FicWad.com

That is one swanky site. One can't help but wish you both would just the eFiction development team, or at least post some mods. I'd kill for that "Keep me logged in on this computer for two weeks" bit. Figuratively speaking.

Mods are tricky, because we've changed enough about eFiction's structure that it's hard to take something out of FicWad and drop it into another eFiction install...

(To get an idea of what I mean, compare Ficwad's stories.php to eFiction 1.1d's stories.php.)

That said, "Keep me logged in" is actually pretty easy. It does require setting a cookie, and then checking for it on every page if the user isn't logged in. The approach that we took to this was to move most of the code that does login into functions.php, then store a cookie containing a hash of the user's password if they said to keep them logged on. In header.php there's a check to see if someones session has timed out but they still have the cookie -- if so, we call the login function and everything is taken care of.

I've heard about Ficwad. 🙂 I was at Acen, an anime convention at some fanfiction panel and that week on LJ and forums people had been mentioning your site all over the place as an alternative to fanfiction.net and groups. What a crazy name!

Cool archive! It's awesome that you and your husband started this multi fandom site. I adore the changes and stuff that you have made (especially the ratings karma- AWESOME!). I have Internet Explorer 6.0 and the layout seems a little off to me. Mostly on the right hand colum, the log in box is flush with the left hand side and the recent stories, because they are in a tiny space their lines seem odd.

If I may make a suggestion, i think that your archive is popular enough that it would look better (perhaps more professional?) if you removed the individual story content off of the main page, and moved it to its own last updated page that would show the last 50 stories added or something, it would have a little navigation tab at the top. And then if you moved the advertisemnt google block to the newly emptied section would make it seem less annoying and in-your-face.

Well anyways, that's just what I think. 🙂 I hope that your archive stays hot!

It's good to hear that we were getting mentioned at ACen! I haven't been there since 2002 (moved to CA), but it will live on in my heart as my first anime con, and first masquerade. It's really hard to tell how much people are talking about you, even with google and referrer logs. ;_;

The name came from a few factors... firstly, we'd been playing a lot of Katamari Damacy. And, of course, it's short, memorable, and slightly dirty. 😀

Yeah, we need to tweak the CSS somewhat. We're trying to do the layout entirely with XHTML, written semantically, which leaves us having to worry about browser incompatibilities. It's handy for reducing bandwidth requirements, though. (It also lets us do nifty things like not need a separate print view. Take a look at the print-preview for a story on FicWad -- it automatically gets rid of the navigation elements and simplifies things. I need to make it drop down to a black-and-white layout as well, I think.)

Karma we need to tweak. We're waiting until the system gets more use so we can try to work out what the best setting for some values is. (Max score, min score, starting score... and so on.)

I like having recent and featured stories on the front page -- it helps give a jumping-off point to random visitors. Definitely a thing to consider, though... personal likes do not necessarily popularity build. 🙂 ("Featured" stories is actually a misnomer, unlike the default eFiction method -- it's really just randomly selecting one high-rated story.)

Here at FicWad, we've written our own forum to match our snobby ideas of what a forum should be!

We like it, and we think that you should too.

(We're currently working on snazzing up the admin page so that we can let multiple admins handle our character and category suggestion system... which won't be a visible change. But it'll be shiny.)

I must say I really enjoy the site. Very easy to navigate and well-organized. Makes me want to start working on some scripts of my own. Unfortunately I still have to pick up my computer from FedEx. 😛

One suggestion: Use short URLs. That's the only reason I like FanFiction.net better. 🙂

Wow, you wrote your own forum? Awesome. 🙂 Looks neat.