Due to some new constraints, I have had to make some changes to the scheduling of delayed postings.
From now on, instead of posting delayed stories and chapters at midnight Eastern time, it will be at 9pm Eastern time.
Well, it does. When it rains it seems to come from all sides.
Last night, a network outage 10 days after the last one.
Tonight, a catastrophic hardware failure in the database servers’ raid at 8:15 pm on the 27th. We’re scrambling to find and configure a replacement. It will definitely take a while and some data has been lost.
Sorry for the inconvenience folks. We’re doing all we can to get things up and running again.
Update 1:55 am: Well, we’re piling it on. On top of the hardware problems we’re having, the replacement server raid that we got turned out to be faulty AND Rogers (the backbone provider) is doing a network maintenance just like last night, without any warning. The tech working at the data center can’t communicate with the outside world to make sure that we get new software to install of the hardware (which is dead at the moment too).
Update 6:30 am: Things are coming along well. We’ve managed to get the database for the storiesonline.net domain going. It’s fairly operational. However, we lost everything that happened from 4:00 am EST on the 26th, so roughly 48 hours of activities have been lost (the latest back up was corrupted, the previous one worked.)
The secure connections over https (for log in and for payments) are not working. We haven’t figured it out yet. The admin pages aren’t fully working yet. So be patient about updates.
Not everything is as it should be, but it’s definitely better than being offline completely.
Update 28th, 2:25 pm: well, the site is almost back to normal, but the submission processing is broken. It needs some work. It will take until the evening to get it done and start processing submissions again.
Your patience is appreciated.
When I started implementing the site’s various RSS feeds, I took the easy road and I used a token in the URL itself for authentication. It was an acceptable solution all that time ago. However, with the proliferation of RSS aggregators and their facilities for finding RSS feeds, I found that I could easily subscribe to any member’s RSS feed that uses those facilities like Google reader.
The upcoming change will have an impact on some of you.
From next Monday on, RSS feeds on the site will require authentication. Most news readers these days support the authentication protocol required. Usually, it will only require that you enter your storiesonline’s user name and password once, and after that, your news reader should take care of the rest.
If your news reader doesn’t support this functionality, then you need to change readers.
Sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause; but there is no way around this, especially with the existence of the library RSS feeds.
Update: I’ve created additional non-authenticated feeds for the New stories and the updates pages. However, for various reasons, not all stories show up in the non-authenticated feeds. So if you choose to use these feeds, you may miss stuff. But, I figure it’s better than no feeds at all. To find the various feeds, including the non-authenticated ones, check the RSS feeds page.
Second update: Firefox does not work properly with the new authenticated feeds. It asks for authentication once and if you create a live feed, the second time around you’ll get ‘Live bookmark failed to load message’ without telling you why. The only way to make firefox work with the authenticated feeds is to follow the hack outlined below in the comments.
Today I implemented a couple of small changes that may be of interest.
First one is on the readers’ side. For premier members, the Universe/Series listings page now allows you to sort by multiple criteria. You can have the page sort the listings by Universe or series name (the default), by author name, by story count and most importantly, by update date. You can have this sorting be in ascending or descending order.
The second one is for authors, and it’s a minor thing. I added the ‘Flash’ story genre for those stories that would benefit from it (less than 500 words).
I’ve made an experimental change to the storiesonline’s listings pages stylesheet that causes check marks to appear next to visited links.
The reason for this change is to help those with color blindness who are unable to see the difference in color between visited and unvisited links.
There is no functional difference from before, and since this is a stylesheet thing, it means that it depends on the browser and the history setting of the browser.
Let me know what you think about it.
Unfortunately, due to unexpected work load in my work, I’ve been unable to finish the code needed for moderation, or for reader voting. So progress has been slow.
As of the first of February, the current code on the site for accepting nominations should start accepting nominations for stories published in 2008.
As of today, the site has received 300 story nominations and 100 author nominations. But due to the lack of finished management tools, I don’t know the final number of eligible nomination.
I will do my best to finish the bigger than expected job, and hopefully soon enough I’ll have a fully functioning awards site.
As I work on the moderation end of the Clitorides Awards site, I’ve become aware of something. Many of the nominated stories are no-sex stories. As in not a bit of sex in them.
The clitorides awards were created to promote the erotica writing community; even the name ‘clitorides’ is a reminder of that.
So my question to the community is: Should no-sex stories be eligible for the awards?
Hello everyone,
Back on February 15th, 2007, Souvie posted the following in message on Usenet in the ASSD group (alt.sex.stories.d) id Message-ID: <dqk9t2tihhc7as6cf8qv704v44utjfqttk@4ax.com>:
I will not be running the awards next year, someone else has taken them over. I’m sure everyone’ll find out eventually. In the meantime, it’s been fun.
I’m going to email Kenny and see if he wants me to do the Silver Clits for the time he’s been away, and it’s possible the person who’s taking over the GCA will be taking over the SCA (depends on what Kenny says).
Now that I have no legitimate excuse not to write, I still won’t be writing. It’s not fun right now and if and when the fun returns, maybe then I’ll pick my pen back up.
Well, time has come to reveal that I’m the one who volunteered to try to handle the awards. I’m sure many of you have already known or guessed that little fact.
I registered a domain for them, it’s at http://clitoridesawards.org/
I always thought the clitorides were a great idea, but the awards suffered from the fact that, usually, one or two people took the responsibility of handling them. Those people should be thanked for taking on such a big responsibility. However, that usually meant if the person got too busy, or simply lost interest or whatever could happen in real life with them happened, the awards suffered. The awards are a big job and a tedious one. Nobody wanted to do the job forever.
I believe that a central website that can handle most of the grunt work and overseen by volunteers from the community can go a long way to establish the awards as a legit entity.
I’m here to announce my plans for the awards and to seek all input.
Personally, I don’t have any particular interest in running the awards or influencing them in any shape or form. My only interest is the general health of the writing community. I believe that well established awards are good for the community.
What I offer is my technical expertise and my resources to build and host a site for the awards.
What I’m here looking for is the input of everybody who is interested in the issue.
In order for me to finish implementing the site and have it work properly, I need a clear set of rules that most would agree on to govern the awards. I also need a group of volunteers to oversee the nominations and handle the final announcements.
The site’s engine would handle receiving nominations, sending out confirmation messages if needed, and tallying the results.
As of now, the site is up and running in limited fashion. It can handle user registration, log in, author nominations and story nominations for the Golden Clitorides awards for 2007.
Currently, there 20 story categories and 2 author categories. They are the same that Souvie used last year. The old archive pages are there, the only change to them was that I put them in the site’s template, otherwise, they’re still as they are on the old site.
What I’m looking for now is suggestions for changes, the creation of a set of rules to govern the awards and volunteers to moderate the awards. There is no admin section to the site yet because I don’t have any guidelines what needs to be implemented other than there should be a way to verify and moderate nominations.
I’m not sure which way is best to start this process; I don’t have a forum. We could use this blog here and the comments system below, or we can create a page relating to the issue on http://storieswiki.org/.
So, lets get this process started
I’ve implemented some important changes in the story delivery mechanism today. The new system has the ability to deliver long stories or long chapters in multiple pages.
Explanation:
Storiesonline is a busy site. Very busy site. In order to keep the site running smoothly and responding as fast as possible to readers’ requests, the reply time for those requests must be kept short. The servers have limited numbers of connections. So the faster each reader got their file and their browser disconnected, the faster the server could respond to another reader. In order to keep connection times short, I tried to keep files as small as possible. That meant for long stories that took a while to reach the readers’ browsers, I used to divide the story into chapters and long chapters into sub-chapters. That’s why some stories have ‘Chapter 1A’, ‘Chapter 1B’ etc…
While the old way was perfectly functional from the story delivery point of view, it created some undesired side effects. The side effects were mostly in management and database size. Each story and each chapter has two database entries, one for the meta data (title, size, etc…) and one for the text itself.
Each time an author wanted to repost a story that had been divided for size, one of us (me or the author) had to make sure that the replacement matched the old divisions. Many readers didn’t realize that chapter 1A and chapter 1B were the same chapter, simply sliced in two in order to keep each part short. It lead to confusion on everybody’s end. It was a mess.
The new system works around all these shortcomings.
So, the new system has ‘Pages’. From the readers’ point of view, it’s a little different.
Each long story (that doesn’t have any chapters), whose size exceeds 60,000 characters (including all html formatting) will be delivered in pages. There will be a mini navigation bar for the pages. When the reader first clicks on a long story, they’ll get a part of the story with the small navigation bar listing the pages. When they’re done reading one page, they click to the next and so on.
Long chapters also get pages.
That change affects on-screen reading only. Downloading archives and using the ‘V’ link to download individual chapters from stories still works exactly the same way as before.
The implications:
Not many implications. For long stories, instead of seeing ‘Chapter 1′, ‘Chapter 2′ etc… you get pages and you click from one page to another. And for stories with multiple long chapters, you won’t see ‘Chapter 1A’, ‘Chapter 1B’ etc… anymore. You’ll also click from one page of the chapter to the next.
For authors, no more ‘Chapter 1A’, ‘Chapter 1B’ in the wizard. Each chapter stays as one entity.
For stories and chapters that were divided under the old system, they’ll stay that way, for now. It’s too complicated to fix for now. Maybe sometime in the future when I have a good chunk of free time for programing, I’ll whip a script that joins those parts.
While I tested the new system extensively, I can never be sure that I worked all the bugs out. So if you stumble on some unexpected behavior, please let me know about it. If you have suggestion for enhancements, I’m all ears.
It’s been ten days since the implementation of the new voting system, so I thought I would keep everybody up-to-date with how things are shaping up.
First thing to report is that voting is up. The number of basic votes cast per day added to the number of TPA votes cast per day is about 30% higher than the previous week’s number of basic votes cast. So it seems that many people were not using the old system and were encouraged by the new one. So for those who were afraid that the new voting system will lead to people moving away from voting, rest assured, it didn’t happen.
Second, the voting form wording change is affecting scores mildly. The median of votes cast after the change is lower. It currently stands at 8.00 compared to 8.82 prior to the change. Of course, the Q Score is compensating for this difference and the Q Scores are more consistent.
The number of TPA votes is about 30% of the basic votes number. So, it’s quite high. I didn’t expect it to be this high. So, I’m not going to keep individual TPA votes indefinitely. I can’t. I haven’t decided how long to keep them, I’ll wait for future development to guide this decision.
Implementation changes:
The Appeal component of the TPA is now a part of the Q Score. It’s processed as a basic score.
During the implementation, I changed the minimum number of votes needed to show the score on the site from 10 to 15.
The expected developments are that some authors and few readers are still trying to find a concrete relationship between the Q Score and the regular score and since they don’t have any hard numbers, many are just ending up being confused and already declaring the new system to be a failure.
My advice to those who are trying to correlate the scores is: Don’t. You don’t have the numbers and if I gave you the exact formula, you will still be missing the data used in the formula to calculate things.
Yes, relative positions of stories may change between the old score and the Q Score and that’s because different posting and updating dates of stories affect the Q Score a lot. So unless you can dig the data from the database, the exact formula won’t be much help.
The unexpected development is that so far, I’m getting a lot more support for the Q Score from readers and few authors. I’ve received many requests to remove the old scores completely and just leave the Q Score and the TPA (many of those requests came from premier members). Reasons given in the requests are that the score next to the Q Score are confusing things and that with all the data presented in the tables, there is too much info to scan through making the site harder to use.
I’m starting to lean in that direction already. If I receive more requests of the same, I will start the process of removing the old average scores and just leave the Q Scores. When/If I start that change I will make it so that the TPA score is also hidden if the number of votes is below 15.
