A Friendly Reminder

I thought that this would go without saying, but I guess some folks need to be reminded. The members of the Cabal are volunteers. They dedicate off hours from jobs, schools, children and families in order to maintain some level of quality control over the content here on D&G.com.

Incase anyone is wondering, the level of quality control we're looking for is not much. As the Site Guidlines state:

Spelling and grammar must be acceptable. This includes your title and summary. What do we mean by acceptable? Fewer than one mistake per hundred words, and absolutely no net-speak, ever.

Every author submitting to the archive has to at least scroll past these guidelines prior to submitting any chapters. When our Cabal members find enough errors to reject your fic based on any of our rules, they can simply send you the no letter and delete your fic from the queue. If they take it upon themselves to fix spelling, grammar or name errors in your fic and notify you of it, this is a favor to you.

They are under no obligation what-so-ever to do this.

Any sniping, cursing, or other abuse of the Cabal members will be an immediate cause of deletion from our archive.

Being polite is not too much to ask.

A Lot of Random Stuff

As we draw closer to the end of our first month at DracoAndGinny.com,
it occurred to me that I should take a look at our hits and see what the site
is actually doing, as far as traffic is concerned.

HOLY COW! Is all I can say. A brief break down of the hits we've been getting
follows.

There have only been six days this month (and we only opened up here on the
5th), that we have not had at least 1,000 hits a day. We're averaging about
3.36 hits per visitor, which means that most of our hits come from repeat visitors.
As I looked at all of these stats, I chanced upon some really interesting info
-- the most visited stories show up on our statistics page. So, in my infinite
geekdom, I decided to make a top 15 most visited stories list. Remember, this
list only has to do with how many hits the story page for each of these gets.
I just thought it was interesting and that I would share.

1. Deflowering Ginny
   Weasley
   


2. Exquisite Irony


3. Never Forgotten
   


4. Dragon and
   Angel


5. Sex-Ed
   
   


6. The Baby's
   Got A Secret
   


7. Cabana Boy
   Draco Series
   


8. On Fire
   
   


9. Rest In Pieces
   


10. Interludes
    


11. Amici ed Amanti
    


12. Fifteen Years
    


13. A Bit of the
    Dark Sinister


14. The Gifted
    Amissio


15. The Weasel
    and the Malfoy

Also, Lauren over at Draco and Ginny Awards asked that we inform you of the round two nominations.

There is a plan in the works for our own little contest here on D&G.com with the prize of Gmail accounts. More information on that will be forthcoming.

To close out this incredibly long news blurb, I'd just like to let everyone know how much we appreciate your patience with getting everything back into correct working order. I'm still strugling with getting the strike tag in place, but it'll come, eventually. I swear. ;)

Contests!

We haven't gotten organized enough to have one of our own, but I wanted to point out to our fabulous authors that there are two fic contests going on now which y'all might be interested in. One is sponsored by ClanMalfoy, August Moon's Surrender, with paid Livejournal time for the winner. The other is sponsored by ToujoursPur, and in keeping with that site's theme it's about a familial relationship within the Blacks - the prize is either a copy of the HP book of your choice or a DVD of them movie of your choice, which is pretty good, I think. So, go read the rules, then write some Black fanfiction! While neither of these contests is D/G specific, they certainly allow for D/G within them, and I think that some of our authors could do a wonderful job with these themes.

ATTENTION

As those of you who've submitted recently know, there has recently been an updated, expanded version of the submission rules posted. Apparently I hadn't been clear enough with the original, two-entry version I had typed up, and for that I apologize. These new rules are a standardized version of what I'd been thinking all along, but never set out in plain terms.



Please go read them. You can find them by going to your account and clicking like you're going to submit a story, and every story on the archive is subject to them, even ones that were accepted before this formalization. If your story fails to comply, fix it - otherwise sooner or later you'll be getting a little note from a member of the Cabal suggesting you do so.



I have said this repeatedly, but just so I know everyone has seen it: I highly recommend a beta reader for everyone. I'm pretty darn good at beta reading, but I still have my own fics read over by someone else because it's very hard to spot your own mistakes. There is no one so perfect that they will never make a typo, and this is your fic, your baby, the finished product that you are showing to the world. Do you want people's impression of it to be that you don't care enough about your own work to do it right?

All hands Bulletin

Since we've had quite a few (over 100 as of five minutes ago) of our recent 'FYI emails' bounced, I figured I'd post a copy of Mynuets email here.

Megh has once again proven herself to rock unspeakably hard, and the new site is up and running!

Because I was a dumbass and forgot to close the site for submissions at the same time as she took the backup of the database, there were some things lost - if you uploaded a story or chapter in the past week, double check that it's still here on the new site. Also, I'm not sure if all of the reviews made it over - if you're missing some, let me know and I'll paste them over. Otherwise...

Everyone, join me in the happy dance! Thanks to the generosity of several contributing members and the incredible awesomeness of Megh, who deserves our praise and adulation, we are now good to go at http://dracoandginny.com!

--Mynuet

Remember! If there are any problems, email us! We've got this nifty new address, Archive@DracoAndGinny.com. The spambots haven't found it yet, so the only mail we've gotten has been the hundred or so Bounced emails.

-Megh

Tenatively Open

Well, I've done all I can, and I think we're as ready as we'll ever be. The archive is now open on it's new home, DracoAndGinny.com.

When visiting. please understand that we're still working out all the kinks and bugs. But we should be up and running at full capacity shortly.

SQUEE!

Thanks to several very generous donations, we were able to buy a year of service, and so very shortly we'll be moving house to new space! Exciting stuff! :D

Moving out!

We've wibbled, and we've decided: The Fire and Ice Archive is going to move to its own hosting package, because we've grown faster than anticipated and it's not fair to the other people on grey-space for us to suck up all the bandwidth. To that end, I'm going to be all shameless and ask anyone who feels like it to donate to the "Buy us server space" fund. If you want to use paypal, send it to mynuet@yahoo.com. There'd be a nifty button here, but I can't get it work. :P




If you would prefer to send a check or money order, contact me for my address. This is all voluntary on your part, however much or little you want to give. Once we have enough for the initial year I'll let y'all know and then keep records as to who paid what so that we can save up for next year and on into the future. We're still debating what hosting company to use, although we think that Globat seems likely. If we go with Globat, we might be able to do something like give pop3 accounts to people who donate over a certain amount.

Emailing Us, Features

Just as a quick FYI, if you're going to be emailing the archive, I do not open any mails that are marked as high priority. Normally mails marked with high priority are spam, so I don't even bother. We get an inordinant amount of spam, and I tend to just go through the main page deleting email from addresses like 0.225.24546adfakdkfjh@ajdflj.net and if the title is something like "Important Document!", or if it's got an attachment. So, keep those things in mind when you send us an email.

I also have a question: How many of you are paid users over at LJ? Could you leave a comment here? I'm working on a couple of features for the site, and one would be something that will only work for paid users on LJ. If you could comment on this news artical, that would be super helpful.

Thanks!

New Layout

As you can probably tell, I've finished the newest layout for the Archive. The degree to which I prefer this one over the old one is rediculous.

Remember this is still in beta testing, so please send me any comments or anything you may have. Think something is hard to read? Dislike the way something looks? Let me know. I may not (actually probably) utilize your comment on this layout; but I will definitely keep it in mind next time I get a hair up my rear to re-do the look.

Curious about the top art? This banner is part of a drawing I did as a birthday gift to the wonderful Mynuet. It is an original piece of art, so if you are tempted to use it for anything know that I will not allow it. This is gift art, meant for Mynuet only. Y'all are lucky she allowed me to make this skin. She could have said 'No.' ;)

Just kidding. But seriously, there has been a rash of art thievery throughout the fandom recently and I do not kid around about this. Just like the art I used for the last banner/layout, it is not open for grabs. If I see it anywhere else I will make a stink and I will have it removed no matter what it takes.

On that happy note, I think I'll close this with a plea for imput on the layout. Let me know what you think, please!

P.S. If you don't see the new layout and want to (because it really is quite spiffy), log in and then go to "edit personal information". At the bottom of the page there's an option for selecting which skin you want. There you can select either the classic layout, the classic layout in wide format, or the new Slytherin's Bride layout.

--Myn

Awards

In addition to awards contest thingamabob at ShatteredSanity.net (see the entry just below for link), there's also a D/G awards contest thingie going on here. Their deadline is July 31, so check them out soon if you're interested.

A Couple of Things

Lauren from, Shattered Sanity.net, has contacted us letting us know that her site has begun it's nominations for D/G Fanfiction awards. I'll have the button to her site, and Magical Theory and a couple of other sites down there on the affiliates box *points to bottom of the page*, sometime tomorrow.

Some people have reported their log-in sessions timing out before they get a chance to read and comment on a story. This has to do with the security settings of your browser. The site sends your browser a cookie, which expires after a certain period of time depending upon your browsers settings. If the cookie expires before you get the chance to review, you will have to log in again to do a signed review. It is a pain in the rear, I know. The only way I know of to prevent this from happening is to either lower your security level (mine is set to medium, and I can leave the browser window open for hours without having to re-login), or make the site a 'trusted' site or somesuch. I'm researching how to do this on various platforms and browsers, but have yet to find anything too consise. I'll post here when I've found something, or made something more to my liking.

Woot!

We're growing huge! I never expected to get this much traffic right off the bat, but it's very gratifying.

Of course, it would also be gratifying if I could tell potential authors that they could look forward to getting reviews. *bats lashes winsomely* So please do review stories you enjoyed reading. We don't currently have a reward system or the like for it, but you'll get a warm fuzzy glow knowing you made an author's day and encouraged them to write more by your interest, and isn't that a great reward by itself?

Log In Issues; Are you on this list?

The following users have had their confermation emails returned to us, for various reasons. If you are on this list and have yet to recieve an email (or to have solved the issue), please contact us ASAP so that we can resolve the issue preventing your registration.

1. Gisele
2. Emma S
3. dracosbabe1019

Some of these are kind of old. Also, if any of you are switching email's please remember to update your address with the site, as we've got some returned mails from people that I know are changing their addresses.

I'm working on making up some new layouts and streamlining the current ones, any suggestions/ideas? Please contact me by using this link (here) and click on the "contact" link. Or just email us at archive [a] desertzephyr.net.

-Megh

Not cranky yet...

When you upload a story, double-check how it looks before submitting. I've been getting stories with random line breaks in the middle of sentences and five lines between sentences and so on, and much time could be saved if each author took the time to look over their work and make sure it looks the way it should.

Registration Woes and Wonders

I've noticed that quite a few of the confirmation emails have been getting bounced back from new members' email addresses. Our mailer deamon attempts to deliver the confirmation email for two days, after that it sends us a notice. So, if after two days you still haven't received a temp password, let us know. We can manually set up one for you.

Can you believe we've hit 120 members? Wow!

No, FAQ...

In responce to some of the problems we've had so far, I've written up a little FAQ. You can reach it by clicking on that Help button right up there, in the menu.

Any questions or comments? You know where to send, 'em!

Bueller?

Anyone out there willing to volunteer to be a beta? The rule is that we don't provide a beta, but instead let people know why their fic was rejected, but I thought it would be a nice thing to do for a struggling author to have a couple of names that could be pointed to as a starting place for where they could look for one. Comment here or send me mail or IM or skywrite over my house or whatever to let me know your thoughts/opinions/etc.

So...

After many days of ... difficulties, we are back. Unfortunately we're back with a fresh start over - but Mynuet and I are working to get everyone added back into the archive. As Mynuet mentioned in the "All Hands Bulletin", as she calls it, if reuploading your stories is just something you can't deal with - and you would not want to be part of our archive because of it - please just email us at archive@desertzephyr.net. We'd much rather add your stories ourselves and retain all our great authors than not.

As always, please let me know of any issues or wonkyness. I'm still working on the bizarreness that is the no-login-from-www.fireandicearchive.com. I'm not sure what I can really do about this, but I'll be looking into it. -Megh, the Mortified