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.

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.

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.

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.

Fixed

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

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.

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.

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

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.