Ask a Moderator — Part 23

[ToBeOrNotToBeAGryffindor]

Please view our Forum's Frequently Asked Questions and Archive's Frequently Asked Questions before posting your questions here, and also make sure your question has not already been asked. (These threads are searchable!)

[The more people ask the same question, the more pages there are, which cause more people to not take the time to read it, causing them to post the same question and the vicious cycle continues]

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[Padfoot11333]

Question: When I went to go read Natalie's Lacuna Mentis a few minutes ago, the table of contents looked like this:

summary summary summary

Rated: 3rd-5th Years
Categories: Dark/Angsty Fics Characters: None
Warnings: Character Death, Mental Disorders, Sexual Situations, Strong Profanity, Suicide, Violence
Challenges:
Series: None
Chapters: 3 Completed: Yes
Word count: 10460 Read: 2588
Published: 07/19/11 Updated: 07/19/11

chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3

I was wondering what was up with this!

Lily xxx

[ToBeOrNotToBeAGryffindor]

Padfoot11333,

This should be a temporary thing. An update was being performed on the archive's server software, but the update kicked out some of the custom coding (which governs a lot of the shiny features on the archives). It's being poked and prodded behind the curtains, and it should be fixed soon.

[Padfoot Patronus]

Do you think mnff and the forums could be affected if the SOPA and PIPA bills are passed?

[ToBeOrNotToBeAGryffindor]

Padfoot Patronus,


This was posted earlier today on the Mugglenet Fanfiction Facebook page:

Here at MNFF we generally avoid anything political as we believe everyone has the right to free speech and free thought.

Today however, this freedom is being threatened and we must speak out. MNFF is a creative fansite, encouraging members to use existing material to inspire their own content. Under the controls of SOPA and PIPA, we would not be able to offer this service and MNFF would likely be shut down. JK Rowling herself has said she has no problem with fanfiction, but our creative use of trademarks and copyrighted imagery would be in breach of these acts and we would be silenced.

"Hogwarts is threatened! Man the boundaries, protect us, do your duty to your school!" yelled Professor McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Andrew Slack of the HPA shared this with us: Today an untold number of people across the world are standing up for a human network that is changing the world for the better. Today, we are showing an old order that the time is over when American people would look the other way as laws like SOPA and PIPA get passed to supposedly "protect" artists. Today, the Internet strikes back to expose the Orwellian language for what it is.
The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) is joining wikipedia, Boing Boing, Reddit, Mozilla, Word Press, Google, and thousands more doing our duty to protect our rights! Check out their web site now...its the same as Wikipedia and thousands of others: ---outside link removed---

Join the largest online protest in history: tell Congress to stop this bill now!

I have a slew of personal opinions on this matter, but it's not really the place to share them. However, as you can see, this very well does threaten the fabric of not only MNFF, but of all fan fiction not based on public domain work.

[acaciacarter]

I'm having trouble searching the forums, so I apologize if this has been asked already:

Is there currently a problem with the Tiny MCE for story submission and editing? I haven't been able to get it to show up no matter how many settings I toggle, and the regular text editor gets cross when I forget about an emdash or curly quote. Does it have something to do with the Nargles in the story submission process right now?

[ToBeOrNotToBeAGryffindor]

The TinyMCE had been inadvertently disconnected due to a software upgrade performed on the archives. It is also why the table of contents for stories look a bit strange and, I believe, why the queue is currently broken. All of these things are on the To Fix list already, but for the moment, the queue issue will be taking precedence.

The Search function has been disabled for a while now, due to a forum software upgrade (buggy little upgrades, aren't they?), as well as a handful of other things (such as one's inbox being full of messages from Array). We know these errors are there, but fixing them has proved to be quite difficult. Once we've got these things ironed out, there will probably be an announcement to that effect so that everyone can once again fully enjoy the benefits of these features.

[iMusic17]

I've been trying to post a new poem in the queue, but every time I try to add a chapter . . . I get the same message: "A fatal MySQL error has been encountered", and it never saves.

Do you know what's happening?
Thanks!
Ellie (iLuna17)

[welshdevondragon]

Ellie- this is a problem everyone's encountering at the moment. We are looking into it, and hopefully things will be back to normal soon.

Alex

[Padfoot11333]

Adding on to Ellie's question--do you know when the queue will be back up?