is developing a new menu which will be mobile friendly/accessible. After that, she'll be working on selectable skins. Of course, the other bells and whistles you've all asked for as well, such as one click add to rec reading, currently reading, and etc. These are all on her to-do for that. PHP has been upgraded to version 5.6.x. ALL the software is compliant, up to version 7 of PHP. The forum has been updated to the latest version. The bug tracker is now here. Site Outage of September 15 BIG thank you to the techs at Nexcess, particularly Ryan and Chris! They found the intruder who attempted to DDoS us, and blocked them. Thing is, when the service provider does the blocking, you can bet they have many more tools than I do, to make it STICK. One thing this did, was uncovered where we needed to tighten security in the code even further. That has been done as well. Manta2g took care of that the same day. I do apologize for not getting it fixed sooner than 8 hours after all this started, but I was at work through most of it, with no computer access. Ad Blockers Our banners are embedded in the site skin. They do not pop up or under. As we use banners to pay the bulk of the site expenses, please consider whitelisting the site in your ad blocking software. We’d greatly appreciate it! The art is great! The Comics chapter table Restoration of the corrupted data is finished. Unlimited subcategory levels With this ability FINALLY in place, I’m starting to implement it. Where you see this, such as in the books subdomain, where I’ve already moved Anita Blake and Twilight back to their parent categories (where they should be, after all), an empty category will display the latest listing. Be sure to click the menu at the left to get to the story listings for the categories. Non posting categories are, by their nature, EMPTY. Oddball characters in place of punctuation This happened as a direct result of there being entirely too many character sets within each table. As I’ve said before, I stopped counting after I hit 12 or so that I found. I found many more after that. What happened, is that when I ran the conversion to utf8, where it was not a normal characters set which the query series expected, it converted the text instead to ANSI (Windows-1252). This is important, to know what it converted to, so you can do the temporary fix while I go through each and every individual chapter throughout the archive. In your browser, set the text encoding to Windows-1252. This option should be in any browser’s “tools” setting. Except for Edge. I can’t find it in Edge. Urrgh. Once I have finished the edits to finalize the character set conversion for the affected chapters, this is something you’ll no longer need to do. I will let you know progress on where this is finalized. Reviewing We’ve made some big changes to the review process. The biggest one is removing the REQUIREMENT of inputting an email address to make an anonymous review. Now, you simply leave the review. Just remember to add your pen name where it’s asked for, so that the author knows who it is! While I’m on the subject of reviews, I’d just like to remind readers that the authors get paid nothing for what they do. I’m not saying leave a review to fluff ‘em. What I AM saying is that at least acknowledge you read what they wrote. Maybe it’s an old fashioned thing because I’m an older gal, but I feel if I’m going to take the time to READ something, I’ll take the extra minute or so it takes to acknowledge I read the chapter (or in some instances one shot). When I have more time to be more verbose, I am. BUT, even when I don’t HAVE a lot of time, I still at least say that “hey, I read it, and thank you for the update” or something along those lines. To the authors, a reminder that you can set or unset whether or not you receive anonymous reviews in the first place. Not all authors want anonymous reviews, which is why the option is left TO the author. The author is also able to set or unset whether or not to receive an email when a review is left. Story Tags One of the other things we do, as we go through each chapter, is to go through the story properties and remove the non-searchable characters from the tags. With the search made to where you can search with two or more characters, instead of four or more; this made it so you can search the tag field itself now. In order for it to work properly, this means that the ‘/’, ‘&’, ‘-’ and other characters like that that are not searchable have to be removed from the tags themselves. i.e. M/M becomes MM, M/F become MF, etc. Dribs, Drabs and Doggy Tales This is the forum where they all are listed. This is the current one. These are open ended, so if one set of words doesn't work for your muse, look at others! Funding Status As always, we appreciate and thank everyone who can donate. It's certainly not required of the users, but every little bit helps! I'm in the process of setting aside an emergency fund, equal to 3 times the monthly expenses. That will be noted on the donation page as well. Deletion notification For Accounts When deleting an account because the user is underage, a plagiarist, or whatever else would be a reason to delete one entirely, we do NOT send a notification. For Stories When deleting stories, this is done for non compliance with the ToS. Stories are HIDDEN long before they are deleted. The user is told there is an issue, and given 7 days to comply before the story is hidden. Upon hiding, the story is left for 30 or more days (it ends up being more when I have a heavy work load IRL) before it is deleted. If the issue is CORRECTED, the story is restored to public view. Disposable email Disposable emails are not checked, and we don’t allow registration with them. Upon finding an account registered with a disposable email address, it is deleted. Email address visibility By default, the email address is hidden when you register. It will only display if you put it in the bio area of your profile. Tech Bits Archive Cleanup Now, because of the new tools that I (and other staff who do this with me) have at our disposal, this should proceed at a much faster pace. For example, I fixed a 52 chapter story with errors from the old crash in 4 ½ hours last week. That same story, fixing it the way I had to before, would’ve taken me roughly 40 hours to get the exact same results. The new tools make it so I cut out several steps in the process, as I no longer have to do this all directly in the database itself. It also means that the people who help me with clean up, can help me with this part as well, not just finding the issues and giving them to me, which is what we did before. Something which I do want to stress with you all, is that I completely agree with what was said during the restoral after the big crash in 2005. It’s really not the responsibility of the users to fix all this. It’s the SITE’S responsibility. This is why I don’t insist that people fix it themselves. Does it help to have users do this to? Sure it does! But, I don’t expect it, as it’s the responsibility of the site. Tech support, directions given Just to reiterate, when I email out step by DIRECTIONS on how to do something, that is exactly what they are. Not suggestions, but directions. If followed as stepped out, it works very well. This means that the user must follow them in the order the steps are given. --------------------- Please remember that the authors you read do like to hear from you! Leave them a review or two, and let them know how they're doing! DemonGoddess061