I have posted a new thread on the forum (Here) which has links to many of the entries on mechanics in the BSV General Tips section, as well as links to several entries on Riters_R_Us. I'm hoping that prospective new authors will take a look at this thread at the same time that they read the rules for posting and will get information that will help them avoid that dreaded rejection letter. The thread itself will be found in the Support section, but I intend to try to keep it visible in the forum entry box so that it is easily accessed by everyone.

The new betalist is finally online. Rather than explain how it works here, I put an explanation at the top of the old list: Betalist - Old Betalist. I'll add an FAQ entry as soon as I have the time.

Questions? Complaints?

.. you'll notice (if you're logged in), that sometimes the number behind the thread-title is red instead of its normal color. Those red numbers mark a thread with new entries; as in, new since you last looked at the thread. Just like the little symbols in front of the threads if you go via the Forum link in the menu.

And for the admins: A red [A] behind the number means the thread is in the Admin only part of the forum.

Let me know if anyone has problems with this addition.

Been playing around with polls, and thought I might as well give one a life test.

Please note that the question is a serious one, I'm just combining it with the poll testing for convenience.

V O T E    H E R E

This is important for our Guest posters. You now have to enter a name when you make a post. Still no cookies or anything, so don't worry; of course that means you'll have to type in the name every time you post, sorry, couldn't be avoided. See, most Guest posters didn't sign a name, and it just got too confusing trying to keep track of who said what.

The names you put in will not appear at the same place as those of the regular posters, that way I hope we'll be able to ensure that everyone remembers that they are not a sure way of identifying someone. Instead they can be found where a regular posters signature would be.

Hope you like, thought it was the best way to balance reducing the confusion and making sure no one gets accused of something they didn't do.

I'm having some problems with my email at the moment, so please avoid using the contact forms on the Support page to send me a message, as sending an email is all they do.

Instead, you can use the Send email link on my author's profile. That will no only send an email, but also show the message in my account.

The above does not concern moderators - see Admin section on the forum.

Btw, questions regarding story validation should be directed to the moderators (Slaymesoftly and Always_jbj), preferably the one who took care of your submission if you know who that is. I don't do validations because of the second language issue, so I'll be unable to help you with most of the problems in that area.

We've started a new beta list - to be used only for beta information. Only one sign-up so far. If you were on the previous list and want to continue to offer your services, please add your name and contact info to the new one. Let's keep the old one around for adding tips, comments, and continuing discussions, but please use the new one for listing and finding betas. Thanks!

Some of you may have noticed that we've had some...what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, impolite visitors (no? you don't think that's the word? lol) on the chat and the forum lately. Not much I can do about the chat, although I have notified Dia, but I can and will delete any gratuitously rude, vulgar and pointless forum entries. We have no problem with the forum being used for discussions - even if they become heated at times; but anonymous posters who are there simply to be rude will be treated with all the consideration they deserve. If you see something and it doesn't go away quickly, let one of us know, will you? Thanks.

Just a quick note for those submitting a story...

Please remember to read the submission rules, you will find these in the 'Support' section if you would like to check them in advance, you also have to agree to them when submitting the story.

If submissions do not comply with the rules they WILL be rejected. The moderators' decision is final, so if your story is rejected for whatever reason (and if it is, you will be told why in an email), please do not email us to argue the point. We are happy to answer any questions you have, but arguing will not make us validate a story which does not comply with our rules.

I was going to do a long rant here, but I think I'll just point down to Dia's post from last March. I'd add to it: I, personally, (don't know about the other mods)will only edit and correct those challenges submitted by people who are obviously not native English speakers. Anyone else will get tossed if it's full of misspellings, netspeak, and so forth.
Please check through the challenges already up (and, yes, I know there are a lot of them)to be sure that yours isn't too similar to some already there. Ditto for fics aleady written. If we know that there are already a lot of fics with the same theme as your challenge, we probably won't put it up.
Also - PLEASE do not keep submitting the same challenge over and over just because you haven't seen it yet. If you submitted it, we got it. We either haven't had time to do anything about it yet, or we didn't take it for one reason or another.
Thanks!

Just a very tardy notice that the Bloodshedverse was the winner of the Best Fanfic Site award at the Sunnydale Memorial awards. Many thanks to everyone who voted for us. We love our members.

We've been nominated for Best Fanfic Website at the Sunnydale Memorial Fanfiction Awards. Thank you whoever did it. (I'll put up the button later, am at a customer's and can't upload the image right now.)

And since we're nominated and all, I should probably let you know that voting is open over there. Vote here.

Due to my being sick, it's been a while since the challenges were last updated, so I thought I'd mention it here - there are quite a few new ones. Check them out, some sound pretty fun.

Btw, remember my rant about the challenges a while back? I just deleted 18 out of 43 challenges because of atrocious spelling, total lack of capital letters, or grammar so bad that I couldn't even understand what they were saying.

Now, don't panic if your challenge isn't up, I left a few in the queue to be validated later (so more people will see them), and some I deleted because they were too similar to already existing stories or because they called for a non-vampire Spike and would have resulted in stories that can't be posted on the BSV.

As for the ones who submitted those 18 challenges though: I no longer accept challenges that contain the type and amount of mistakes that make it obvious that you didn't even try. Either check what you are about to submit or live with it being deleted.

Whenever someone uses the Send email feature in your profile, you now won't just receive an email, but the message can also be found under My Account -> View Messages.

The number next to the View Messages link tells you how many unread messages you have, so just clicking My Account will let you know if anyone tried to contact you.

You can mark messages you've received as read so that you can keep them but not have them show up as new the next time you check. Unread is also available should you need it for some reason.

Delete lets you delete the message, and if the message in question was sent by another member, you can even reply directly without bothering with email.

There has also been a change to the Send email option in the author profiles. If you're logged in while using it, the script will automatically use the name and email address of your account.

Any questions?

OK, you know what, I don't care if this is going to make me sounds like an absolute bitch, I'll say it anyway.

Story submissions on this archive are moderated, our rules say things like "proper grammar and spelling", so why is it so hard to figure out that the same rules would apply to the challenges? I get that you don't want to bother someone about proofreading those few lines, that you may not have the option to spell-check the text, or that English may not be your first language, but goddammit, there is no, absolutely no excuse not to capitalize the character names! And chat-speak? You've got to be kidding me!

I proofread and fix up the submitted challenges, but it would be nice if you could at least make some effort.

I've decided that if it is obvious that you didn't even try to spell things correctly and form coherent sentences, I'll not try to fix it up either, I'll just delete it. I'll make sure to add a note about that on the challenge submission form so everyone knows about it before hitting Submit.

Sorry to everyone who does make sure to use proper language and spelling in their submissions, this rant was obviously not directed at you, and your stuff will be in no danger of being rejected. This is for the people who think chat-speak in a challenge is fine, while capital letters and punctuation are optional.

Remember the post I made on November the 3rd about our ongoing problems with AOL? I checked the news, it was definitely on the 3rd - remember that, it's important.

Anyway, I made that post after I'd tested several variations to our contact-form in the hope of making it work with AOL email addresses. To do that, I'd also created an AOL account of my own *shudders*. Of course, none of the test-messages reached that account, hence my comment in the news. After posting that comment I emailed AOL in hope of some support *snorts* - not that I ever got a reply.

Just now I was researching something else and stumbled upon another idea I thought might help with the AOL problem, and logged into my otherwise ignored AOL account. And what do I see? Two of my test-messages are sitting in there waiting for me to discover them. Great, right? Well, not so much, since the date of those messages is November the 5th. Two whole days after I sent them. Makes me wonder how I'm supposed to run proper tests when I have to wait several days after a change to see if it had any effect.

Sorry for ranting, needed to vent, I fucking hate AOL!!! *deep breath* Ok, guess that means I'll be running tests over the next few days and try to figure out which settings I used for those two emails that went through. But hey, unless it was just dumb luck, apparently there is a way to get through to AOL accounts from this site.

If you register an account using an AOL email address, chances are you won't receive your activation email. If you have a non-AOL address available, use that; otherwise let me know, and I'll activate your account by hand.

Important announcements are NEVER done on tag. If I put them up somewhere else, I might mention it on tag, but never just there.

There, that should stop any speculations over the comments made by the troll last night.

Ohh, lookie, we've been nominated for Best Fanfic Archive, Best Established Site, Best Shipper Site and Best Site Name at the Solemn Graces Awards. Nifty, huh?

Somehow I thought this would be obvious, but I guess expecting people to know what I'm thinking is just as silly when it concerns the site, as in a fic. Anyway, I added a short note in the challenges section now, so you can let your mind-reading powers rest.

We only accept challenges that request a story which can be posted on this site. Not saying the author has to archive it here, but he has to be able to do so should he/she want to. So challenges that call for All Human or non-B/S fics are out; especially the latter. There are quite a few archives out there that accept all pairings, please post those challenges there. In fact, take a quick look at the rules on the Support page and check whether a response to your challenge can follow them, before you submit the challenge if you please.

As you probably have noticed by now, we're re-posting the old BSV round robin. I feel like I should clarify something about that, though.

What we're doing is: we're copying it from the original verse, and posting it here. The account we're posting it under is just a normal BSV account, the reviews do not end up with each chapter's author. In fact, we're using one of my email-addys for it, so if review-notification were enabled, I'd be the one to receive them.

I just felt like I should mention that, so you won't think the authors are ignoring you when you don't get a reply. They can of course still see the reviews, like everyone can; and if one of them were to ask me for the login-data for that account because they want to reply to your reviews, that'd be more than fine. But like I said, in this particular case, no replies doesn't mean you're being ignored.

You have to thank Richard for this one. He mentioned that it would be much more helpful, if the page title, when viewing a fic, contained the fic's title instead of just blantly stating "The Bloodshedverse :: Spuffy with Bite".

So a fic page now carries the fic's title and author in its title, and an author's profile carries the author's name.

Hey, lookie here: I just got an email that we've been nominated for Best Overall Site & Best Site Content at Insane Buffy Fans.

Thanks to whoever did this.

I tried to run a program earlier that checks a website for broken links. Since I deleted some unneccessary files from our webspace yesterday, I thought it'd be a good idea to make sure they really WERE unneccessary.

Problem is, that program apperantly accesses your cookies, and if they contain login data for a site, it uses that data. (No, that wasn't mentioned anywhere.) So it checked for broken links while logged in as admin. And while deleting fics, accounts, reviews - all that, works via forms and can't be done accidentially, the admin can delete forum-entires via a simple link. The program checked those links, and as a result deleted the entry in question.

I stopped the stupid thing as soon as I noticed that it was logged in, but I wasn't in time to save all the entires. - No reason to cry, right? Dia is sure to have backups, right? I do actually. The new one was being created right after the entires disappeared, and before I got home to stop it. - Still not that bad, knowing a few things about computers, she surely saves some of the older backups as well. Ha. Ha. The licence for my db-backup proggy expired and I'm currently unable to do that. The new key is ordered and all, but it didn't arrive yet.

So yeah, I messed up and the entries are gone. I'm so very sorry this happened. *someone hand me some rope please, there is a nice sturdy tree over there* You can bet I won't run anymore tests, checks, whatever, until the new licence-key for the backup program arrives. *whimpers*

For most of you this post will seem odd, but those that have seen/can see a certain other post will know what this is about. Everyone else, just forget about it. LOL

I do not, have not, nor will I ever delete a fic or account if it hasn't been requested by the author/member in question. Besides me only BSB has access to those features (because I saw no reason to revoke her rights when she left), and I seriously doubt she did anything like that either. Neither Always_jbj nor Slaymesoftly have the rights to do anything but validate/reject fics and post in the News section.

The only way I will delete an account/fic, is if it was specifically requested. And even then I will verify your email address first to make sure the request didn't come from a third party who wants to harm you. (The last time I deleted something was ComedyOfErrors a few months back, because she wanted all her stories gone form the web for personal reasons.)

If your fic/account suddenly disappears and you don't know what is going on, you contact me and ask! It could be a DB error, in which case I might be able to find the file and fix the DB entry. It could be an error in the code, in which case I absolutely NEED to know about it, because it could happen again if I don't fix it. It could be you accidentally deleted it yourself. It could be that someone hacked into your account (stole your pwd), and deleted things to spite you. The only thing it will never be, is me deleting something without your explicit request.

I added a new link to the menu that leads to the Fanfic Status Network. This is joint effort of some of the fanfic archives you all know. The BSV, the Spuffy Realm, Sweet Temptation, Nocturnal Light and Vampire's Kiss.

The idea is that we all will put up a link to that site, and keep it updated about the online status of the different archives. That way, if one of the sites in not reachable, you'll know you can go to one of the others and find a link there that will let you know what's going on.

In addition, you can subscribe to a mailing list on the Status Network, that will let you know about updates on the status of each archive.

If you visit any other archives that you would like to see added, let the administrator of that archive know about the Status Network and suggest they fill out the Become A Member form. The more archives are involved, the more use you visitors will get out of it.

Ok, a new tip for those of you that have problems recieving emails from the site.

Check your spam-filter (the local AND the online one) and see if you have a so-called whitelist. Add the following address to that list: httpd@web14.websitesource.net

That's the addy the server uses to send the emails. It's NOT the addy that shows up in the FROM: part of the header, so don't let that confuse you.

Dennis now has a place of honor on the BSV. He'll also dress up for the holidays, but since I don't know all the important holidays in the different countries I'd like your input.

There is a post up in the BSV lj that asks for suggestions. Here.

I'm stepping down as owner of the Bloodshedverse and giving it to Dia, who has already done sooo much work on it already, she deserves to get full credit for it! I'll still be around and am in no way 'leaving' the fandom, I just know that it is in my best interest (and the BSV's) to hand it over to someone who can give it the full attention it deserves! Thank you Dia for your willingness to take over!! *hugs you*

Yep, it's me again! I just wanted to mention quickly that while reviews are what authors 'work' for, opinions and reviews that border on rude aren't really appreciated. So if you're being an ass? Please stop. Thank you!

Authors, when you post a story that has been beta'd, please don't forget to thank that wonderful person(s) in an author's note! Thank you!

In light of Buffy/Spike Central not being online right now and Spuffy Realm's space limitations, I just wanted to assure new/returning visitors that you are more than welcome to register and enjoy the site REGARDLESS if you post fic or not. Happy Reading!