How to put a story on your alert list

[Amara_Sakae_]

I am wondering how am I supposed to get indication that a story has been updated. I'm new to adult-fanfiction and I haven't gotten anything down yet.

 

[BronxWench]

We don’t have an update notification feature at this point in time.

Some authors maintain mailing lists for update notifications, or give them via Twitter or Facebook. If so, it’s generally stated in the story by the author.

Alternatively, you can add a story to your Currently Reading section on your archive profile. Our FAQ here explains how to do that. It gives you a quick link to a story, and you can see the last time it was updated on that page as well. You can also see if the author has a “Promote a Story” thread, and follow that thread, with email notifications enabled.

[Amara_Sakae_]

That’s not what I wanted to hear, i kinda wish it had an easier way. Anyways, thanks for your response.

[Guest Kenn Davis]

Amara Sakae has a valid point, some of these stories are damn good and bookmarking them and checking every few weeks is frustrating.

 

[Desiderius Price]

Put an alert system on that feature wishlist...

[BronxWench]

2 hours ago, Guest Kenn Davis said:

Amara Sakae has a valid point, some of these stories are damn good and bookmarking them and checking every few weeks is frustrating.

 

From a personal standpoint, I’d love to have an update feature that sends me an email. But from the other side of the issue, I also know it’s not as easy to code in features as people think because we’re working with what’s become a custom piece of coding in the archive. We can’t simply add in features we like, as we can do in the forum, because there’s no library of features for us to browse. Our coder has to write something that will work with the rest of the code seamlessly, and that’s not always possible.

In a perfect world, i.e., one in which I win a huge lottery, I’d give AFF the money to purchase a brand new, super powerful package for the archive, and hire lots of minions to carefully migrate the databases to the new package. The reality is that we’re all volunteers running this place on a shoestring budget which barely covers the cost of hosting the archive. There isn’t anything left for buying software. We do amazingly well with what we have, though, I think.

[Desiderius Price]

Hmmm… maybe we need more coders?

[BronxWench]

57 minutes ago, Desiderius Price said:

Hmmm… maybe we need more coders?

Are you offering to donate your services? Because right now, paying coders is not something we can do, and we can’t ask manta to forsake actual paying work to design features for our archive which might not even work as planned, while we scrape together a minuscule stipend hardly reflective of the time and effort she expends.  I do what I can by donating my time (and spare cash when I have it) to making AFF work. If I could code, I’d be offering that as well, because I believe in what AFF represents.

This discussion crops up from time to time, and it’s really sort of frustrating. We’d love to provide the kind of snappy software which makes users drool happily, full of bells and whistles. Hells, as an infrequent contributor to the archive, I’d love it myself. But the reality is that we’re not backed by a deep-pockets not-for-profit like AO3, and we’re not a for-profit site supported by mainstream advertisers like FFN. We are an independent site dedicated to allowing adult members to write, free of censorship, and that means mainstream advertisers will RUN from us, and not-for-profits, despite their avowed dedication to progressive principles, will draw the line at some of the content we permit. Yes, we could get backers… IF we change what AFF stands for.  I don’t see that as an option, do you?

I’ll step off the soapbox now.

[Desiderius Price]

53 minutes ago, BronxWench said:

Are you offering to donate your services?

I’m tempted/mulling it over.

[BronxWench]

18 minutes ago, Desiderius Price said:

I’m tempted/mulling it over.

Honestly, every bit of help we get is good. I tend to take this very seriously, because I’ve spent the last seven years volunteering here. I don’t expect everyone else to do the same, but it feels sometimes like a good, hard slap when someone says all we need to do is… and then proposes something that’s really very costly for a free-to-use, not-for-profit website that can’t even pay DG to keep it running.

[Desiderius Price]

On 7/1/2018 at 5:17 PM, BronxWench said:

Honestly, every bit of help we get is good. I tend to take this very seriously, because I’ve spent the last seven years volunteering here. I don’t expect everyone else to do the same, but it feels sometimes like a good, hard slap when someone says all we need to do is… and then proposes something that’s really very costly for a free-to-use, not-for-profit website that can’t even pay DG to keep it running.

We definitely see code differently, though I don’t know what the state the AFF code is in or how easy/difficult it would be to modify w/o breaking everything else.  However, I’m willing to take a peek.  That said, having a “wish-list” on the side is good to have, just in case...