Titles and Summaries

Increased limit for story titles from 50 to 70 characters. This should resolve issue with the few writers that might find the first limit too constricting. Please note the 70 character  limit is likely to stay for a long time unless we see a collapse of the written language. Seventy character is aplenty for a readable story title and actually crosses the toleration limit for most readers.

Tiles/summaries can now contain parenthesis “()” characters to help writers that want to visually categorize different stories into similar series.

Changes

• Story/Forum title: Increased limit for titles from 50 to 70 characters.
• Story/Forum title/summary: Allow parenthesis “()” and hyphen “-” characters.

Fixed

• Sorting in Doc Manager where “Chapter 10” is displayed before “Chapter 1”.

 

Minor Updates

Changes

1. Allow apostrophes within searching keywords and phrases such as “Mike’s wishes”. Due to caching, this change will take up to 1 hour to take effect.
2. Increased character limit in search field to allow longer searches.

Fixed

1. (FictionPress Only) Some new stories are not properly indexed in the search database.
2. Some forums are not properly indexed in the search database.

 

Forum/PM Fixes

Fixed

• PM inbox/outbox list bunching up. The display layout was broken by the last update.
• We have cleared all block list for forums. Incorrect data was causing some users from being blocked erroneously.
• Forum management page errors since last update.

 

Search & Beta Tweaks

Changes

1. Beta area and Author searches now display “Join Date” in addition to published stories count. Avatar icons have also increased in size in these two areas.
2. Forum/Community searches now include covers.
3. Make sure all cover images act as clickable links.

Fixed

1. Forum search errors out on certain keywords.
2. Tiny font issue for forum/community searches.
3. Search result distorting some links.

 

Tweaks Aplenty

Following are updates to the desktop/regular site.

Changes

1. New check-and-remove option added for Alerts and Favorites management to allow faster and multiple removals per action.
2. Arial is now the default font replacing Verdana for a tighter layout and improved readability across all platforms. Users can change their story reading mode to ‘Verdana’ mode via the text style toggles.
3. Story links now respect the :visited css property to alert users which stories they have already visited.
4. Increased font size for those with high-resolution monitors (1400 pixel width and higher). Ultra high-resolution screens have very small pixel size translating to smaller texts and this change should improve readability for these users.
5. Slightly darker blue colors for all links to reduce eye-strain for those that stay on the site for hours at a time.
6. Darker horizontal rules (separators).
7. Cleaner look for the story content/chapters management page.

Fixed

1. Image manager pop-up selection out of alignment on some browsers.
2. Fixed Alerts and Favorites management for those with monster 10K+ plus entries.

Notes

• Sorting within Alerts/Favorites management will return in a different form in the next scheduled update.

 

Minor Details

Changes

1. Site spell checker will longer disable browser’s built-in/native spell checker feature. Both can now co-exist peacefully.
2. Disabled forum post styling abuse by some users inserting html to make texts larger and etc.

 

Richer Forum Post Styling

Forums posts now have richer styling options.

Changes:

• Many new format styling are now available within forum posts. New formats includes easier quoting, strike-through, numbered and un-ordered lists, horizontal rule, and centering.

If the new formatting is causing any issues, please report back so we can improve and iron out any bugs.

 

Spell Checker and Grammar Suggestions

To help procrastinating writers, we are launching a combo spell checker and rudimentary grammar suggestions feature for our online editor. If everything goes well, we will also port the feature to the review box.

Please note that automated tools are not substitutes for proper self proof-reading and editing. These small features we are offering are meant to help writers catch any last gaps and are not meant to be first-line defenses.

Changes

1. New spell checker for profile, forum, and document manager. Spell checker currently supports 5 languages: English (default), Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese.
2. New grammar suggestion feature integrated with spell checker. (English only)

 

7/23 Performance

Changes

1. During our recent bug hunting  process we were able to find and resolve a performance bottleneck which has improved page processing speed by 10% on average. The increased speed will be most noticeable in the forums, the login area, and the mobile site.

Fixed

1. Safari and iOS users having issues posting to forums after our last update.
2. A short window yesterday where the captcha system would not validate correct inputs.

There might still besome selective users having connection issues or timeouts and if you are one those few, please post a comment and let us know what browser you are using and any antivirus program you are using. Many antivirus programs today are filtering all web browser content and are notorious for being buggy in this feature. Make sure to test our site with your antivirus program’s “link scanner” or “web protection/filter” disabled.

 

7/9 Status Update 2

Updates

1. Better email subjects for many alert types. For example, chapter alerts now include the story title in the front of the subject followed by new chapter number to allow better user-side email sorting.
2. Forum limit for replies (threads) per topic has been increased from 9,999 to full 20,000. This should help large forums and forums dedicated to role-playing. Note the limit is here to prevent forums being overloaded by spam. If there is a need for forums to have even higher limits in the future, we will increase it.

Fixes:

1. Resolved issue with some users not being able to use the Facebook login.