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In the Newsby Rorrah January 8, 2007 Summaries are now cut off at 500 characters to limit the space any one story takes up on the home page of the site. You can enter more, but only 500 will be displayed. Most people will not be affected by this; those that are need to learn the art of being concise! Thank you. Nilmandra December 27, 2006 Submissions for new authors are again open. Please ensure if you are requesting posting privileges that you have read guidelines and understand the focus of the archive. Happy Holidays to all! Nilmandra
July 25, 2006 Submissions for new authors are closed indefinitely. If a date is chosen for them to be reopened, I will post it on the submissions page. Nilmandra
September 7, 2005 Submissions for new authors will be closed until on or around September 20, 2005, while we take a long awaited vacation. Nilmandra
August 13, 2005 A livejournal community has been set up to discuss the 'quote of the day'. The group may be found here. You need to have a livejournal and be a member to post, but anyone may comment. Please come and share your thoughts. Nilmandra
May 1, 2005 Submissions for new authors will be closed until on or around July 1, 2005, as I will be unavailable during most of that time. I have added some links to Resources for the 'Fair-use' statute (Section 107 of the copyright law in the US), similar laws in other countries and the guidelines for when material is determined to be in the Public Domain. I have also updated the SoA guidelines to reflect some common interpretations of these rules, which will essentially be to quote no more than 10% to a max of 1000 words of any text, and to ensure that you have properly cited the author of the material. If you are not in compliance with this, please adjust your stories accordingly. Nilmandra
February 16, 2005 The site is now open for author submissions. Please use the new submission form to apply for posting privileges. Thanks to everyone for their patience while we added this new functionality and while I finished some work projects that were consuming my time. Nilmandra
January 9, 2005 Notice to authors seeking posting privileges: please withold sending submissions until after February 15, 2005 while we revamp our submissions process. We are developing a submissions form that will help us to gather the needed information from prospective authors in a consistent and time saving manner. Guidelines, FAQ's and some site policies will also be updated to reflect some commonly asked questions. Nilmandra
December 17, 2004 Notice to authors seeking posting privileges: please withold sending submissions until after January 1, 2005. Thank you for your patience, and I hope everyone has a very happy holiday season. Nilmandra
May 20, 2004 Notice to authors seeking posting privileges: please withold sending submissions until after June 11, 2004. Thank you for your patience. Nilmandra April 26, 2004 The awards page has been updated to include information about the new MEFAwards and the resources page has been updated with links to two fanfiction glossaries. February 21, 2004 Please note that both the guidelines and the information we ask to see from potential authors have been updated. I hope this additional guidance on subject matter helps to make our guidelines clearer to new authors and reduces the burden on the screeners. My apologies in being a day late! Nilmandra February 4, 2004 Notice to potential new authors: Please withhold sending any requests for posting privileges until February 20, 2004. Any inquiries received between now and then will not be answered. Due to the overwhelming number of requests, the guidelines for the types of stories being accepted at Stories of Arda are being refined, as well as the information we wish to see from potential authors. This information will be added to the site before the 20th. Thanks in advance to everyone for their cooperation. Wednesday, December 31st Announcement: In order to provide our readers with information about the various Tolkien fan fiction award programs, we've added a link to the resource page. Check out the new Awards Page Tuesday, October 1st Email addresses and crawlers Announcement: In at attempt to prevent our reader's email addresses from being harvested from this site and used to spam, I have added a new bit of code to the site. It is invisible to the end user, but it hides your email addresses from most of the site crawlers. We don't want our readers and authors to stop communicating for fear of spam. For those people who absolutly don't want their email address available to the general public, you can still choose to hide your address. Just log in, Click Reader, User Info, Edit Profile, and uncheck the box marked Show Email. Friday, September 5th Help and stuff Announcement: Help. We have some now. For those of you confused as to where all the stories went when you logged in, those who wondered how to reply to a review, those who wandered and were lost, we have erected a signpost in the road. Cheap Rolex Replica Luckily the signpost is big so we were able to hang all the destinations we could think of upon it. Okay enough of me jabbering in metaphor. There are now FAQ's in the help section to cover the most frequent problems folk have run into on our site. If you can think of any additions, ask away and we will append them to the signpost...*cough* er...help page. Now onto the stuff. For those of you fanatic reviewers out there we have a new toy. If you leave signed reviews on our site, we make a nice list of all the reviews you've ever posted. The list is now sortable by date, author and story to make it easier to determine if you have left a review for a chapter. To see this glorious new feature, login to the site, go to the Reader area if you are not already there. Click on All Reviews. You can resort by the fields I mentioned by clicking on their header, so Click on Title to resort your list by title. Thats it for now, enjoy Thursday, September 4th New Feature! Announcement: At the suggestion of a site author, we added some new functionality to the review process. We had built into the site the ability for authors to reply to reviews directly in the review area. However, oftentimes reviewers didn't check back on their reviews. So now the reply is sent via email to the reviewer along with being posted at the site. Hope you enjoy this. Tuesday, August 26th Site adjustments! Announcement: At the request of several members, I've added a new feature. Newly uploaded chapters will not immediatly be viewable from the main site. Authors can now fool around with a chapter until they are happy and not subject the rest of the world to their tweaks. As a result, there is now an extra step to publishing a chapter. Now when you are ready for your chapter to be seen by the world, you must click on the Publish link. This will then send out your email notifications and make the chapter visible. Conversely, if you decide after publishing that you don't want anyone else to see it until you make a few MORE tweaks, you can hide it. However when you republish it will NOT resend the notification emails. Happy posting! Monday, August 25th Editor adjustments 1. Please note that putting double quotes (") in a chapter title will cause an error. It will probably upload the chapter anyway, but it will look like it failed. You can put the quotes in the chapter text all you want. But in the box above the editor where it says chapter title, don't use double quotes. 2. I have increased the intelligence of the javascript cleaner so it will catch more of the double spacing that occasionally happens. 3. I have made the bold/italics checker slightly smarter as well. So hopefully it will no longer turn your entire story bold/italics. As a general rule, I will keep making these announcements on the Stories_of_Arda yahoo groups list, and will reserve this area in the future for major announcements and outage information. 1. Authors can directly respond to reviews and have the response posted with the review. Keep in mind, much like a reader review, what you post is non-editable. Directions:
Your reply is now posted. You can post any number of replies to the same review. 2. Favorites (Authors, Stories, Links) have been opened up to Readers as well as Authors. So in order to edit your profile, or add/change favorites, you need to go to the Reader page rather than the Author page. This forced us to add a way to search Reader favorites. So a second line has been added to the search page. Just select the User who's profile you wish to see and it will redirect you to their page. Let me know what you think of these new toys Bugs 1: Congratulions to Lindelea for finding a bug. As it turns out, the author notifications of reviews was failing if the story title contained an apostrophe. It's all better now. Bugs 2: Thanks to fileg for being my Mac OsX test guinea pig. For whatever reason, with Mac/Mozilla combo, occasional spaces were being deleted. Fixed! Monday, August 4th So far, this has been the smoothest site launch I've ever had. Site Hiccups: So far it has been quite a successful launch. But there have been a couple of things that have hung people up.
Thursday, July 31st Yeah! Guidelines. Site Launch: We are Rockin! Story Formatting: Got tired of the double spacing. Spent way too long trying to get rid of it. But it should work now. Sorry Jenolas and Levade if you were affected by my testing. Resources: Up on the site and ready to go. Enjoy. Tuesday, July 29th Chants in an aggrieved tone: "guide...lines....guide...lines" Site Launch: We are just waiting now for the resident board of directors to actually draft guidelines for stories. Who knew that getting writers to write could be such a long and tedious process. Search: Fixed a bug that was breaking the keyword search. Also labeled the text field so that people actually know thats what the box is for. Story Formatting: Have had to tweak the clean up script to account for the vagaries of Word. It's Microsoft, I should have known better than to expect consistant logic. Its somewhat random on linespacing, not a whole lot I can do about it without completely taking away your control of how you want things to look. Thursday, July 24th (mid-day) Because it seemed like a good idea at the time Story Formatting: I have achieved some success with the formatting issue. This is what happens. You paste your text/code in and push the button. We write that data to my handy dandy code cleaner, and it strips out all the code we don't want. Then it uploads to the site. I've tested this on Windows: Mozilla 1.3a+, IE5.5+ Netscape 4.61+. No idea on what it does to Macs. So please play around if you can. Edit your stories and watch code disappear. Well...if your story has extra formatting anyway. Bug Fix: Someone reported a bug, woo hoo. The code that assigns characters to stories when first created was flawed. It is now fixed. So you may wish to edit your stories, and confirm which characters it actually has assigned to it. On the Author Menu, click on the story title. Thursday, July 24th (barely....somewhere in Hawaii *yawn*) Because sleep is overrated as well Story Formatting: I am within inches of getting the HTML cleaner to work. This will remove all the stupid microsoft tags and the relevant font tags that we don't want on the site. This should standardize the way things look. I'll be leaving in place all the heading tags, bold, italics, and underline. If there is something else you really MUST have, contact me (rorrah) and I will consider it. Author's Favorites: As an author, you can list your favorite stories and authors from our site in your profile. As we get bigger, the addition of authors and stories will probably have to change, but they are fairly functional currently. You can add your favorites in the Author Area by selecting on the appropriate item in the sub-menu Wednesday, July 23rd Because as we all know, paying work is overrated! Author Links: This is for stories, art or just general pages from other sites you'd like to link to your author page. For instance, if someone does some art for one of your stories, you can put a link in the "Author Links" area. The only thing we ask, is that if the link goes to an adult site or is to a story that is rated NC-17 please check the adult content box to give warning. You can also link your FF.net profile page onto here or any story that may not be appropriate for our archive, but still belongs to you. Forthcoming are the Favorite authors and Favorite stories area. Links can be added in the Author area, on the sub-menu "Links" Tuesday, July 22nd Progress continues on site development. Story Uploads: We now support (we think) uploading from the following browser/platform combinations
Story Titles: It is no longer necessary that story titles be entered. For those of you who don't name your chapters or only have one chapter stories, the Chapter number will now suffice. Email Notifications: It is now possible to get email updates when a new chapter is uploaded. It is also *NOW* possible to unsubscribe from receiving those updates in the Reader area of the site. Reviewer's Email: Email addresses of the reviewer are no longer up on the site. I'd rather we not be blamed for contributing to the amount of SPAM everyone gets. So if you leave a review, and enter in an email address, it will send the email onto the Author, but not post it on the site. You also still have the option of leaving the box blank. Author's Email: Authors can choose to hide their email address on their author page. If you go into the Author Area and click on "Author Info, you'll find a link to change your password or edit your information. Here you can uncheck the box that says "Show Email" Author Information: Biographies, Screen name, Email and passwords can all be edited in the Author Info area found on the sub-menu in the "Author Area" section of the website. Reader's edit tools are still forthcoming. Requests - Bugs: If you have a suggestion on site layout, are having difficulty doing things or have any concerns, Please let us know. Everything is still in development and thus subject to change and random failures. We're trying to track down bugs and kill them dead as we find them, but some of them are awful sneaky. We also lack a Mac for testing so those crazy Mac users out there need to let us know when things look bad. Please contact Nilmandra@storiesofarda.com or rorrah@storiesofarda.com with site issues |