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This week I'd like to talk about two of the new features coming to the site soon. I've shared this a bit with the authors, but I wanted to share them a little wider. This is a more focused view for readers. We currently have one way for authors to group their stories: Series links. They work, but I've wanted them to be more obvious. So, with the new version, we're giving a bit more depth to our Series. Series now has a description. We can also add a series banner and special enhanced displays for series that have special circumstances. Authors should take note of the red Xs on the side. We can now very easily remove stories from a series (and yes, it asks to confirm the delete, so no accidents) or reorder the stories by simply pressing the up and down arrows. But a series of stories isn't the only way to group stories in the next update. As anyone who has ever read Tom Clancy, Mercedes Lackey, J.K. Rowling, or Rick Riodan knows, you can have a whole bunch of different series featuring different aspects or couples that all take place, along with stand-alone stories, in the same world. And hence, the next new feature: Worlds. Worlds function almost exactly like Series, except that there is no order like in a series and you can add Series to your world. For the sharp-eyed readers here, you will spot "Contributors". For the purpose of this demonstration, I added dkstories' Dreams of Humanity Series to my Psionic Corp world. Series listing also allows contributors, though I didn't show it in the example above. Also in the picture, you can see that Series has one highlight color (black currently) and Worlds another (Violet, currently). Also, Dreams is tagged with Premium, so that is also listed. I see this feature getting used for authors who share the same writing world or for authors like @Comicalityand I who write stand-alone stories that share the same area. In the example, you see two of my Anthology entries which are stand-alone entries in my Psionic Corp world. Good news too, current existing stories in a series will import in as is. The Author or staff members will just need to go and add a description to the series page, and it'll be good. (if one isn't added, it'll just look as it does now) The browse menu will now have a "Browse by Series" and "Browse by Worlds", as you can see in the right-side menu in the above image. There are other things coming as well. But as you can see from the screenshots, the test server already has these features working

Hello everyone! It is that time again. The Stories Archive software on Gay Authors has been updated. We've had a whole lot of bug fixes and a couple of new features added. IMPORTANT NOTE: Stat's are Rebuilding for the next few days. You'll know when it's done because not every story will be ranked #1 with 0 views. New Features Site level Story view statistics are now available. We have been collecting timestamped story/chapter views since Jan of 2018. That is just shy of 26,000,000 story/chapter views that have a timestamp associated with them. NOTE: for privacy sticklers, no personal data is collected here. You can now go over to the new Story Stats section and see what people have been reading, set the time frame and the genre and show the list. Story level statistics are now also available. You can click on the story in the site level list and see the details of views by chapter in the time frame you choose. My Stats. Authors will be able to quickly see how their stories are doing with views. This data is broken down into All Members, Members or Guests. Administrators also have the option to view Premium Member group views. (again, no personal information here). This allows you to get an idea of what people are reading, if you want to make sure there is more of that available. (This is exactly what we are doing with Premium Member group views... what do Premium Members like reading? Get more of that.) Series and World link embedding now works properly. That is, if you place a link to your series or your World into the editor, such as your signature, it now properly formats like a story link would. We now have the ability to allow a chapter to be edited without the story being edited. This is important to authors that would like to be able to fix typos in their Anthologies without the system throwing a hairball about editing stories in restricted categories. Stories only reputation is now visible on your author page to just the author and Staff. This will show you how close you are to leaving the moderation queue through promotion. Bug Fixes Story widgets now obey settings for devices. Which is to say, when you view the site on desktop, you'll get more information visible. If you view the site on a mobile device, then we reduce the menus down to the bare minimum to improve the speed Review links in notifications are no longer broken. This was patched onto the site a while back and this is the official fix. Links to your reviews in a notification should work properly. Automatic Link Title should simply add a number to the link title if a story with the same automatically generated link exists. Should this remove the confusion when everyone names their story the same thing and the system previously gave you an error. We can now properly delete chapter comments again. There was a bug preventing us from doing it. Leaderboard function is going to be what it is for now. It's quirky from a programming standpoint and the minor issue we're experiencing is not currently worth the cost of trying to work around it. Goals widget should now be usable on Mobile devices Weird bug where the Promoted Author banner was not showing properly to members/guests has been fixed. Miscellaneous notification bugs fixed. Multi-author approval system for World's and Series should be working properly now, where the author can improve instead of requiring an admin to do so. Story Update activity Stream, is no longer showing unpublished stories. I am working on a FAQ entry for using the story stats. That will be up soon.