For those who like a darker look to their web sites, we've two new skins available - Fire and Electric blue.



These skins make use of some of the cooler new CSS features found in modern browsers such as rounded corners, shadows, gradients and rotation. Therefore, they won't work so well in legacy browsers. At the moment the compatibility pecking order goes:

Chrome: everything works
Safari: 99% works
Firefox: 90% works - enough to use the skins
Opera 10,11 alpha: still lacking some CSS 3 features
IE 9 beta: still lacking many CSS 3 features
IE 8: erm, no

We had a problem on the server around 20:00 EDT last night where a buggy program caused the server to run out of memory. The first symptom of this was that people were unable to login, then a little later the site stopped rendering pages properly. It also caused some tracking email messages sent around that time to contain an error message instead of a list of tracked stories.

We've now passed last year's level of participation with 1,500 voters in this year's CoA, and we are approaching an average of 700 votes per category. However, it's still a close race in many categories, with 3 instances of a 1-vote margin between 1st and 2nd places.

You have until the end of the month to cast the deciding vote

We have one month to go until voting closes in this year's CoA awards which is plenty of time for you to enjoy reading some of the nominees that have made it into the second round that maybe you missed when they were first posted.

A reminder to all those who've voted in the first round: you can now vote in the Best Crossover Story category, and can also vote again in any of the categories where your chosen nominee didn't make the cut.

Click here to cast your votes

We appear to have some hardware problems with one of the server hard disks at the moment. At some point in the next few days, the site will go down for a few hours while the disk is replaced.

If the main site is unavailable check http://status.tthfanfic.org/ for updates.

The first round of voting is complete and the nominees in each category have now been trimmed down to the top 5 (or 6 in the case of a tie for 5th place). Well done to all the authors that made it. 1242 people voted in round 1 casting a total of 20471 votes - that's an average of 445 per category. Here's how round 2 works:

• If the nominee you voted for in round 1 made the cut, your existing vote is kept. If you change it, it will be as if you never voted for the original nominee and supported the new one from the outset.
• If the nominee you voted for in round 1 didn't make it to round 2, you can now make a second vote in the same category and your original vote will also be kept in the final scores.
• If you didn't vote in round 1, you can still vote in round 2

Click here to cast your votes

You'll be pleased to hear that you can now search the site by character name. You can either add a specific filter on other searches using the prefix "character:" or just search normally with the character name as a keyword, and the site will now use the character field to help rank the results so that stories where that character has a significant role now appear near the top of the results list.

Also, when browsing categories you can choose to filter the list of stories by the most popular characters within that category.

To provide the data for this feature, the site will now scan each story shortly after it is uploaded and attempt to a) find which words in the story are names of characters and b) determine which of them has the most 'screen time'. It does this by analysing each paragraph of the story and trying to spot who is the primary subject, and then assigning the entire paragraph to that character.

You can see how a particular story has been classified by referring to the new pie chart on the Statistics tab, which shows the top 15 characters that were identified (as long as the accounted for at least 1% of the story). Note, there may up-to a one hour delay between a story being added/updated and the character data being analysed.

This also allows us to answer another long debated question of whether Buffy, Willow or Xander is the most popular character:
you can now see the Top 30 characters accross the whole site on the Miscellanous Site Statistics page.



There is also an author-specific version of this chart on the Profile page that shows the leading characters in an author's stories.