FictionPress & FanFiction Blog

To upgrade some of our network gear, we will need to disable site access for about 15 minutes starting at 1AM US Pacific time. We apologize for this slight inconvenience.

Please note our network is currently being targeted with a sizable network attack.

Majority of site features are working as normal but some are operating in degraded mode. We are currently working with our network provider to resolve this external problem.

Problems due to ongoing attack:

• Email Alert Delivery. We have currently disabled email delivery to prevent any lost mails in transit.
• Network Logins.
• Page might be loading slower than normal.

We will update throughout the day as more info comes out.

UPDATED (2:13PM US Pacific Time): Attack has stopped (lasted 1 hour and 5 minutes) and all services have returned to normal. We will not sit quietly on this and will find the source of this attack to prevent future incidents.

Please note the search engine will not return the latest data for most of today pending the completion of several important upgrades.

Update on iCloud Email Delivery

We have confirmed that iCloud is performing “silent” drops meaning no one, not us, nor the intended users, are notified of any problem with email delivery. Everything goes into a black hole.

Our job is to deliver the email to iCloud servers (think of it as the Postal Office) which we successfully do but we have no control at what iCloud does in the final leg of inbox delivery (think of it as the Postal Delivery Man). With iCloud’s silent filter currently in place, you will never know what emails you might have lost.

Issue has been forward to relevant Apple engineering team and they will attempt to resolve it on their end.

UPDATED: The following changes introduced a bug which resulted in some reviews/docs/forum posts having unintended single spaces injected into the text. Problem has been fixed and the bug duration was around 5 minutes.

Fixed:

• Arial font not working in Fontastic Panel.
• DocX (Document Xchange) submission preview was not showing proper font colors.
• Chapter jump menu cutting off long chapter titles.
• Spam-like reviews making the reviews page wider than available space.
• Some search engine filters resulting in error notices.

We are introducing an experimental new texture (background) option for our Fontastic Panel in “Reading” mode. Only applicable to story reading pages and only with the default  dark-on-light  theme. This new addition is subject to drastic changes and thus the experimental tag.

With 8 different paper like textures to choose from, readers that love the default dark-on-light reading them can now chose the best text to background contrast to reduce eyestrain from extended reading.

Try it out and send us your feedback.

Resolved issue with IE8 users not being able to save font preference between page views.

Fixed

• IE8 browsers not preserving settings in the fontastic panel.
• In-Page table sorting for some pages within the user admin area.

We have confirmed that Apple’s historically unreliable iCloud email system which service @mac.com, @me.com, and @icloud.com emails is currently silently dropping emails and affecting our alert mail deliveries.

We want to emphasis this has nothing to do with us and everything to do with iCloud’s broken spam filtering which is well documented on the web over the last month.

If you are affected, please choose one of the following three options:

1. Check your iCloud email account’s Junk folder for our alert emails. If you find them there, mark them as not-spam. If you do not find our emails in the Junk folder and have not received any in the past 24 hours, go to option 2 or 3.
2. Contact Apple Care. All iCloud users are paying members and deserve a better product, and politely let them know you are unable to receive emails from @fanfiction.com and @fictionpress.com. Please note the .com in fanfiction.com. Calling is the best option. If enough people complain, they will fix this problem.
3. Hate to suggest this since we know users will resist as they have already paid for the service, but we recommend users to sign-up for  a more reliable email service such as gmail or even outlook (formerly hotmail). You heard that right, many top free email providers are much better than iCloud and this is not just only us saying this.

If enough people complain to Apple Care support regarding their email filtering issue, they just might fix it.