It's that time again! Here's a rundown of what went on over the past two months in more or less chronological order of when they were released.

• Story covers, avatars, and story backgrounds now have the option for you to upload an image. If you are using an external url as your image, AFF now also backs them up for you (this was in response to Photobucket disabling everyone's images without warning).
• Image albums are now available for every member to upload all of their images to for use in their stories, blogs, and other content. Once again, this is to help those of you who lost their ability to embed Photobucket images.
• Finally figured out and fixed the issue where some members who try to post story links in their content end up having malformed "/story/view/view" URLs.
• You can now upvote stories as long as you have a minimum of 10 karma points (down from a requirement of 25) since email verification seems to have drastically cut down the incidences of vote cheating.
• Chapters now have an upvote link at the bottom of the page to remind readers to upvote if they enjoyed the story.
• Album images and videos now have comment sections.
• Polls now have improved commenting which includes proper comment notifications and the ability to reply to parent comments.
• Links to YouTube video or AFF-hosted user images (from albums, stories, avatars, etc) that are posted to feeds or comments now embed the respective video or image within the message automatically (try it to see what I mean!).
• Links posted in user feeds and story subscriber feeds are now clickable.
• The Public Image Gallery is now available for viewing images that members have listed as public.
• Created "Latest Image" and "Latest Videos" widgets to help these community submissions gain exposure.
• Created the "Daily Story Comment Streak" to help encourage more story comments and support the authors.
• Created the "Story Comment Streak Rankings" to acknowledge consistent commenters.
• To prevent spam comments, a commenter downvoted by an author will no longer earn karma points for a comment posted on any story or blog post made by that author nor will any comment by that commenter help them continue their comment streak. To cancel this effect, upvote one of their comments.
• Now preventing accidental multiple form submissions (for those of you who double or triple post by accident).
• Created an "Undiscovered Stories" section meant to help readers find possibly under-appreciated stories that received a lot of effort from their authors but have had low exposure so far.
• Comments made on stories eligible for "undiscovered story" status now earn an extra bonus karma point. Note: I understand the concern that this may lead to comments that are less than genuine but incentivizing commenting is actually only a small part of why it was enacted. The real reason why the comment bonus was put in place was to be able to attract more readers to stories that possibly should be getting more attention and that is done by highlighting them in the story listing results with the "comment bonus" status. So where normally, someone looking for stories may just pass over a story in the search listings maybe due to an uninteresting title or a bad description, I am hoping to grab their interest enough with the bonus for them to go in and take a look at the story. Comment bonuses are given to stories that authors have put effort into writing so there's a decent chance someone stumbling into it may like it. In short, this is to help stories that readers may be routinely passing over in the search results but could actually be hidden gems.
• Videos and album images now have view counters to help you measure the popularity of your post.
• Advanced search form now allows you to search by min and max total word counts for stories.
• Story subscriber feed has been relocated to just above a story's comments for better visibility (apparently, some people never knew this existed until this change). You can now also click through the story subscriber feed link and read all past messages posted by the author.
• Emojis and other supplementary (weird) characters can now be embedded in most submission sections of the site except for wall posts and story comments (because of technical issues). 💩
• Fixed chapter counts in story listings where only publicly viewable chapters are counted now as opposed to including the draft chapters in the count as well.
• Flat-fee first-come, first-served hour long promoted ad placements are now available for blog listings, discussion listings, and individual tag listings. These promoted ad placements are meant to be a more affordable alternative to the regular ad calendar for members of the community to advertise. The only catch is that since it is much cheaper than the regular ad calendar, you'll have a lot of competition for these slots so you have to be fast to get them!

For September, I'm going to try to work on solving the wall spam problem. This has been an issue for a long time now and my first foray into trying to solve it was the "1kp per message" setting for non-friend messages. It's only had moderate success since I'm still seeing people around who are still pissed at advertiser spam and the setting itself is widely misunderstood. I'm going to try figuring something else out.

PAX is in Seattle! It'll be a fun weekend.