Hi, Sweet! That one's easy since it already exists. It was a new feature that came along with the site update a few months ago. I either forgot to mention it when I listed the new features, or it just got overlooked since there were a bunch of changes. Anyway, to set your account to receive email when an author responds to your review, go to edit preferences in your account info and check the box that says, "Contact when author responds to review:" That should do the trick.

I got a suggestion in chat (via the ever-awesome spuffy luvr) about members being able to mark where they've left off while reading a story. I messed around with the bookshelf feature, and from now on it will keep track of the last chapter you clicked for every story that you have on your bookshelf.

If you add a story to your bookshelf by clicking the [Add Story to Bookshelf] link on a story's table of contents or from the story listings (e.g. the most recent page or titles page), the story listing will show, "You added this story to your bookshelf on (date)." since you haven't viewed any of the chapters yet. Once you click on a chapter, or if you add the story to your bookshelf while viewing a chapter, the story listing will show, "You clicked (chapter number) of this story on (date)." The chapter number will also link you directly to that chapter so you can pick up where you left off. As you continue to read, the story listing note will update to reflect the last chapter you read and the corresponding date. It will always show the highest number chapter that you read, so if you click on a earlier chapter to catch up or re-read something, that will not affect the note.

Since this is a new feature, it wasn't saving the last read chapters previously. When you look on your bookshelf, all the stories will show the, "You added this story to your bookshelf on (date)." note even if you have read chapters in the story. As you continue to read from now on, the story listings will update properly.

Let me know if you have any questions or if any thing seems glitchy. 

Something I would like to see is a list of published authors. It would be nice to easily see if an author you really liked has published anything and under wich name. I realize that this is information you mostly don't have, but it would have been nice though. 

Magnus, that's really up to the authors themselves. We certainly don't mind if they link to their original/published fiction in their profiles, but we have no idea who is or isn't published. Also, if they're published, we have no idea if they want their original works tied to their fanfiction. Sorry I can't be more help with that one.

Rebcake (and spuffy), this one's easy since it is already available. In the top menu, if you click on the Authors tab, it takes you to a master list of authors with links to their profile pages. However, if you instead click on Browse By:, it takes you to the main browse page. From there, you can choose to browse by authors. The list of authors this leads you to looks identical to the other list, however, the links don't lead to the author profile pages, they lead to a listing of an author's stories which is sortable by categories, characters, ratings, genres, warnings, word count and complete/wip.

Also, Rebcake, thanks for the feedback. It's always nice to hear that the changes are making a difference.

Edited to add: I changed it from Browse by: to just Browse so that it would be more obvious that it's linking to something.

I would love it if the story pages kept the summary as part of the top banner (or whatever you call it, the text that stays the same for each chapter and appears above the main body text. Something to remind me how many words and chapters, what the story is about, for those times when I have multiple fics open. 

I probably should have kept better track of the changes I've made since now I'm trying to remember them, and things are a little hazy . Because of that, I may miss a few items, but I wanted to list some of the new/edited features so you all would be aware of them.

• I fixed a bug where you had a link to add author/story to favorites even when that author/story was on your favorites list. The link will now say remove author/story from favorites instead.
• I created a new list for the top lists page. You can now view the most prolific authors by word count (I know you were all curious about this).
• Nothing big, but I added an OK link on the confirmation page that you're taken to after adding a story to your bookshelf or read list. The link will take you back to the page you were on before adding the story to your list.
• If you're an author, when you view your story stats, you can now see how many members have your story/stories on their bookshelves.
• I added some new sort/search options to the browse pages (this includes most recent, titles, bookshelf, etc...). You can now narrow down your results by min/max word count and in addition to the most recent and alphabetical sort options that used to be there, you can now also choose to sort the results by word count, read count and review count:

That's all I can remember for now. If you have any questions or additional comments, please let me know.

Thanks!

One thing that I have wanted for a long time is having a Holiday Stories in the Categories.  Right now that category only shows two stories and I know that there are a great many more.  Anyway that a Holiday Stories could list a complete listing?  It would really be helpful to have a good listing of the holiday stories.

On the new feature of listing stories by word count - that is one of the ways that I search for works - so great big thanks for this new seach tool.

@nmcil, I can update the stories that Pfeifferpack listed in her Holiday fic recs from last year, but I don't know all the stories well enough to go through the entire archive and label all the holiday stories. If someone wants to volunteer to compile a list of the holiday stories we have, I'd be more than happy to use the list and update accordingly.

@chocoholicannanymous, I can definitely see how that would be useful, but the way the site is set up, I just don't see it becoming an option here since it would require a complete code re-write. I know that some sites have tests for members who want to become betas, and people can't be listed until they get a certain score. However, we don't have such a test because we don't really have the extra time to be beta gatekeepers. I think at this point, all we can offer are the beta profiles. It's pretty clear by what each beta has written (or not-written) if they would be of some help to an author.

Thanks to you both for your suggestions!

Is it possible to have the "holiday fic" or "holiday story" added in the "summary" description for the search process?  This would be an easy way to gather the holiday stories.  another way is to ask the writers to send you the info. 

Also would like to add my PLEASE to the complete incomplete search process - this is a huge time saver for readers.  I always want to know the status of a story. 

nmcil, I'm confused. If I do a simple summary search using the word holiday, a number of stories show up. I'm not sure why you're saying it's a failure.

Also, I don't get this, "Also would like to add my PLEASE to the complete incomplete search process - this is a huge time saver for readers.  I always want to know the status of a story. " You can search for only completed fics already in the advanced search page, and you can choose complete only or work in progress only in browse pages in the drop-down that is labeled all stories.

I think it would be a great idea to add a "Recently Completed" list on the sidebar of the main page, near the "Recently Updated" and "Featured Stories."

Why?

Well, I don't know about many of the other readers here, but I know I often click through from chapter to chapter on a sort of auto-pilot, just trying to find out what happens next.  I can't tell you the number of times (probably in the hundreds, or even the low thousands by now) that I've come to the end of a WIP, accidentally closed the tab/page/window/whatever, and completely forgotten about the fic for months (or years) simply because it was SO GOOD THAT I FORGOT TO PUT IT IN MY FAVORITES.

It would be really awesome if there were a handy list on the front of the site that could tell me if any of the fics I'd forgotten about (i.e. fics that weren't originally posted as complete one-shots--with the "Yes" checked for the Complete? question--and had multiple chapters) had been finished since the last time I'd visited the site.  If it was sorted by date of completion, that would be good as well, so I'd know where to start reading the updates list based on when I last saw the site.

Hi! First of all, I really love your site and thanks for all the work. I love that you started archiving the good older fics so that they don't get lost when other sites are taken down.

Here's my suggestion. I came up with a challenge for the first time. This idea just wouldn't leave me alone. When I posted it, though, I couldn't find it again because the challenges are sorted alphabetically and there are only certain criteria you can search for. Also, many people use symbols to propel their challenge to the top of the list, which makes it kind of difficult to find what you're looking for. I think it would be more user-friendly if the challenges were posted by most recent. That way, we could check regularly and see which are the new ones. Maybe there should be a category in the advanced search so that you can search not only for challenge responses but also for the challenges.

Thanks, have a nice weekend and I hope this helps!