May 28th, 2012 -- Notes:
We have increased the story summary length limit from 255 to 384 characters. Please note longer summaries do not translate to more readers. Our recommendation for all authors is to make sure the summary is brief, to the point, and contains the 4 Ws when possible: who, what, where, when (optional).
To maximize the number of reviews a story may receive, we highly recommend authors to enable anonymous reviews. There are already several layers of proven protection in place against spam hence our recommendation.
We have resumed email delivery to Verizon.net/Gte.net email account holders. However, we cannot guarantee the safe delivery of alerts to those with Verizon/Gte emails and still recommend such users to migrate to a different email provider for future safety.
We have tweaked the way the site handle accounts with undeliverable email addresses. If we are unable to successfully deliver an email to your registered email address for any reason, we will immediately stop all alert notifications and members must login to acknowledge/resolve the issue to resume alert delivery. Previously, the site just disabled all alert features for effected accounts. Now, alerts are not delivered but alert settings are preserved.

Public Announcement
Image Manager feature is now rolling out for the entire site and is currently pre-activated for Forums. Communities and Stories will be activated next once we confirm the feature is stable with the Forums.

In the meantime, you can get ready by uploading your existing story covers and community logos.

June 4th 2012 -- Notices:
Please note we would like to clarify the content policy we have in place since 2002. FanFiction.Net follows the Fiction Rating system ranging from Fiction K to Fiction M. Although Fiction Ratings goes up to Fiction MA, FanFiction.Net since 2002 has not allowed Fiction MA rated content which can contain adult/explicit content on the site. FanFiction.Net only accepts content in the Fiction K through Fiction M range. Fiction M can contain adult language, themes and suggestions. Detailed descriptions of physical interaction of sexual or violent nature is considered Fiction MA and has not been allowed on the site since 2002.

Yeah, this last one is not making many people happy.

^That's because they already have a site for that - adultfanfiction.net.

June 5th 2012 -- Notes:
Image Manager feature is now rolling out for the entire site and is currently activated for stories, forums and communities. Image feature allows your stories to have story covers, and forums/communities to have logos. We recommend authors to login and start utilizing this new feature. For the best image quality, please submit image files with width to height ratio of 6/9 and size of 300x450 or higher.
Kindle browser issues with login has been fixed.
iPad/Safari browser issues with forum posting has been fixed.

Upcoming:
Stories: Notes feature.
Forums: Improved ban, moderation, and filtering.
Communities: More in-depth filtering.

I'm curious to see what the notes feature will be about. Hopefully it will be something which will allow authors to post notes on their stories in an accessible way so that they will not post whole chapters consisting of nothing but notes on their story. Or worse, posting a story that is nothing but an announcement (i.g., link).

As for the June 4 clarification, I totally support it. I don't read explicit stories, but I've seen a number of them in my fandom just by reading their descriptions, stories which involve all kinds of unholy things being done with penguins (penguins!). I would not mind these stories being deleted one bit, especially because they have always been in violation of site rules even if the rules have long gone unenforced.

June 18th, 2012 -- Notes:
Easier Access with Network Accounts: We are now offering automatic login/sign-ups for users with Google/Gmail and FictionPress.com accounts. If your existing site account shares the same email address with your network account such as Google/Gmail, you will be logged-in to your existing account.
Better Tablet Support: We have optimized the desktop site for tablet viewing in both portrait and landscape mode. Optimized for iPad, Android, and Kindle tablets.
Less Eyestrain with Increased Legibility: We have slightly increased the default font size of the site for greater legibility as monitors and even tablets are now supporting ever higher screen resolutions.
Story Covers: We have increased the display size of image/story covers slightly since introduction and are still optimizing this new feature. Image tips: To avoid the cropping/clipping of images do not submit square pictures but image files with the recommended 6/9 width to height ratio (300 pixel Width, 450 pixel Height).

@SJF: I sorta agree with the second part, but what a lot of people are upset about is that their stories get deleted with no warning at all.

June 21st, 2012 -- Notes:
Network Accounts added Twitter support. Users with Twitter accounts can now directly login/signup.
We will no longer use the forum.fanfiction.net and login.fanfiction.net domains for the forums/login urls. Everything will be on the primary www.fanfiction.net domain. Although old links will still work by auto-redirection, we encourage users that bookmarked the login/forums links to update their bookmarks.
Improved iPhone/iPod and Android phone support for the Desktop site for those that prefer the non-mobile version.

^ What does that last one even mean?

July 1st, 2012 -- Notes:
Network Accounts added Facebook support. Users with Facebook accounts can now directly login/signup.
New Guest Reviews Moderation Feature: Previously, users lost valuable guest reviews by enabling the 'Disable Guest Reviews' feature. 'Disable Guest Reviews' settings is now a toggle for "Guest Reviews Moderation".

If "Guest Review Moderation" is enabled, guest reviews will be in a moderation queue for 36 hours during which authors can remove or fast-approve the review(s). If after 36 hours and no action is taken, the guest reviews are slow-approved and enters the system.

We believe this new moderation feature gives authors finer-grain control while still allowing legitimate reviews to be accepted. Please note guest reviews can still be removed by authors after the the slow-approve 36 hour window.
Review box within stories received a minor upgrade to improve accessibility especially for those with pop-up window blockers enabled.
Due to a rare Leap Second bug, Login service was disrupted for about 1 hour and 30 minutes yesterday.

FF now has its own blog, that updates everyday, so I'll only be putting the relevant updates here I guess. Other users can help post here too.

7/11 Update

12
JUL
UPDATE: Upgrade was started on schedule and completed in 10 minutes. Login area is now back online and operating normally. Thanks for all your patience!

On July 12th, 2012, @1AM US Pacific Time, @4AM US Eastern Time, the login area will be disabled for 15 to 30 minutes while an important upgrade is performed. During this time, reviewing and publishing feature will be inaccessible.

We apologize for this short inconvenience. The planned upgrades will allow us to introduce new features slated to be pushed out on July 12-13th.

7/13 Update

13
JUL
Updates

New sorting types for story listings. Now available are sorting based on the number of reviews, number of favorites (favs), and number of follows (subscriptions).
Community pages received a minor face-lift to be more consistent with rest of the site.
More available display width for screens with 1280 pixel width or wider resolution.
UPDATED: Crossover in-page sorting has been fixed.

7/15 Update

New Time Range Sort option: There is now a time range filter based on either Update or Publish Date and ranges from 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, to the default “All Time”. The time range filter is designed to enhance and complement other filters for larger categories where even filtered results can be in the hundreds of thousands.

Image covers activated for the public pages of Communities (C2s).

New Published Date Sort option for Communities.

Misc minor improvements all around.

We got a lot of great feedback for our last blog post on new sorting options. Sometimes when we introduce a new feature, it may be designed for a certain group of users. In this case, the sorting options are designed for and much requested by readers. Giving readers more choices is always a good thing for the authors in the long run.

7/15/2012
Please follow us on our blog link and our Twitter account @fictionpress for the latest news on site operations and status reports.

Updates:
New sorting types for story listings. Now available are sorting based on the number of reviews, number of favorites (favs), and number of follows (subscriptions).
Community pages received a minor face-lift to be more consistent with rest of the site.
More available display width for screens with 1280 pixel width or wider resolution.
Atom/RSS feed links have changed slightly. Previously they were under the sub-domain of “link and they are now all under the “www” domain such as “link. Other than the domain part, the rest of the feed url stays the same format. Please update update your feeds links.
Better email subjects for many alert types. For example, chapter alerts now include the story title in the front of the subject followed by new chapter number to allow better user-side email sorting.
Forum limit for replies (threads) per topic has been increased from 9,999 to full 20,000. This should help large forums and forums dedicated to role-playing.

7/26/2012
Updates:
New iPad/iPhone/iPod compatible web paste method for document submission.
New filtering options for Communities.
Improved words/length range filter for story listings.
Profile links reactivated with better spam protection.
More accurate word count for all stories and especially for stories written in some Asian languages.
To minimize bump spamming, the act of removing/adding chapter to bump up your story on the listings, we will not modify a story’s last updated time-stamp if the same chapter has been removed and added over a certain time period.
To minimize alert spamming/duplicates from authors, we only send out one alert per chapter per story over a certain time period. If you submit a new chapter, a new alert is sent out to your followers. If you delete this chapter the next minute and re-submit the chapter, no alert will be sent out.
Faster overall site performance and especially for mobile users.

Profile Links have been re-activated. Linking to external websites within member profiles have returned now that we have purged many fake accounts used by spammers. There is also a new verification stage for external links to prevent spammers hiding nefarious websites behind deceptive link titles.

To help procrastinating writers, we are launching a combo spell checker and rudimentary grammar suggestions feature for our online editor. If everything goes well, we will also port the feature to the review box.

Please note that automated tools are not substitutes for proper self proof-reading and editing. These small features we are offering are meant to help writers catch any last gaps and are not meant to be first-line defenses.

Changes

New spell checker for profile, forum, and document manager. Spell checker currently supports 5 languages: English (default), Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese.
New grammar suggestion feature integrated with spell checker. (English only)

03
AUG
Changes

Clicking on the story cover within a story will now showcase a much larger cover image.
Removed most of the underlines for site links for a much cleaner look.
Tweaked forum ranking icons. The previous icons were a little too bland and a little too serious.

06
AUG
Following are updates to the desktop/regular site.

Changes

New check-and-remove option added for Alerts and Favorites management to allow faster and multiple removals per action.
Arial is now the default font replacing Verdana for a tighter layout and improved readability across all platforms. Users can change their story reading mode to ‘Verdana’ mode via the text style toggles.
Story links now respect the :visited css property to alert users which stories they have already visited.
Increased font size for those with high-resolution monitors (1400 pixel width and higher). Ultra high-resolution screens have very small pixel size translating to smaller texts and this change should improve readability for these users.
Slightly darker blue colors for all links to reduce eye-strain for those that stay on the site for hours at a time.
Darker horizontal rules (separators).
Cleaner look for the story content/chapters management page.
Fixed

Image manager pop-up selection out of alignment on some browsers.
Fixed Alerts and Favorites management for those with monster 10K+ plus entries.
Notes

Sorting within Alerts/Favorites management will return in a different form in the next scheduled update.

07
AUG
Changes

Beta area and Author searches now display “Join Date” in addition to published stories count. Avatar icons have also increased in size in these two areas.
Forum/Community searches now include covers.
Make sure all cover images act as clickable links.
Fixed

Forum search errors out on certain keywords.
Tiny font issue for forum/community searches.
Search result distorting some links.

07
AUG
Changes

We have reverted the default font back to Verdana due to feedback.

We do wish there is a universal alternative to both Arial and Verdana in the land of browser typography. Verdana is nice and clear but extremely wide. Arial is compact and more traditionally pleasing but sometimes a little too squeezed with a lot of text. Verial font anyone?

Arial would now only be used in certain instances where spacing is critical. In addition, we are currently testing multiple web fonts for people to toggle/use for story reading pages.

08
AUG

We are experimenting with a new online editor for cover images. The new editor allows easy point-n-click access to adding titles and other effects to your current image covers. Many writers do not have the tools or skill to create or edit an image cover and this new feature should help alleviate this problem.

Please note that multiple passes of using the image editor will severely degrade image quality. Each time you hit save via the editor is considered one pass. We recommend having the original image backed up on your computer, upload it, and use the editor once or twice to save changes. If you need to start over from scratch, upload the original image on your computer and start the process over again.

Changes

New online image editor for covers. To access, visit Image Manager, click on the image and visit editing link.

To achieve the best image quality, upload 6/9 ratio images and not squares. 6/9 ratio is equivalent to 300 pixel width and 450 pixel height. If you upload a square image, we crop it and potentially distorting your original image.

Mobile Changes and Communities

14
AUG

Changes:

Communities access now available for mobile.
New navigation bar for mobile.
Search engine for Communities and Forums activated for mobile.
Minor visual updates for the desktop site.

Fixed:

Beta profile’s genre section showed incorrect highlighting.

Notes:

Community alert/follow action will be added to mobile soon.

UPDATED: We have fixed the over-sized font problem when an iOS device is placed into landscape mode.

23
AUG

Replacing the deprecated category sorting option we had before, we are introducing a more useful and powerful category filtering option to the story management pages for both Favorites and Alerts/Follows. This should help those with hundreds if not thousands of favorites/follows in various categories.

Changes

DocX send limit has been increased to 100.
Favorited stories management page now has a “Category Filter” option.
Followed/Alerted stories management page now has a “Category Filter” option.
Fixed

(mobile) Broken links in some areas of the communities section.

29
AUG
We currently have a policy of cleaning up stale PM messages that have not had any activity for more than 1 year. One year expiration limit is a good balance as PM feature is intended only to be a short-term messaging system.

The next version of the PM system (v3.0), is currently under development and will be introduced later this year will resolve some of the issues with the current system.

Changes

Unread message subjects are now in bold type to distinguish from read messages. Our last update broke this feature.

Removed “Delete” option from outbox since it does not work as intended.

9/19/2012
Updates:
Members can now manually update or correct their account country location via the settings page. Before this change, country location was detected automatically but only at 98% accuracy and even less so when you reside in a border region or in a country with a relatively small land mass.
Unified keywords search. Previously, you had to put in exclusion keywords in a separate input field. It is now just a single keywords entry and you just prefix the keywords you want to exclude with a “-” dash/minus character. More info available on our blog.
Search: Increased character limit in search field to allow longer searches. Allow apostrophes within searching keywords and phrases such as “Mike’s wishes”.
Performance: We have added several new servers into our fiction cluster to improve response time during peak loads.
PM: v3 is under development. Delete option removed from outbox since it does not work as intended.
Performance: Databases for PM, Forums, Reviews, and Avatars have been upgrade to provider better response times.
Story Favorites and Alerts/Follows management pages have been redesigned to handle tens of thousands of entries with filtering for category, author and sorting for Story Title, Update Date, and Add Date.

23 SEP
While doing our regular log sweeps we discovered that some users are using the Document Manager to submit word files with embedded images which can cause the conversion process to fail. Embedding animated GIFs might be spiffy for sharing with friends but our system will not always process them correctly.

So a general rule of thumb is to remove images from your word files before submission and especially if you encounter errors.

Lastly, we have been doing quite a bit of work helping the <0.5% who likes to submit amazingly corrupted Word documents and especially Word 2003 and higher (.docx) files. To help us find the common connection between these users, we would like anyone having problem submitting .docx files to send their original files to our support email with the following info:

Attach the .docx file in question.
What OS are you running? What OS version?
Which Word Processor did you use to create the file? What version of the program? You can find these info by looking for the ”About…” option within the program menus.
With some feedback and luck, we just might be able to help these users out.

Titles and Summaries

26
SEP
Increased limit for story titles from 50 to 70 characters. This should resolve issue with the few writers that might find the first limit too constricting. Please note the 70 character limit is likely to stay for a long time unless we see a collapse of the written language. Seventy character is aplenty for a readable story title and actually crosses the toleration limit for most readers.

Tiles/summaries can now contain parenthesis “()” characters to help writers that want to visually categorize different stories into similar series.

Changes:

Story/Forum title: Increased limit for titles from 50 to 70 characters.
Story/Forum title/summary: Allow parenthesis “()” and hyphen ”-” characters.

Fixed:

Sorting in Doc Manager where “Chapter 10″ is displayed before “Chapter 1″.