Hotmail is rejecting email messages from our server at the moment. If you have a Hotmail or Windows Live address registered for your account, you may miss some messages. We are currently trying to get this sorted out.

If you are a hotmail user and have an alternate email provider, you can change the email address registered to your account in the settings page of your profile.

Update 15th March: Microsoft have fixed their spam filter and this is issue is now resolved and hotmail messages are being delivered.

Those of you with an e-book reader will be pleased to hear we now support downloading stories in MobiPocket format in addition to E-Pub. This means that using an Amazon Kindle you can now download stories directly from the built-in web browser as e-books. To use this feature, select the Whole Story link at the top of the first chapter. Usability enhancements to make it easier to reach this link will be following in the new year.

It seems when we updated the server operating system back in October, the time zone stored in some user profiles was corrupted. If this has happened to you, you may see incorrect dates against some stories/reviews and if you are having email notifications about tracked stories delivered at a specific time of day, they will be sent at the wrong time. Those who haven't logged in between 3rd October and today won't be affected. Everyone else should verify the time zone setting in their profile is correct.

Note: this does not affect the forums, only the main site.

The results of this years Crossing Over Awards are now published on the CoA site. Thank you to everyone who took part and congratulations to all of the winners.

The 2010 award for Best Crossover Story went to Chilord. The runners up were Jaded and NotJana.





The Best Crossover Author award this year went to Jezaeiri





As always, unashamed gloating from the winners is encouraged in the I would like to thank... forum.

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