FictionPress & FanFiction Blog

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.

We have found the cause of today’s email alert outage and are working on a solution which will take a few hours to activate.

For precautionary reasons, we have paused the delivery of all email alerts until the situation is fully resolved. Note that password recovery, email change activation, and signup emails are not effected.

Thank you for your patience while we get this problem sorted out.

We are currently diagnosing a strange email alert issue that is affecting a sub-set of our members which started earlier today.

If you are missing significant amount of email alerts in the past few hours, please leave a blog comment with the name of your email provider. For example, if your email is joe@hotmail.com, just leave a comment with @hotmail.com. Do not leave your full email address for privacy reasons.

With your help, we can better hunt down the underlying cause.

Launched new option to set UI (User Interface) font in addition to the Reading Mode font.

Here are the current default settings:

• UI font: Open Sans
• Reading font: Verdana

New configurable fonts:

• Droid Sans
• PT Sans
• Open Sans
• Roboto
• Ubuntu
• (System Sans Serif Fonts) Verdana, Arial, Helvetica
• (System Serif Fonts) Times New Roman, Georgia, Palatino

UPDATE: If you are unable to change font size on the reading page, please let us know your browser, browser version,  and system type.

As result of all the great feedback we have resolved most if not all of the font-sizing and jagged edged problems that plagued some users and especially those with Windows XP/Vista PCs.

We have also tweaked the default font-sizing to be 1 size smaller for most displays except for HD+ (1600×900 resolution or higher) monitors/laptops and this new setting appears to be the current happy medium.

For the devoted Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Comic Sans fans or anyone that like the idea of a font buffet, keep an eye out for another update later tonight.

Viva la fonts!

UPDATE: Our developers decided sleep deprivation was not too good for quality control and thus a decision has been made to suspend all pending feature pushes until tomorrow.  Devs are human too, sometimes.