We’ve Been Busy in July
It’s hard to believe that another month has come to a close — and, not just any month to boot. As of today, the StoryForge beta has been open for six months, and we’re thrilled to have seen so much great community-building in that short tine. Over 4,000 writers have joined our community since we launched, sharing over 1,700 stories and creating an even 200 Writer’s Circles — where stories are discussed and shared in meaningful and constructive ways. Thank you to everyone who has joined us on our journey so far!
In July, the development team has been hard at work adding new features and fixing bugs left, right, and center. While we’re reasonably confident that everyone is getting enough sleep, we are deeply grateful to all of the effort that our development team has put into the releases we’ve shipped in July. So, let’s celebrate what’s new!
By the way, if you want to see our change logs in real time, we’d highly encourage you to join our beta testers Discord server and subscribing to the #changelogs channel. We post there within a few minutes of each platform update. You’ll get an invitation link when you sign up for a StoryForge account, but if you’ve misplaced yours, just email us at help@storyforge.com and we can send you a new invitation.
Internal process improvements
I get it, talking about internal processes isn’t fun for anyone (and, trust me, writing the documents that go along with our new development process took quite a long time). And internal processes don’t create shiny new buttons for you, our community, to play with. So, you might be (rightfully!) asking why I’m giving internal process the first part of this post — and the reason is, internal process changes allow us to better plan for and deliver lots of development value.
Prior to July, we’ve had documents and spreadsheets all over the place that list feature requests, ideas, and relative priorities of all of the things that everyone wants the development team to work on. Keeping those documents in sync with one another, and understanding what the true capacity of the development team was, has been a challenge. Until now!
We’ve been collecting all of the feedback that we’ve received from you (our community!) about what we should work on next, any bug reports that you’ve submitted, and our own internal wish lists, and through these new processes we’ve been able to score and prioritize all of this work into a cohesive roadmap. We’ve also been able to create some truly gorgeous Jira boards and reports that help everyone on the team understand the status of a particular feature or bug fix.
All of this is to say: our development processes have improved significantly so that we can better serve you. We hope that you notice more frequent and significant updates and better change logs, and we’ll continue to refine this process as the development of the platform continues.
Without further ado, here are some of the things we’ve released in July as a direct result of these internal changes!
Comments from old manuscripts are now visible
The #1 feature request we’ve had for a while now has been making comments from old manuscripts available to readers, so that as new manuscripts are released, the conversation doesn’t get lost. Now, no matter which manuscript of a story you’re reading, you can always see all of the comments that were left on the story.
Because the contents of stories can change over time (that’s the point of editing and revising, after all!), we will now mark any comments that were left on a different manuscript than the one you’re currently reading, just so you’re not caught off guard by a comment referencing a part of the story that has since been revised or deleted.
We’ve also updated the comment counts on the story’s front page and in the story discovery feed to keep those consistent. And, coming soon, authors will be able to receive notifications of any new comments that get added to their works, or you can opt in to get notified if someone replies to your comments.
You can now switch between manuscripts
If you click the 📰 newspaper-like icon in the bottom toolbar of a story, you’ll be able to switch to any other manuscript that the author has made available to you. As always, authors have full control over who can see a manuscript, and different manuscripts can be released to different audiences.
By default, you’ll always start out reading the latest manuscript of a story. However, if you want to see how a story has evolved over time, you can now switch which version you’re reading.
Customization shops have been upgraded and now have daily inventory refreshes
We’ve heard your feedback that sometimes it can be difficult to find some of the customization options we’ve released, especially on some of the categories that have lots of items. Now, instead of items appearing randomly every time you load the customization screens (for your avatar or library), those items will stay the same until 12:00 UTC every day. We’ve even added a countdown timer so you know how long you have until the items refresh.
This means that if you see something in the shop that you like, you’ll want to buy it before it disappears! If you’re short on Quills (or if you went negative by buying a pack of Anti-Quills), you can earn more by completing your Daily Tasks, or you can purchase packs of Quills for as low as $1.99 by clicking on your Quills balance or the leaf icon in the upper-right corner.
Coming soon, you’ll be able to use Quills to refresh the store for yourself early.
Your avatar now appears next to your username across the platform
Your avatar is no longer just for you: it’s now visible to everyone on the platform whenever you comment on a story, release a story, post a message to a Writer’s Circle, or otherwise have your username show up.
It’s been really fun to see everyone’s customized avatars start to appear! If you haven’t customized your avatar yet, you can click on Draft the Cat in the upper right corner, then click the pencil icon to start customizing. We’ve reduced some prices on avatar items to ensure that some customization options are easily accessible! No one has unlocked the dragons yet…
Referral codes are here
To get ready for our Kickstarter campaign, we’ve begun partnering with some notable writers on social media platforms to help promote StoryForge and our Kickstarter. We’ve added referral codes for these partners, and we may look to expand the referral code program in the future. If you don’t have a referral code, that is totally fine! But if you do, make sure to enter it in the appropriate box when you’re creating your account.
So many bug fixes
While I won’t list every single bug fix here, I will list out some of the notable issues that our team has addressed. Thank you to everyone who submitted bug reports — keep ‘em coming!
If you purchase any packs of Quills that unlock customization options, you’ll now see those thumbnails in the purchase confirmation screen. We’ve loved seeing some of your reactions to the secret unlockables, and there are still a few out there that haven’t been unlocked yet!
We’ve dramatically improved the performance of the Story Discovery page, so it shouldn’t time out anymore.
Most functionality related to shelves has been fixed.
The Daily Task list was previously generating an inconsistent number of tasks every day — now you will consistently get a list of five tasks to complete, each of which will award 2 Quills (with a bonus 5 after you complete your entire list). We’ve also added a countdown timer to this screen so you know how long you have to complete your tasks, or how long you have to wait to get a new set.
In order to improve the performance of reading stories, we have hidden all reactions (pieces of inline feedback) by default. If you want to see them, click the toggle in the upper right corner of the story reader.
Several instances of the “White Screen of Death” have been resolved. If you ever see a message reading “Application error: a client-side exception has occurred”, please open your browser console, refresh the page, and send us a screenshot so that we can look into the issue. More often than not it’s a quick fix!
Thank you
Thank you to our entire development team for all of the hard work that has gone into these releases over the course of July. I know that several developers had a few sleepless nights trying to get things fixed, and there have been some long, passionate conversations about how to best go about implementing these features or prioritizing which bugs to get fixed first. These are some truly great changes and I sincerely appreciate all of the effort and quality work that the team has done to release them!
And thank you to our community, not only for reporting bugs and requesting these features, but also for joining the StoryForge community and cause in the first place. We wouldn’t be here without you and the support and energy that you give us day in and day out, so thank you so much for being a part of StoryForge.
As always, if you notice any bugs or have a feature you’d like to request, please reach out to us by:
clicking “Provide feedback” anywhere in the app
sending us an email to help@storyforge.com
posting in our beta testers Discord server (if you have an account but need a Discord invite, reach out to us at help@storyforge.com and we can get you an invite link)
or (new!) clicking the (?) icon in the upper right corner of the navigation bar once you’re logged in.
We’ll see you around the community!