%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |  Announcements pertaining to Writing.Com! |
 |
With 124 entries, this past run of "Good Deeds Go Noticed"  was a great success, having it's tag carried in over 600 reviews!The winners are as follows: ♥tHiNg♥   gets 1,000,000 GPs (1st)Just call me Omni  gets 500,000 GPs (2nd)🌕 HuntersMoon  gets 250,000 GPs (3rd - Also, Tied Most Entries!)Jaye P. Marshall  gets 100,000 GPs (Honorable - Tied Most Entries!)Thank you very much to everyone who entered! Review On, ~~SM |
It's time to celebrate another huge milestone for our community, Writing.Com is now Nine Years Old! So, break out the cake and ice cream and put your party hats on! We've decorated the site and there's millions of Gift Points up for grabs in the many contests run by Writing.Com, our Moderators and other members!     It's a Great Reason To Party! We've hit another great milestone; Writing.Com is nine years old! Our community, its features and members have come a long way and we're proud to say we're still going strong! Help us celebrate this wonderful event all week long by writing, reviewing and meeting other members. There's a massive amount of things going on this week! All of the official Writing.Com birthday activities are linked from within our '09 Party Central, which is linked at the top of the "Site Tools" pulldown menu throughout the entire week (9/1-9/7).
... and don't miss all of the activities at:
 New Shareable Party Images!
Good Deeds v9.2 A simple contest for three (3) people to earn Lots of Gift Points! Just do five good deeds by reviewing any five (5) items on Writing.Com and you might win! ... A total of 1,750,000 Gift Points up for grabs! Without looking at the individual responses, we will pick THREE (3) random numbers from 1 to the number of responses we received. We will then look up the five reviews given by those members - public or private (we're Staff... we can do that.) and review those submitted reviews for quality and content. The three great prize awards for this running of the contest will be given to three different members; we will draw numbers until we have three unique people. For the complete rules and entry form, visit:
Happy 2 Year to Writing.Com's Shop Writing.Com's shop went online two years ago. It now has over 100 awesome products ranging from journals to bookmarks to games to new branded Writing.Com gear! Visit "Our Shop" from the header of any page, or directly at: http://www.Writing.Com/main/shop LOW PRICED Costumicons Are Available! We're practically giving away costumicons subscriptions during our birthday week! Each subscription purchased (or gifted) will last beyond the birthday celebration and will end on noon on September 14th, 2009. You can subscribe to or change your current costumicon from the "My Account" area or directly at: http://www.Writing.com/main/my_account/view/costumicons As usual, you can preview any of the larger portfolio images by clicking on the small image within the costumicons Store. Don't Forget: You can GIFT costumicons to others! A costumicons subscription makes a great gift! Send one to a friend from your "My Gifts" page TODAY! http://www.Writing.Com/main/my_gifts.php#spend Thank You! We want to take a moment to thank all of the members within our community. Your involvement and support of Writing.Com is appreciated by all of us and we look forward to serving you through many more birthdays!  Thank you for another great year on Writing.Com. We appreciate your continued support! ~~ The StoryMistress  andThe StoryMaster  |
| Greets, We've added a new tool to the Product Reviews area that lists the top 100 most active product reviewers. The new listing is linked from the Product Reviews listings or can be accessed directly at: http://www.writing.com/main/product_reviews/action/top_reviewers  Remember: Product Reviews can be added by members of all levels and they do not count towards any portfolio limits. And, of course, product reviewing makes a great writing exercise, so share your opinions of the last book you read... or video game you played... or DVD you watched!  Enjoy! ~~SM |
| Greetings Members, Message Forums are a very flexible item type. Since their initial addition to the site as a tool for members to communicate, they've evolved into have a number of very different and specific uses. The 10 new forum sub-types will help members to more easily find the forum they're looking to find. The following 10 sub-types have been added:  Activity Contest Debate Discussion Game Other Promotion Q & A Review SocialAll Message Forums will default to the Other sub-type until edited... so we encourage you to edit your forum and set the correct sub-type ASAP! Please note this is a new addition so if you find something wrong, we probably don't know about it -- please report it. Enjoy, ~~SM |
| Greetings Members, Book items have been limited to a standard 2 Megabytes per book across all membership levels. We're changing that to add increased capacity for higher membership levels... Upgraded Member books are still limited to 2 megabytes per book. Premium Member books are now limited to 4 megabytes per book. Professional+ Member books are now limited to 8 megabytes per book. Journal and Blogs limits have been increased for Premium+ Members: Upgraded Member Journals and Blogs are still limited to 725 entries. Premium+ Member Journals and Blogs are now limited to 1,450 entries.The increases have been tested, but if you find any of these new limits to be not working correctly, please report it to us as soon as possible! Best wishes, ~~SM |
| Greetings Members, I'm pleased to introduce a brand new service from Writing.Com, Offsite Mail Service. Offsite Mail Service is the ability to both send and receive your Writing.Com email through another service... such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo!, iPhones or Blackberries. The technical terms for what we're adding are IMAP and POP3. Please note, this feature is only available to members with a Premium Membership or above.To use the service, you'll need to know the following: Mail Server: oms.writing.com (oms stands for Offsite Mail Service) Username: When asked for the username to login with, use your full WDC email address, for example, support@writing.com. Password: Your email password is the same password as you use for the site itself. If given the option between IMAP or POP, always choose the IMAP option. Doing so allows all of your mail folders to be available offsite, as well. For best results: Select the option to leave messages on the server. That way, you can always read emails via the site. If you do not leave the messages on our server, they will no longer be available via the website email system.In addition, when given the option for SSL or a secure connection, please note we are waiting on final configuration of our SSL certificate. That being the case, some mail services (like the iPhone) will allow SSL and give you a warning which you can click to ignore... And some services (like Gmail) will return an error. When in doubt is may be best to avoid activating the SSL connection. Need help setting it up? Try: "Invalid Item" An important caveat is that WritingML is parsed by Writing.Com's web interface, not by the email server. Messages are delivered to your email box with WritingML intact. Any email you read offsite will not include any WritingML conversions... you'll just see the "raw" WritingML. While we may or may not make attempts to solve that in the future (even the solutions have problems), OMS still serves as an easy way to stay in touch. Again, we recommend members using the service select the option in their email service that leaves messages on the server so you can always read emails via the site. Please remember this is an initial beta test phase. I've been using it on my iPhone for a number of months working out some issues, and I love it... and some of you have gotten iPhone responses from me.  As always, we appreciate your feedback and bug reports! Best wishes, ~~SM |
The following winners for the July 2009 running of "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest" were chosen from the 47 entries submitted. Each entry was judged based on the criteria provided in "Short Shots: Official WDC Contest" . Congratulations to the following three winners: First: "Homage" by NickiD89  Second: "Invalid Item" by A Guest Visitor Third: "Invalid Item" by A Guest Visitor Thanks to everyone who entered and a special thanks to our dedicated judges for making a difficult decision! ~Diane |
| Greets, We'll soon be completing a long (very long) awaited update to the rating/reviewing system to allow for the individual rating/reviewing of Book Item chapters/entries. When we make that change, however, we have to deal with the major way that this change affects Gift Point auto-rewards on existing book items. Books with chapters (non-blogs) will then instantly be awarding reviewers for each chapter that they review, not just the first one. ... So, rather than come up with an elaborate and complicated toggle, when we make the update, we'll first clear out existing auto-rewards for Book Items (-- again, book items only). Authors can then re-evaluate how much they want to spend per chapter and reset their auto-reward on their book items. If you have feedback on this, we're interested; but at this time, overcoming this auto-reward "snafu" is our last major hurtle to making this important chapter-by-chapter change for reviewing. ? ~~SM |
| ** Beta testing and use of video embedding is available to Premium+ Members. ** Greets, The new WritingML embed tag can be used within Book Items (blogs, etc) to directly embed YouTube videos into blog entries and book chapters. Videos make for great commentary and, along with photos, make great multimedia aids and provide wonderful fodder for bloggers. Some Notes and Instructions: The new WritingML embed tag can only be used within Book Items (blogs, etc). It will not work anywhere else within Writing.Com. The tag takes 2 arguments, a "source type" and a URL. * The only "source type" presently available is youtube. * The URL is just a copy and paste of the URL that you provides under the video's info. It should look like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkYZ6rbPU2M Only one embed tag may be used per entry.An Example: {center}{embed:youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkYZ6rbPU2M}{/center} Given that "youtube" is the only source type, the tag will basically look like this: {embed:youtube:URL} Now, for your creative entertainment, the above tag yields the following: Please let us know any issues, suggestions, etc that may come up during the test of this tag. Enjoy, ~~SM |
| Following the release of "Photos for Blogs", it's clear more is needed to complete the photo blogging picture. As a step in that direction, we've added a new writingML extension for the photo tag: {fsPhoto:} This tag includes the photo in it's full size. Please note this tag is only available for use within Book Items (blogs, journals, novels, etc). Along with adding photos to blog, this new fsPhoto tag makes creating a "photo book" in your portfolio much easier, while taking up far less portfolio space. In addition, we've added a new "xlPhoto" tag that works universally, in any item type. This goes along with the existing "sPhoto" (small), "mPhoto", (medium), and "lPhoto" (large) tags. Best wishes, ~~SM  |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
