May 20, 2024 Release Notes
StoryForge updated to Build 38 (NDS5W3FY4) on May 20, which is our biggest update since the launch of the original beta back in January. Through a combination of the great work that our own development team has put in over the last few months, and some extra help that StoryForge received as a part of our participation in CodeLaunch, we are thrilled to share the release of some of our biggest features yet!
What’s changed with this release?
We’re introducing a brand-new reader experience and story discovery page. We've rebuilt these pages from the ground up to allow you to discover and read stories on the platform in new and engaging ways. All of the tools you're used to are still there, though it may take a little while to find everything using the new layouts. We hope to use the design language of these pages to improve the visual consistency of the platform over the coming months. Check them out here if you haven’t already!
We’re implementing a new and consistent layout across our core application features. For those of you using light mode, please let us know if we missed anything - our development team has largely been on the dark side for the last few months and we’ve done our best to make sure everything works well in both modes. StoryForge uses your device’s theming preference, and we plan to add a toggle button soon to allow you to switch back and forth.
Introducing cover art on stories! You can now choose a cover image for your stories by clicking on the cover image itself in the editor. It's free to select an initial cover image for your story, and it will cost a few Quills in order to swap to a different one. If you change your mind, you can swap a story’s cover back to a previous choice for free. We're partnering with Pexels to provide a wide image library to start, and we hope to expand the options available to you in the future.
Tags are now a public resource that are immutable once created. This means that we've removed the ability for you to edit or delete a tag once you create it, but we have added the ability for you to tag your works with tags that others have already created. Right now there is a limit of 10 tags per story, and next week we’ll be merging together similarly named tags to make story discovery even easier.
Removed star ratings from comments. This is based on user feedback and our own testing, where we realized that wasn't quite the right direction we wanted comments to go. We greatly appreciate all of the feedback you’ve left authors, and we hope you continue to do so even if you’re not giving a star rating.
And, of course, lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. Seriously, if I was to list all of those out, we would be here all night. The team has been working incredibly hard at processing all of the bug reports and feature requests, and we greatly appreciate everyone’s feedback and patience while we take care of everything.
Since we haven’t shared full changelogs to the website in a while, we’ll also announce that back in April we fixed two bugs that a lot of folks (including StoryForge staff) noticed:
You no longer need to sign in every day! Once you sign in, if you actively use the platform, we’ll keep your session active for a much longer period of time. You may need to sign in again periodically or if you clear your cookies, however the daily sign-in bug has been solved.
Longer stories are now supported. Previously, stories were limited to about 100 KB of text — that’s roughly 15,000 words of English text. That limit has been increased to 20 MB, which is about three to four million words — on par with some of the longest books ever published, depending on how you count it.
Thank you for continuing to support us and each other on this development journey, and thank you to the entire development team for all of the fantastic work that has supported these releases! We’re excited to continue to bring new features to the StoryForge community and we can’t wait to hear what you think of these latest ones. You can use these new features today by signing in at app.storyforge.com, and if you have any feedback on the platform, please fill out a feedback ticket by clicking the feedback button on the right-hand side of any page on the app.