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”.

 

7/18 Word Counts and Document Manager

Changes

1. More accurate word counts for submitted stories and especially for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Thai. We will be re-calculating the word counts for all stories retroactively.  Please note that word count is at best an estimate since in some languages, a word is only defined while in context and cannot be easily calculated by a computer.
2. Document shelf-life has been extended to 90 days from previous 60 days limit.

A quick look back at the inception and history of our Document Manager. When we first started, you can directly edit a story or chapter content live minus the document stage. So what happened?

After several years of monitoring and a lot of feedback we discovered this live-editing method introduced a very high rate of errors and often catastrophic human ones. As result of the findings, the Document Manager was born.

One can think of Documents as manuscripts or drafts and the Document Manager as the editing room holding all your drafts. We decided it was important to hammer the following points home to authors:

1. Never perform live content edits to your published story.  Just like you don’t edit a published book on the shelf but rather a manuscript or draft. The same principle applies here to help separate the process of  “Editing” and “Publishing” which is often confused now-a-days due to the popularity of online blog type systems. Your stories are more important than blogs and you should treat them as such.
2. Preview, Review and Edit before Publishing. In the old days, you can publish a file from your hard drive straight to a new live story and due to this missing self-review process, tons of human errors were made.

Document Manager vastly reduces the human error factor in the editing and publishing process and helps to introduce the idea to writers that editing is a distinct and important process separate from the publishing stage.

Tip: You can use the export to document (exp) feature to perform edits on your existing story chapter if you do not already have it in your doc manager.

 

7/17 Update

UPDATE: We have fixed a problem with > 1K word count filter caused by today’s update.

Updates

1. Filtering and Sorting upgrade for Communities. Added filters: genre,  word count, time range, and complete status. Added new sorts:  reviews, favs, and follows.
2. Added “< 1K” and “< 5K” word count filter option for story listings.
3. Added “< 1K” words option in the search engine for those seeking short stories.
4. Relabeled the misleading “1-4K” words search option to the accurate title of “< 5K” .

 

 

7/15 Update

Update

1. New Time Range Sort option: There is now a time range filter based on either Update or Publish Date and ranges from 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, to the default “All Time”. The time range filter is designed to enhance and complement other filters for larger categories where even filtered results can be in the hundreds of thousands.
2. Image covers activated for the public pages of Communities (C2s).
3. New Published Date Sort option for Communities.
4. Misc minor improvements all around.

We got a lot of great  feedback for our last blog post on new sorting options. Sometimes when we introduce a new feature, it may be designed for a certain group of users. In this case, the sorting options are designed for and much requested by readers. Giving readers more choices is always a good thing for the authors in the long run.

 

7/13 Update

Updates

1. New sorting types for story listings. Now available are sorting based on the number of reviews, number of favorites (favs), and number of follows (subscriptions).
2. Community pages received a minor face-lift to be more consistent with rest of the site.
3. More available display width for screens with 1280 pixel width or wider resolution.

UPDATED: Crossover in-page sorting has been fixed.