TTA Fans

Well Subscriptions is probably the the most useful of the new updates. It will let you get emails about anything new on TTAFans.com. And best of all you can completely control what and how often you get notified about. By default you'll get alerts to new comments and updates to things either you uploaded, or that you commented on, no more than once every six hours in a digest format. But it can do a lot more than that.

First off go to My account in the links to the left. There you will see a button at the top (sometimes referred to as Tabs here) labeled Subscriptions. Click that.

This page will give you a summary of what types of things you already have subscriptions to. If you scroll down, there is also a Settings section on this page. Expand that, and here you can change how often you get notifications, if you want it in Digest format or not, what things you auto-subscribe to, and other options.

Then with the other tabs at the top (Pages, Blogs, Content types, Categories), you can view in detail just which items you are or are not subscribed to, and (un)subscribe to any of them from right there.

For example, if you want alerts to all new Stories and Images uploaded to the site, go to the Content types tab, check the boxes for Image and Story, and click Save. Or if you want alerts to everything new on the site, check all the boxes on that same page.

If you don't want to subscribe to whole content types, but just particular postings, or to all new items just by particular people, then when you are viewing any content on the site (such as this news story), near the bottom, before any comments, will be a Subscribe section. Expand that and you will have a variety of options.

For example, say you are looking at an Image from JoeArtist. You can choose to subscribe to just that particular picture, and any new comments to it. You could subscribe to all new Images in general. You could subscribe to all new content from JoeArtist, or to just his Images. Select the ones you want and click Save below.

Overall, pretty easy and quite useful to keep up to date on new content you want to know about.

Private message email alerts are very simple, and don't require you to do anything, unless you want to change how it behaves.

By default, you will get an email each time someone sends you a Private message, letting you know you have one. Now you don't have to log in all the time just to check if you have any new messages.

If you don't like that, just go to My account on the left menu, then select the Edit tab at the top. From there, scroll down to the Private message settings section. In there is the Notify of new private message by email options, of which you can choose Never, Daily, and Every message (the default). Change it to what you'd like, and click Submit at the bottom.

Free tagging now lets you give content you upload "tags" of your own choosing, and are not limited to just Canon/Fan, Art/Written/Fan Fic/Review tags that are avail by default.

That means you can give descriptive terms to the content, such as names of the characters, species, name of a story a picture is from, etc. And you can you can give as many such tags to an item as needed.

Say, for example, that we're looking at Brainsister's Beautiful Dreamer picture. Now she was nice enough that the title says what it's related to, but even if it didn't, it has Tags that define what it's related to: ATTEPUH, ATTEPUH19A, Fifi, Wakko. These are all displayed at the bottom of the image as clickable links. If you were to click on ATTEPUH there, it would then bring you up a new page with everything related to Pepek's story that is tagged ATTEPUH. Or click on Fifi, and bring up everything that's tagged with that.

It's a great way to bring related material from all across the site together, without having to search, or even for things you can't search, like what's in a picture.

To add Tags to your own content, when you're uploading it, just look for the Tags field, and start typing them in, with commas between them. As you start to type a word, if you have javascript on, the site will suggest matches to already existing tags, to help you keep them consistent. That way we don't have all of Fifi's content tagged with a mix of "Fifi," "Fifi LaFume," "Fifi La Fume," "Fifi LeFume," etc. The usefulness is when the tags match across different items.

Now there's still also a lot of older content here that hasn't had Tags. If any of it is yours, feel free to bring it up and "Edit" it, and add the new Tags.

Some new menus and left column sections have been added to make finding some things easier. In particular, of course, Fan Fiction is a major part of the content on this site. So to make finding that easier, there is now a whole top menu devoted to listing every Book and Story on the site listed as Fan Fiction, in alphabetical order. Just click Fan Fics up at the top of any page, and now you can view a list of them much like we always could view Image Galleries.

Also to help find and promote fan fictions, there's now a Latest fan fics section on the left, which shows the four newest fan fictions on the site, making it easier to spot new stories. When uploading, be sure to select the Fan Content Type: "Fiction" to be listed on either of these!

Also new to the top menu is the Links entry. Click this to bring up the TTA Fans list of links to other sites. And even better, you can add your own TTA-related links as well! The instructions are right at the top of the page, and as easy as adding an Image or Story.

And for a little variety, and since we only show the single newest image, there is now a Random image element on the left side, so that you might run across older pictures you might not have seen before.

Promoting items to the front page has so far been limited to site administrators. But now that option has been added for our Verified users!

This means if you have a new story, art, blog entry, some TTA related news, or something you think is of interest to everyone that comes to the TTA Fans home page here, you have the power to put it there!

And it's very easy. When uploading any new content, just go down to the Publishing options section, expand that, and in there just check Promoted to front page before submitting. Now your content will show on the front page!

The view counter is pretty much your standard page counter, letting you know how many times someone has surfed to that page. You can see these on the full page, and on summaries like on the home page. Near the bottom of any content or content summary, look for something like "10 reads" to tell you how many times it has been viewed.

These counters are starting as of now, so prior views won't be counted, but all new ones going forward will be.

While this isn't something regular TTA Fans users are going to run into, reCaptcha has been added to new user sign-ups. What this does is when someone is signing up for a new account here, they get one of those "enter the leters/word shown in the image" entries, which helps cut down spammer bots from singing up for new accounts here. And trust me, there used to be a lot of them.

And it appears to be working very well. And if it does, what it means is we may be able to give more permissions to non-Verified users too, such as to post comments. And at the least, makes running this site that much less work. Yay for less work! :-)