Author Archives: Xing

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.

The email problem we encountered a couple of days ago really took a toll on our feature push schedule. An external factor due to a 3rd party mistake was the root cause of all the mail delivery problem. The 3rd party was able to resolve this matter on their end but it nevertheless wasted two full days of our time. No one is perfect and we are just glad the problem is behind us so we can move forward.

April Schedule:

• First week of  April: Complete the 4 character support for all part of the site. Currently the category listing page and story line-items are not showing all four.
• Mid to Late April: At least one large feature push. If everything goes smoothly, April will overshadow March by a significant margin.

Fixed

• Random chapter text not found error. 
• Dark theme making drop-down menus invisible.

Triage:

• We are investigating some minor issues with IE8 browser not saving font changes. Regardless of the eventual fix, we highly recommend all Vista/Windows7 users to upgrade to IE9 immediately.  XP users should use Chrome/Firefox as a temporary workaround. 

Notes:

• Many fonts in the fontastic panel will not be available for Windows XP users. XP cannot correctly render many of the newer fonts without changing system configuration and we have decided to drop the support of these fonts for XP users. XP users can only select system type fonts such as Verdana, Arial, and a few others.
• IE6/7 Support. We will no longer officially support users on IE6/7 browsers. Please upgrade to IE8/9. IE6/7 is way too old and we will not test any future features on them. The site will still function on pre IE8/9 but just not officially supported.

Email alerts have returned to normal operational status and all new alerts should be delivered without issue. Note that old alerts that were dropped or undelivered by email providers will not be retried.

We will continue to monitor the email stream for anomalies over the next few days to make sure everything has returned to 100% health.

We are still working on the email delivery problem. Please be patient while we sort this out and it is going to take the better part of today to resolve this.

For now, PM and Forum alerts have been disabled. Review/Story/Follow/Fav alerts are being delivered with best effort but some users might still be effected until a final fix is in place.