Patch Notes - 25 April 2020

We have released a large number of bug fixes and improvements over the last couple months. We haven’t released any patch notes at the time, since development and release has been continuous and we didn’t want to release piece-meal patch notes every week.

The last two weeks, we have released even more changes than usual, so we felt it was time to write up what’s new and what’s fixed.

New Features

  • We have added our customized emojis to the comment section
  • You can now report users from their profile page
  • You can now feature 16 achievements instead of 15 on the forums and fictions
  • Comments can now be locked by authors and the staff, removing the ability to reply to the comment or any of its replies
  • Chapters can now have their entire comment section locked - if you don’t want to get comments, you no longer have to have them
  • When searching for fiction you can now specify multiple fiction statuses; this means you can now search for “Ongoing or Completed” at the same time
  • The fiction search page now completely excludes stories you’ve marked as “Not Interested” unless you select the checkbox on the bottom of the advanced search form
  • Reviewers that had their fiction reviews deleted by the staff for breaking a rule can now be blocked by staff members from reposting a new review. 
  • Hovering over the (?) of the page count on the fiction page and the fiction dashboard now displays the word count in the popup window.
  • The amount of reputation a comment has received is now displayed on the comment
  • The Contact Us page now has reminders that we have a very lovely support ticket system to be used for support requests.
  • The V2 follows page has been reorganized! There is now an “Open Next Chapter” button if you aren’t up to date with a fiction. In addition, the notification and unfollow buttons have been hidden in a dropdown menu to clean the page up a bit This includes email subscription, unfollow and the premium only feature “push notification”. To make it easier to tell whether you have enabled notifications for a given fiction, the ellipsis button for the dropdown menu comes with a bell icon, which is crossed over if you don’t have any notification enabled for a fiction.
  • You can now unsubscribe from notifications for your own comments - no more email flood of doom when a rowdy group of users start a 2000 message conversation in reply to your comment!
  • [2020-04-28]: Adding this on the list since it'll be a while for the next changelog; now the fiction lists have a genre selection dropdown with the exception of the Trending list. And it also includes the Trending list.
  • [Authors]: CTRL+S is now a shortcut for saving a draft or saving your edits to the current chapter. Note that this does reload the page.
  • [Authors]: Giving reputation for a comment in your fiction now also marks the comment with a star
  • [Authors]: Polls can now go on the bottom of the chapters
  • [Author Premium]: You can now exclude deleted chapters from your Find and Replace results
  • [Author Premium]: We have a new analytics backend; which will allow us to scale and improve more easily 

Bug Fixes

  • Upvotes and downvotes no longer refresh the page after changing the sort order
  • Accounts created with Google+ or Facebook can now be deleted
  • Deleting a review from your “My Reviews” page now correctly redirects you back to the page
  • Support tickets now correctly send emails about new replies to the tickets
  • Cancelling the deletion of a comment no longer leads to a 404 page
  • USD currency displays correctly on the website where relevant instead of showing the ¤ symbol
  • [Authors]: The scheduler's datetime picker now behaves correctly with the mouse wheel
  • [Authors]: You can now schedule chapters on 15 minute intervals instead of every hour; this has been implemented for a while but the UI wasn't displaying it properly due to a bug
  • [Achievement System]: There was a bug in the achievement system that caused users to receive experience several tiers above theirs, then no experience until they exceeded that tier. This has now been corrected, but this has resulted in many users seeing reduction in levels. The new levels is their originally intended number.
  • [Achievement System]: Review Upvote achievements have been fixed and have been sent out to the users who qualified for them
  • [Author Premium]: Case sensitivity during Replace operations is now properly respected
  • [Advertising System]: Our internal advertising system where you can promote your books now accepts payments correctly

Other Changes

  • Report reason is now mandatory when reporting content with the “Other” reason, or when reporting the content of a fiction from the fiction page (since we need you to be more specific when making these reports)
  • The “scroll to top” button on mobile is now only activated when it is clicked twice to avoid accidental taps in the midst of reading that breaks reading immersions.  
  • There have been a number of backend changes that improved overall website performance and maintainability but resulted in temporary errors in some cases. These changes have been the reason for the few short downtimes over the last month.

Premium Subscribers

The current global situation is affecting virtually every market; the advertising space is looking particularly dire. Over the past month we have seen a significant reduction in our ad revenue, which made us consider ways to mitigate the impact, such as sticky ads and enabling videos on non-chapter pages. However, we loathe these things as much as any of you.

In these times, our Premium subscribers are the reason we can keep working like before and afford to spend time improving the website. We have some new premium-only features in the works to thank you for sticking with us, more details on these will be revealed soon.

On top of that, we will reward every user who has an existing Premium subscription or subscribes until the 6th of June an exclusive achievement.

If you don’t have one already, our reader Premium subscription only costs $3/month (that’s less than a latte at your nearest Starbucks!), or $30/year for readers - and the one-year package can be purchased with a one-time payment without a subscription. It helps us keep the lights on and allows you to use Royal Road without any ads whatsoever.

If you want to support us more and enjoy more benefits in the process, the author premium is filled with features! From being able to customize your fiction page header, to having analytics and enhanced editing tools. All of it including our appreciation, can be yours for just $5 per month, or $50/year 

So if you can, we would appreciate your support! 

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Comments(115)

RavensDagger

RavensDagger on

Glad to see you guys are on top of things! Keep up the good work! 

    Ysgramor's Soup Spoon

    Ysgramor's Soup Spoon on

    [Authors]: Polls can now go on the bottom of the chapters

    If this is a new update then did Dreamer really warp the page so you could have it at the bottom before the update?

      RavensDagger

      RavensDagger on

      I'm sure the site will deny any tentacle-based shenanigans. 

      Wing
      Admin

      Wing on

      This should actually be the oldest newly added feature, but since we never mentioned it before, we decided to add it to this note patch since someone asked us about it.  
      Most of these features listed above are from the past 1-2 weeks, the poll one specifically is from before that but it was fresh on our mind.
      There were a lot of updates that we didn't include from before as well. We are considering uploading more frequent patch notes from now on. There certainly won't be a lack of content in it. 
      Our glorious everfixing dragon is always on the go, continuously updating stuff! ​  Hail! 

       

      Anyway, since the first comment was practically hijacked and I wanted to answer it, I might as well doubt with extra promotion and say, if anyone wants to suggest more features go to https://feedback.royalroad.com/

      01001010

      01001010 on

      That is what meta-tentacles are for after all xDDD

KurtMKing

KurtMKing on

No reminder about Author Premium?

Aselo

Aselo on

Oooh shiny new upgrades! How fun!

xoid

xoid on

  • When searching for fiction you can now specify multiple fiction statuses; this means you can now search for “Ongoing or Completed” at the same time
  • The fiction search page now completely excludes stories you’ve marked as “Not Interested” unless you select the checkbox on the bottom of the advanced search form

Finally! Been wanting these two for AGES.

Statesidespy

Statesidespy on

"You can now unsubscribe from notifications for your own comments - no more email flood of doom when a rowdy group of users start a 2000 message conversation in reply to your comment!"

Is this a callout?

Vowron Prime

Vowron Prime on

A huge thank you to the RoyalRoad staff for making this possible! Great work, these are impactful wins! 

Doctor Zero

Doctor Zero on

Nice update.  Thanks!

Len923

Len923 on

Thanks for the hard work, and thanks for the concise update on the site's changes! 😁

Jonah of the Whale

Jonah of the Whale on

Thank you for the work and update, stay safe.

CautiousTitan

CautiousTitan on

Interesting features! Looking forward to future updates!

BO0KW0RM

BO0KW0RM on

So glad about that arrow needing to be double tapped. So many times have I accidentally done that. For no more!

l nimbus

l nimbus on

I bow before the great dragon machine.

Zerfo

Zerfo on

Thanks for your work 😃

But the emoticons don't work in the comments of the chapters and here it's work... strange 😕

twinklecake

twinklecake on

Things are different than they were before, and weirdly, I don't hate it.

flssdd

flssdd on

Oh, very nice. Seen some of the changes little by little and I'm very glad for some them and thank you for the double tap.

I've been building a list if suggestion for the feedback page, still too lazy to post, but soon... 😃 (btw some of the emojis look so derpy :D)

Will definitely consider Premium when the corona thing blows over and I see how things are looking for me.

Luke Scheffe

Luke Scheffe on

Thanks for the Patch Notes!!!

Nocebo

Nocebo on

"Over the past month we have seen a significant reduction in our ad revenue"

Wow, it is almost as if companies don't want their adds displayed over stories that say: "It is no longer rape if you enslave the meathole first removing her option to say no!" 

And the site obviously agrees with it, since nothing happened despite multiple reports...

    13lack12ose

    13lack12ose on

    Uhmm, Ad revenue is down globally because of the Corona crisis. So I think your comment is possibly misinformed / misplaced?

    Necessity

    Necessity on

    Seriously wondering what your reading. Whatever it is, it hasn't crossed my sight. Not surprising, stories that show non-consent, especially repeatedly aren't usually that popular. Its like the authors who write that stuff can't actually do good character interaction having relied on foced and negative interactions, sinking the crappy ship.

RobertKeene

RobertKeene on

Is there a way to gift reader subs? 

13lack12ose

13lack12ose on

I've noticed some of these changes as they occurred. But thanks for the comprehensive list! Glad to see you're working on improving the site. I love RR! <3

alstonsleet

alstonsleet on

Nice work!

One thing I would really like? The ability for readers to apply a comment to a specific paragraph/sentence/word (whichever) ala webnovel. this really helps when commentators just want to send in a quick edit/spelling fix.

Luke Scheffe

Luke Scheffe on

Thanks for the Patch Notes!!!

Luke Scheffe

Luke Scheffe on

Thanks for the Patch Notes!!!

KoboldPatrol

KoboldPatrol on

Yay, thanks for the great work! I had noticed some of the changes already.

SkeletonMonarch

SkeletonMonarch on

Thank you for these fixes! 

Zethuron

Zethuron on

Thanks for all those, though i think the review upvote achievements still are not fixed. Seen multiple people who should qualify for one of those, but still havent gotten it, and it has been 2 days.

edwardcastle

edwardcastle on

Awesome! Thanks for the hard work!

Darkdej

Darkdej on

Thanks for working to make the site even better than before!

Mash_Potatoes

Mash_Potatoes on

Interesting developments 

Scarlust

Scarlust on

Polls at the bottom is a game changer

Lucrecio

Lucrecio on

Thank you for the update! Happy to help with the premium support!

BobaShaker

BobaShaker on

Nice, Glad to see you guys still working!

SenescentSoul

SenescentSoul on

11/10 patch notes. Would read again.

All of this is great stuff.

BenKiss

BenKiss on

Great job! Keep it up! 

Inslayer

Inslayer on

Wow, this is amazing!

Of course, I noticed some of those changes before the patch notes, but it's so much more than I expected. 

Xenteko

Xenteko on

Chapters can now have their entire comment section locked - if you don’t want to get comments, you no longer have to have them

So now authors can just delete any comment they want to, or just stop people from commenting altogether...

What's the point of being a member of this site? I may as well just read whatever I want with zero interaction, if you're going to continue to prioritise author's feelings over user engagement.

    Wing
    Admin

    Wing on

    Community interaction is the core of Royal Road and we like it like that, but everything needs to be balanced. 

    Authors have the right to moderate their own fictions, both from deleting comments(which we had for a long time) to now blocking comments.
    Having better control and moderation over the chapters will keep the authors happy, and we want them to be happy! They are part of the cycle of happiness. 

    Happy authors willl continue to write and publish chapters. More chapters of loved stories will make the readers happy. 

    But the balance and the system dictates that if you read a story, you will still have the right to review it. So that remains unchanged. 


      Aspartame

      Aspartame on

      "Community interaction" should be limited to a binary thumbs up or down feature only. It's kinda going that way.

      thenchen

      thenchen on

      I mean, from RR and other "interactive" places like Reddit, Youtube etc, there's a certain point where toxicity festers in comment sections. The right to moderation was always the prerogative of community mods and content creators, and judging from their volume of web traffic/advertisers, there's no reason why authors here shouldn't be able to exert those powers too.

      redria7

      redria7 on

      As an aside to this, why do authors have the power to view and un-delete comments that readers have deleted themselves? I realize that nothing is ever truly gone once you post it on the internet, but I really don't like knowing that authors can manipulate my comments like that. If I want to delete my own comment, then only a mod should be able to retrieve it (or even better, just delete it completely).

madstack

madstack on

Is the bug when using the keyboard shortcut still in? Sometimes when you press 'right' on the keyboard, it prompts you with "You have a comment pending..." or something along those lines. @Wing

panala1234

panala1234 on

Starbucks doesn't exist in my town, and it costs 6 dollars.

Thymm

Thymm on

After reading the part about ads, I realized, that I have premium subscription. I'm getting old...

Soncikuro

Soncikuro on

I'm not sure if it's a good idea to allow writers to lock the comments' section. I think opinions are too important to be silenced like that.

mjkj

mjkj on

Thank you for the detailed patch notes.

Since you mentioned premium: any news about that re-subscribing horror every year for Germans? or at least an email or pm to remind one of that??? *is quite frustrated about that*

feha

feha on

> The fiction search page now completely excludes stories you’ve marked as “Not Interested” unless you select the checkbox on the bottom of the advanced search form This does not work for active-only search and the popular-this-week search. Unsure if it matters (probably doesn't), but i got JavaScript disabled.
Betrayed Orange

Betrayed Orange on

Don't know where to post this nitpicky bug report, but here it is: the dialog box shown when tapping the style score shows the score as the title, where it should show "Style Score". This is a recent bug, a week or two old.

Root Greevil

Root Greevil on

These changes all look great. Keep up the good work!

OP nerd

OP nerd on

Yay! No more acidentaly zooming to the top of the page!

bnight

bnight on

i remember in 2014 when there was LMS translation here and now we have the whole comunity it is awesome and im happy to be with you all from the begining! 

cyberskull

cyberskull on

I can't find the option for a one-time payment for a year of premium. 🙁

Garret25

Garret25 on

That's a lot of improvements. 

pewpewcachoo

pewpewcachoo on

Question, does the author premium and the reader premium do the same thing? Just with more features focused towards authors? If someone has an author premium account do they also get that special badge? Guess that was actually three questions. Hope you guys are having a good day.

_Amy_

_Amy_ on

You can now unsubscribe from notifications for your own comments - no more email flood of doom when a rowdy group of users start a 2000 message conversation in reply to your comment!

whistles innocently

The great chain shall live on

Sydorow

Sydorow on

Thank God for the next chapter feature in the Follow List!

magical heart

magical heart on

cool thanks for the update

Troy Stone

Troy Stone on

Keep up the good work.

redria7

redria7 on

So not to disparage your improvements (things are continuing to look better and better!), but is there any news on an app?

Asviloka

Asviloka on

I noticed the stars on comments and the end-of-chapter polls, both very welcome changes! :D Thanks for the updates~

Sage Drunk Kitty

Sage Drunk Kitty on

Have a nice day everyone!

Snapdragon

Snapdragon on

The next chaoter button is a really nice feature! Would it be possible to have that for the chapters in the History page as well? I find myself often resuming where I last left off by finding what I was reading the day before in the History page instead of hunting it down again in the follow list, and also having a next chapter button there would be really handy.

Thanks for all the work and cool new features!

Whassup

Whassup on

"Send e-mail when story updates" being behind another click is already awesome. The times when I accidentally clicked it... 

Joyueguie

Joyueguie on

Love the changes you've made to the V2 follows page. Well done! 

dnajester

dnajester on

Love the new update to the v2 follow list. I found a bug. Singularity System of human advancement chapter 34 shows as the most recent but after reading chapter 35 I have a red dot

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