Monthly update time! This will be a short post since I'm working on something that came up that I just found out about and will have to post a new blog talking about it in a few days.

• Authors can now designate translators for their stories (including themselves). Translators can then link their translations to the original story. Each translation credits the original author as well as the translator while the original story lists every translation available.
• Story text is now non-selectable by default.
• Chapter word counts are now recorded and displayed.
• Total story word counts are now recorded and displayed.
• Story listings now show the total story word count for each story.
• Increased story and blog comment karma earn limits.
• Increased karma earn limits from new story upvotes.
• Increased karma earn limits from new story subscribers.
• Improved anti-cheat mechanisms against karma harvesting for all karma earning activity.
• Promoted ads now record and show the number of clicks and total views of each ad in the ad calendar.
• Added thumbnails to promoted ads.
• Added Google site search to the advanced search page.
• PM section now has an "unread" filter.
• Added [M] and [TW] markings in chapter navigation.
• Web and mobile push notifications are now sent to subscribers for new story updates.
• Web and mobile push notifications are now sent to author followers for when new stories are posted.
• Web and mobile push notifications are now sent to blogger followers for when new blogs are posted.
• Improved speed and experience for the blogs followed listings section.
• Profile stats are now links that lead to the relevant sections.
• Now able to reply to only specific people in the user feed without sending an alert to everyone in the thread.
• The iOS app now has back button functionality.
• Lots of bug fixes ( more fixes than features this month =/ )

So I found out about the problems people are having with PhotoBucket (See: PhotoBucket now charges $399 for third-party hosted images). I personally think that PhotoBucket doing this without warning is unreasonable considering it had been used as a free image host for years with millions of images embedded in thousands of sites but it's their service and they can do what they want with it. Unfortunately, many Asianfanfics members also use their services and are now without images.

There are free alternatives of course and the image host I've been advocating for a long time now is Imgur but I've come to realize that depending on the services of other sites is a risky gamble. So starting last week, I've been working on a way for Asianfanfics members to be able to host all of your images on Asianfanfics. We're going to start with stories and avatars for now where all images will have unlimited bandwidth and I hope to expand to members being able to upload even more images to their accounts for use in their content. I'm hoping to also have a few advantages over Imgur where we'll try to ensure that the quality of the image is unchanged when it is uploaded so your photos can maintain high quality (Imgur employs heavy compression and other space-saving processes for some images especially for anonymous uploads).

There are two main reasons why I've been hesitant to do this:

1) Cost - This is expensive to do as evidenced by PhotoBucket now charging money for it. Imgur just about breaks even. I think we can do it though there is no going back if my estimates are wrong.

2) Risk - What happens if someone uploads illegal pictures to the server? Will my servers get shut down without warning? This one's tough since we've gotten shut down before by some random person on the internet making untruthful accusations (we were back up in a few hours after I straightened it out but that was a bad day). If they uploaded a bad picture on purpose then it would have been even harder to dispute.

Despite the above, we're going to try anyway. I think PhotoBucket springing their new restrictions without any warning for their users just bothers me (there must be millions of dead images on the internet now including some of my old stuff from a long time ago!) so I'm going to see what we can do about it. I'll let you guys know a few days from now!