Jun
9th
2017
welp · 11:46am Jun 9th, 2017
Guess I now have to find the time to add the new formatting tags to all my poetry; publish three stories that are now literally otherwise inaccessible; re-commission my avatar to fit the ugly circle thing; figure out how the new rich text paste interacts with Scrivener and/or whether the BBCode updates broke Scrivener’s already tenuous BBCode support; and discover what else broke and/or changed.
I don’t hate the new updates -- I’m sure there are things I’ll like as I grow to use them more -- and I do appreciate that they bring the site closer to launching the gen-fic side. It’s just ... that’s a lot of growing pains all at once. 😐
Ugly circle frame is tricky. I guess I should be glad in a way that I don’t have an avatar yet? (With the default image, it clips my ear. Ow!)
Speedy adaptations to you.
Poor poetry, what did it do to deserve this?
And what's this gen-fic thing I've been hearing about?
I’m afraid:
Even to look at my poetry collection. It’s some kind of a “Schroedinger’s cat allergy,” I think...
But at least the new “indent” tags let me continue my eccentric manner of posting comments!
Mike
Just resize the resolution of your avatar a bit. Throw the raw file at me if you want me to take a crack at it.
What I find great is my avatar still looks pretty amazing.
I like the new look, but I miss ye olden days when things were more pony. I'm all for gen fic, but don't shun the hand that feeds you, they say.
I think my favorite feature is that the site now "bookmarks" your location in a story if you leave it partway through.
4566007
Is Knighty trying to shift towards a more general fiction type of site or something?
Lemme know if you find a workaround for unpublished story linking. It was always a gray area but I found it useful.
4566148
I don't know a lot about it, there are more informed people than me, and I haven't heard anything new about it in a while, but as far as I know, knighty wants to create one massive fiction site where you access/avoid the pony side of things (or content from other fandoms) by way of "filters". This is probably why the general layout and color scheme have been getting more and more neutral.
I was mostly okay with the updates… and then I just about lost it when saw genre abbreviations like "X'ver"
I'm getting less and less comfortable with such sweeping changes to text formatting, considering how much of the site's frozen content (ie author has left the fandom) has had its presentation altered or broken. Sigh…
I'm confused: what do you mean 'inaccessible'? What were you trying to do?
4566165
Present Perfect and I tried out some experiments.
Well, first I'll say I talked with knighty long ago, and I know what problems they were having with sharing unpublished stories, but they were loath to crack down on it too much as they also knew a lot of editing was occurring that way. So it's unfortunate they finally did go for the nuclear option, but there is still a small respite. Here is a small workaround, but one of very limited usefulness. Back to what PP and I found through trial and error.
I found it curious the story edit page would still have the ability to set a password for people to view it as unpublished. I mean, if they 404 all unpublished stuff, it would be useless to have a password, right? Well, it turns out that everyone gets 404'ed if the story has no password. But if you set one, it gives a one-day window for someone to view it. I don't know what that means. Maybe PP gets a one-day window starting when he inputs the password, and a different user might get a window starting three days later when he first inputs it. Or maybe it's one day from the time I set the password in the first place, no matter who's accessing it. And maybe there's a new one-day window if I change the password again. It's too time-consuming to investigate all that.
I can envision a couple of brute-force approaches, depending on which ones of those speculative statements are correct. You could create an alt account, put your stuff to be edited in there, and share the account password with your editors. You'd all be able to see the story indefinitely, and when it's ready to publish, do so on your regular account.
Another way, if the password is good for a day from the time you set it, no matter who accesses it, but changing the password starts a new window, would be to change it daily in a way your editors can predict. Have it be "one" on the first day, "two" on the second, and so on. Maybe PM your editors once a week or so to remind them which number it's on. This would obviously require a lot more attention to maintain.
For me, I typically get editing help on the GDocs version before I even port it over here, so it doesn't affect me much.
4566559
Thanks for this info. Further research suggests that my unpublished stuff was just deleted with the changeover, so probably reconstructing it all just to have a one-day window on views won't help that. I appreciate the intel! I guess the only way to host a link collection of non-story fan art is offsite now.
4566825
Deleted? Hm. I've got several unpublished stories, and they all seem to be there in my list, but I haven't clicked on them all to make sure I can access them. The one I did try worked fine.
4566825
I asked knighty about your stuff getting deleted, and he says it shouldn't have been. What'd you lose?
4566825
And last update. I talked with knighty some more, and the one-day thing was just a login limit. If you share the password with someone, it'll kick them out if they're logged in for a solid day, but they can just log back in and view the story again.
4567428
A couple unpublished pieces and the hub I used to link everyone to for the Cadance stories. Nothing huge.
4567936
knighty was asking me what you lost, since that wasn't supposed to happen.
4568090
No heroic efforts for retrieval are needed, but just to track the process, I am missing the unpublished story files "Pegasus" (empty except for cover art), "Photograph" (had actual content) and "Cadance of Cloudsdale" (the last being not a story but a pre-Groups index page).
EDIT: I see the problem. "View My Stories" only views published stories, and the expanding menu, which does show unpublished stories, cuts off after a time, so very old unpublished stories can't be accesssed that way (that's how I found "Photograph" again, as it's not so old.) I may be just missing a menu. Let's follow up private if anything more needs to be said so as to not spam Horizon here. Thanks!
4566559
To confirm and possibly expand what you said:
I added a password to my Wordcount Testing "story" about 72 hours ago and haven't touched it since. The password is "horizon" if you wish to experiment.
In another browser that's logged out of FIMFiction, I am unable to access that URL under any circumstances, just getting a 404.
In another browser that's logged into FIMFiction under an alt account, that story URL goes to a password page, and I am able to log in. This means that passwords do not expire 24 hours after you set them. It's possible they expire 24 hours after first use, but from what you say, that doesn't seem to be the case. I hope.
"Nuclear option" is a pretty good descriptor. :\ But then I've been salty about this ever since they first started cracking down.
4568136
This is a problem of bad UI. What you're missing is that the word "Stories" in the menu which pops out a side submenu is also itself clickable, and leads to https://www.fimfiction.net/manage/stories, which is the only page you can see your unpublished material from.
Pasco, if you're still talking to Knighty about this, he could solve it trivially by adding a "Manage Stories" link within the submenu that goes to the same URL. Having the menu item do double duty as a link and a trigger breaks a lot of UI expectations.
Edit: Submitted this to the issue tracker.
4569203
I very much like how you used a lot of technical words to tell me that it's someone else's fault that I didn't click on a thing. Hooray!
4566533
I had (have) a couple of stories which I left unpublished because I wanted the content readable but I didn't want to clutter up people's search bars/my story page/etc. The "wordcount testing" story I linked in the comment above is one of them: I was using it to document the exact way in which FIMFiction's word counter worked. (That's now obsolete, but I also had a chapter in which I played around with cool formatting tricks and comment hacks.)
The other two are:
* the entries to the Last Dreams of Pony Island contest — the ~25 submissions for the final chapter, which are of no interest to anyone who hasn't read that story (but aren't canon to that story, so can't really be added in on their own)
* my Hard Reset 2 omake (a side story written by a fan, and two script-format things)
"Accessible but unlisted" was the perfect default for them, because they're only of interest to a specific subset of fans. Now I have to choose between moving them offsite, cluttering up my published stories list, and losing that content.
4566268 4566148 4565668
Knighty announced in a site post a while back that he wanted to use the FIMFiction codebase to also build a repository of original fiction with a similar curation model. (Though how he wants to do this if he's specifically locking out the Patreon-walled story model is … well, an open question. What's the benefit to authors of publishing on a site where you can't monetize your original content?)
He made very clear after comments blew up that it was not going to replace ponyland, but be a separate front-end to the site, and people who wanted only ponies could keep using fimfiction.net with no major changes and just ignore the new stuff.
4569395
Oh. Jeez sounds like there's gonna be a lot of new updates.
4569383
Ahh, yeah. Pascoite and I figured out, and had it confirmed by knighty, that unpublished stories now require a password to be viewed. If you don't have a password, they come up 404 to anyone trying to read them.
On the upside, this will mean no more accidentally reviewing unpublished stories! :D