Register | | Login | Help | Contact Us
SVUfiction.com will be switching hosts soon and we'll be aiming for a seamless transition. Our previous hosting situation has lead to ongoing problems on the administrative backend, deterring access and uptime of the site databases in an unimaginably complicated way.
Suffice to say that the forum tables are intact but the software needs to be reinstalled. More frustratingly, email communication from the site to the administration has been sporadically reliable given the backend of our email service, so I have not been getting your doubtlessly countless emails about the site's problems.
Validation has temporarily been removed in lieu of a validation team, entrusting you all to adhere to the site's traditional rule system without a monitor.
Once we reach a height of stability with the technical details of our hosting and coding, we will gradually reinstate both the old validation methods and more open communication (maybe through an e-ticket program to deal with issues as they come).
In the next few days, keep the fanfiction coming and abate grammar faux pas with constructively critical reviews (as Darwin intended). Feel free to comment on this news item to vent your thoughts. Hang in there gang. I'll keep you updated as we go.
Best,
Rachael
Site Administrator
What a relief to see this information! Based on some of the stories that have posted lately, I was afraid SVUFiction was losing its edge in the fanfic community. The fact that this site DOES think proper grammar, spelling, sentence structure, coherency of a story, etc, is important is what makes SVUFiction heads above all the rest!
And I know I am not alone in saying 'thank, God, the site came back up and thank you for changing hosts!' The inconsitency and downtime of the site has nearly killed us SVUaholics!! SVU and SVUFiction.com 4-ever!! " ) Bensler
Jabyar,
I've been looking into that problem and it looks like it stems from a Microsoft Word import or copy/paste issue. Word likes to inject its own special, weird version of HTML that isn't agreeing with the new host server's character set.
I'm going to see if I can dive into the files of your stories we have stored and remove what's causing the problem, or else fix it on a server-wide basis.
In the meantime, in Firefox if you go to View -> Character Encoding -> Western (ISO-8859-1) when viewing your stories, the question mark issue resolves itself. This is also a tip others can use if they run into the same problem with other stories.
Are my stories the only ones to have vanished or were other authors affected?
wcgreen,
There are no other authors that were affected to my knowledge, but it's quite likely that others have not notified me or were not able to.
I have no idea why your stories vanished. The site problems that occurred last Fall only related to weird mySQL/PHP VPS server problems and should not have had any effect on the story files, which are saved as plain text. But once our old host "fixed" those problems, other problems like your missing stories and the mangled forums popped up.
The only other way I think of that could account for their disappearance would be if someone with administrative access purposely deleted them. I can of course say that I personally didn't, and I do trust those who have previously earned this access (all past validators). But at the very least I can thin the list of those allowed administrative access, in case it was somehow a security issue.
I'll try to do some more investigative work on your missing stories, but in the meantime I do apologize. Considering all that you've put into this website, it's ridiculous that this somehow happened to you of all people. I'm torn between apologizing excessively and sitting back completely flabbergasted by the bizarre mystery of your inexplicable and suspiciously specific misfortune. Perhaps I should send you cookies.
Cookies aren't necessary. Just having you available and the site up again is enough.
I don't think I've ticked any one off--at least, no one has mentioned it to me. I'm content with the cosmic accident explanation. I've worked on enough projects to know the least anticipated thing always happens.
As soon as things are settled, I'll reload everything from my backups. If you need any help, let me know
Wendy
Rachael,
Thank you for posting this news about the site. I--and I'm sure I'm not the only one--am happy to know that the site's issues are being addressed. I/We really, really appreciate your efforts.
Thanks again,
--Trish