What's New on Short Stories 101

A bug in the system caused email verification links to stop working. This has now been resolved.

The writer's age at time of submission now appears under the 'About The Author' block on the story page.

The total number of recommendations, favorites, reviews, and views that a story has received will now appear at the top right of the table on the 'Your Submissions' page.

The login recaptcha will show after 5 failed logins every 24 hours.

You can now see who has recommended / favorited stories.

Helping to better connect users.

You can now change whether your story is fully listed, partially, or completely private.

Due to the overwhelming amount of stories that have quality issues, but aren't easily dismissed, a new status has been added. Stories that have quality issues will be marked as 'Approved with issues,' and will only show up in the author's profile rather than the whole site. You will be able to request admin review for full approval by editing the story and amending any issues.

Story listings on the "Your Stories" page now feature a link to view reviews on the story reviews page.

You can now order by highest and lowest rating on the "Your Stories" page under "Your Account".

Submission recommendations now appear in notifications.

First step to making the friend system more relevant and interactive.

Looks snazzier, I hope.

Improved layout and now features read time, reviews and recommendations count.

They weren't updating properly.

Links in some emails, such as the "Fix Issues" button, were broken. They are now fixed.

It was just getting the way, having to scroll past it every time someone viewed a conversation thread.

You can view a larger version of users' profile pictures by clicking on it on the profile page. Larger versions are saved from here on, so you will have to re-upload if you've uploaded your avatar before this update.

Story listings on the "Your Submissions" page now feature more details.

Our RSS feeds were a little malformed. They've been touched up to appear correctly again.

A slippery fish that occurred when user wasn't logged in.

The story listing is now neater and more aesthetically pleasing.

You can now add an 'advanced bio' to your profile by going to profile settings under the account settings tab.

Just so it's better than what it was.

The bookmark tab now pops out from the side and looks better. It also has a 'clear bookmarks' option and shows the last time you visited a bookmark.

Friends system has been implemented. Friend requests will appear in the top right, next to notifications. Right now, the system is limited to sending and receiving friends, so it's pretty barebones. In the future there will probably be additional functionality with the friends system, such as sharing stories with friends only, seeing online friends, etc.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is all the hype in the world of Google and mobile browsing. Basically, it is a highly-optimized version of the page, specifically for mobile phone users. You may notice that some pages in Google display AMP in their listings. AMP has been implemented for story pages.

Errors were found when testing the site in the W3C validator, so these have been fixed.

The user profile is now much more aesthetically pleasing and functional.

Users can now add a cover picture to their profile page to make it more personalised and visually pleasing.

User profile listings in the user directory have been re-designed to include avatar and cover picture.

In story listings with banners, authors will now have their age displayed next to their name.

On the story search page, you can now filter by story length via the minimum and maximum word length options.

You can now also filters by author age via minimum and maximum age filters.

Just some additional timespans.

The read time was always under a minute, regardless of the word count. This has been fixed.

Users will now receive notifications when their stories are moderated, reviewed, or favorited. They will appear globally in the top right under the bell icon. Which notifications a user receives can be configured in the notifications preferences section in account settings.

The main menu on mobiles has been tweaked to iron out some issues.

The date on reviews, review comments, and private messages now follow a "time ago" format that is updated live.

An issue with the pagination on the filters on user profiles prevented loading any page other than the first. This has been fixed.

Reviews at the bottom of stories are now loaded in using AJAX, meaning they won't load in until you've scrolled to that point of the page.

Review comments can now be up to 2,000 characters in length.

Users can now remove their comments on reviews.

They were accidentally left reading the old rating system. They now read ratings from the new review system.

Users can no longer post reviews, favorite, or recommend stories that have not been approved.

On user profiles, you can now order stories by their length.

User profiles now have options to filter and order stories and reviews.

When a user is blocked, they can no longer leave reviews on stories by the person who blocked them, and vice versa.

The block button is now on the profile, instead of being exclusively on the message screen.

Users can now block each other from sending messages via the messaging screen.

Minor fix to the messages screen where it'd unnecessarily show "Yesterday" or "* days ago" multiple times.

Fixed bug where messages didn't parse special characters.

Category and genre descriptions now appear as tooltip on submit story page. Unpolished, but handy for the ones that currently exist.

For people who accrued many reviews incoming and outgoing, this will be very helpful.

Ratings on the site now outputs star rating based on decimal instead of rounded number

Read time on story listings now shows if it is under 1 minute (<1m).

Fixed a bug on the 'Highest Rated' tab where the incorrect read time was displayed.

The star rating and review count of a story now appears underneath the story's title for stories that have no banner.

Certain older stories that have no description are supposed to have a small excerpt of the beginning of the story to fill the void. A bug meant that it was not showing and showed as just "... (continued)".

Ordering by 'Highest Rated' will now order stories according to the ratings received using the reviews system. Until we had accumulated enough reviews, I'd left it to remain ordered by the old star rating system which has been disused since the implementation of reviews.

Feel secure knowing that your communication with the website is now encrypted. Notice the HTTPS in the address and green padlock next to it.

The account settings page has been segmented into different sections.

Users can now change their email preferences via the account settings area. You can decide which types of emails that you want to receive.

This is to future-proof messaging against spam, as well as prevent duplicate submissions from eager clickers.

Fixed an annoying bug where the textarea wouldn't scale back down after a long message.

The link is in the footer section.

Users can now message each other using the messaging system. Message threads will automatically load new messages every ten seconds while you are viewing them.

Users who had pending-moderation stories removed had their story count negated, despite it never incorporating the story to begin with. This caused negative story counts for people with low story counts. It has now been fixed.

The story title style has been changed to make it more prominent.

Story moderation emails (such as notifications of story approval) now look pretty. Email notifications will be extended to more functions later on.

There was a bug where stories that hadn't been approved were still appearing in certain sections. This has been fixed.

Currently, only users that are 14 years and older can register on Short Stories 101.

Don't have a banner image to hand when submitting a story? No problem. After a successful submission, users will be greeted with a gallery of random images from unsplash.it, a royalty-free image service. The selection can be refreshed to bring forward more images if none are suitable.

Authors who have many stories can now easily filter through their story listings that appear on the "Your Stories" page in the "Your Account" section.

Stories on users' profiles that number more than twelve are now separated by pages.

Story listings across the site now use a grid layout, incorporating story banners, as well as additional information such as current rating/reviews and read time.

Stories may now be featured if they meet the expectations for garnering such a title.

The search page now has filters for poem and featured stories.

Users can now sort stories from A-Z, as well as by number of recommendations, favourites, etc. Simply click the label at the top of the table.

Users now have their average review rating under 'Statistics' in their profile.

An error appeared when a user reset their password using the forgot password form. The password did indeed reset, but a blank page would have folllowed. This problem has now been fixed and users using this facility will be greeted with a success message.

Added fan fiction category as requested by one of our members.

Users can now 'recommend' stories. Recommended stories will appear under the 'Recommended' tab in the profile. Recommendations are intended to become an important metric later on.

Two new tabs have been added to users' profile pages: Reviews Given and Reviews Received.

You can now see who is online via their profile, or the green circle next to their username around the site. Online users can also be viewed in a list via the user directory (see site footer).

A loading bar will appear at the top of the page when an on-page event occurs, such as bookmarking, favoriting, etc.

Fixed a minor aesthetic bug that caused the top navigation bar dropdowns to stick with a white background after they'd been closed.

The browser will no longer have to reload, thanks to the implementation of AJAX navigation in these areas.

Users can now update their profile with links to their Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn profiles via the Account Settings page.

User profiles now display the average rating that they've received from reviews of their stories.

You can now review stories, along with a star rating. The ratings bar has been removed from the bottom of stories, and has been superseded by the story reviews system.

Stories may now have banners (or cover pictures) that are featured at the top of the story page. Simply edit the story and look to the bottom right of the page where it says 'Featured Image'. You can upload any size image, as long as it fits a minimum of 818 pixels in width, 415 pixels in height, up to a maximum of 5000 pixels and 5mb in file size - it will be automatically scaled and optimized to fit. These pictures also appear when you share the story on social media, and in the future, they will be implemented on the story listings throughout the site.

Story pages now have a simpler, more-streamlined design that also incorporates the new story banner.

Uploaded images for avatars do not have to be the exact size; it's automatically scaled and optimized. Also, you can now remove your avatar if you wish to do so.

If you're writing a new story or updating one previously submitted, changes will be autosaved incase something happens, such as a browser crash. Autosaves will be valid for one day.

Stories are now parsed in HTML instead of BBcode. The BBcode editor had various issues, so hopefully this resolves them.

You now have more options to format your stories with in the story editor.

They were not setup correctly before, but now they are.

It wasn't quite counting correctly before, but now it works as intended.

If your story has not been approved by a moderator, a reason may be given that will appear above the story. You can also request remoderation by fixing the issues on the story editing page.

The female gender will now appear correctly on profile pages, whereas before it appeared as male (oops!)

The fixed scrolling side block on the story pages was jumping and not functioning correctly. This issue has now been fixed. It will also stop when it reaches the bottom of the story, instead of the bottom of the page.

The length requirements for story descriptions has been relaxed to between 15 and 200 characters.

Each story page now contains 'schema' which will assist various web applications, such as Google, in identifying and displaying your story data in the way that they see fit.

User's can now enter a tagline (a short description) in their profiles by going to Account Settings. This replaces the lengthier user bios, which will now appear as paragraphed text in the 'Bio' block on the user profile page.

Revamped design that's tailored to be modern, intuitive and user-friendly. Changes include new logo and colour scheme.

Registered users can now bookmark stories to read later by clicking the bookmark icon next to the story listings. Can also be bookmarked from the story page. Bookmarks can be viewed and removed in the top right menu across all pages.

Users can now flag inappropriate or spammy stories.

Users who wield the 'Trusted Users' badge have proven themselves to be competent writers who adhere to the website rules. Their stories will be automatically approved.

Users can now select their gender to be featured on their profile.

Keep track of the stories that you've read by going to the 'Recently Viewed Stories' section in your account.

Star signs are automatically calculated by the user's given birthday and will appear on their profile.

New genres include: 'Autobiography', 'Informative', and 'Non-Fiction'

New categories include: 'Factual' and 'Serious

Replaced the old WYSIWYG editor that caused some problems.

For anyone interested in keeping track of website updates.

Fixed the abnormal behavior it was exhibiting, especially with pagination.

You can now search fellow users in the user directory. See the link in the footer.

Measures have been implemented to enhance login security.

Emails will be responded to as soon as possible.