Even though the Dark Lords Competition is reaching an end there are still plots of murder and torture buzzing around HPFF. Okay, it’s really just me plotting the death of Star Mochee, the biting, complaining and ill tempered house elf that replaced the late Star Bucky. Most everybody who knows me on the site knows that I am a competition-obsessed riddler. One competition I always look forward to is the Holiday Contest. I realized that we would be coming straight off the tails of the Dark Lords Challenge this year but when you live for competitions it does not seem like an overload.

A few nights ago I broke out my magic quill (given to me by QQQ) and began writing down ideas on what extra special event we could host this year. After nicking a few of Jays doughnuts I was hit by inspiration! We could do a Santa Stocking Stuffer and give away a whole slew of limited edition HPFF pens and pencils!

In my excitement I summoned Star Mochee to get me a cup of hot tea (I have sworn off coffee since I found Star Bucky floating in my Coffee Cauldron.) He made some grumbling comment about my excitement and in a moment of foolishness I told him about my idea.

It should have stopped there. If it had been Kreemy or the late Star Bucky the worst that would have happened is the information would have been leaked to the members a little early and my PM box would have been flooded with notes of anticipation. Oh vey! I am still not sure how what happened next happened.

It was early in the morning when I finally took a break from my brainstorming. You see, my Tea Cauldron was empty and I was desperately needing another Chi Tea and a potty break. I wandered down the hallway of the HPFF Virtual Staff room in my purple bunny slippers when I caught the sounds of crumbing doughnuts and whimpering coming from Jays office. I gently knocked on the door but nobody answered so I did what any Logical Raven would do and peeked my head in to make sure everything was all right. (I guess I did not learn my lesson from last time.)

Sitting in the middle of the floor was Star Mochee. He had a box of Krispy Kremes and four bound Garden Gnomes that had been kidnapped from Noblevyne cubicle.

Stuffing Santas just like you said. Star Mochee must listen and obey.

It was demented (shudders) The grim smile that little elf had on his face has he crammed a doughnut down a poor gnomes throat. When I told Star Mochee that was not what I meant, that I was calling the event a Santa Stocking Stuffer event he began stuffing crumbs into the gnomes stripped socks instead. Needless to say Star Mochee has now been officially banned from helping in our holiday celebration. The good news is were still doing the Santa Stocking Stuffer!

Every day beginning December 1^st, authors will be selected at random to receive their very own HPFF pencil/pen set. Who would not want a set of their very own? This our way of saying thank you for helping us make HPFF the very best Harry Potter fanfiction site on the web!

Well, if you're looking at this right now, you know that I've been up to something because it's not orange anymore :)

HPFF is a big site and, unlike most big sites, it doesn't have an unlimited budget for pursuading people to integrate all of its componants so, like a very small site, not all of it's peices are built on the same structure, so they don't all match...per se ;) Well, we're about to change that. Jay, Cattlyst and myself have been working diligently this week to bring you a cleaner, shinier HPFF.
Part work in the database, Cattlyst has been toiling tirelessly to tie up the loose ends of our recode, add new elements to the site and his work hasn't gone unnoticed by the staff or the membership. In the last month, he has implimented a much loved and long requested "Remember Me" function to the login system, allowing your sessions to remain active for a longer period of time. He gave users the ability to delete their own stories, set up your author status (trusted or otherwise) to appear on your Manage Stories page, got the Favorite Authors, Favorite Stories, Favorite Author Of, etc.. counts and lists on your Author Page live so that we can all keep tabs on one another and even set up a "top" script that indexes such details as top reviewed story, top read story and top reviewer. Beyond all of that, he's made a lot of minor edits and gone to work on a lot of big changes, behind the scenes, that you will be seeing the benefits of as soon as we can.

Jay, our diligent site owner, has excersized an inordinate amount of patience in working with myself and Nick and our frequent accidental crushing of the archive to upload, impliment, comment on and get us rolling with technical and esthetic changes to the site over the last month - all in addition to the regular work he does on the same projects.

Meanwhile, I've made a nice visible mess of things. In the last few days, Jay has kindly updated 6 skins that, while they're pretty are a smidge...buggy :) Old skins - snowscape, writing, etc... - have been permanently removed in the interest of turning to a system that supports a single layout - easier for updating as new elements are added to the site as well as for finding things :) Until they're all ironed out, however, you know you can trust the Castle and Dark Mark skins to be tested and fully functional. I can promise that, over the course of the next few days, we will be working on a few changes to the way that the site is skinned which will make it easier for Jay, Cattlyst and myself to make changes to things - it may be a bit of a bumpy ride but we'll all be happier in the end.

Well, anywhoo, there's your update and I promise to keep you posted as more changes are made and fun new buttons appear :)

Backing up is time consuming, it's true. Just trust me on this one, it's an hour well spent in guarding against the fateful day when you will wake up to discover that everything is gone - just...gone. (The last time my PC died, I almost cried...literally.)

Backing Up Your Stories
Odds are, if you read our TOS or our FAQ's, you probably have a copy of your stories saved somewhere on your PC, and that's a good thing. If you don't, keep reading and, even if you do, now is a good time to drag them out and make sure they are the most up-to-date versions of your stories. There's nothing more tragic than realizing that your PC versions are littered with typos and un-beta read in your hour of need.

For those of you that ignored our frequent warnings, there's still hope for you, and backing up isn't as hard as you would think.

Things It's Very Important To Back Up:
- chapter summaries
- chapter titles
- chapter content (including HTML)
- story rating
- story warnings
- main characters
- main pairings
- era
- genres

Now, of course, there are a lot of ways to do this and you are welcome to do it whatever way you like, but my favorite method is to use the Print Story page to grab my entire story in one fell swoop. First, I like to login to my account and visit Edit/Delete Stories. Then, for each of my stories, visit the Edit Story page and copy down all of my story info into a Word document - rating, warnings, characters, the summary, etc. This is going to make getting your story revalidated a lot easier. Forgetting to include a warning and having broken images are some pretty common rejection reasons, so having the information ready is a must. To get out without saving any accidental changes you might have made, just hit the back button.

From there, go back to Your Account and hit the Show My Page button. Open up the story you would like to back-up, in this case I'm using one of my stories - Extempore (M) as an example. Visit your first chapter and, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, you should see a little button that looks not entirely unlike a printer. Clicking it will take you to a page that looks much like this one. If your story is a one-shot, you're all set. If, however, you have more than one chapter, you need to click the Print All Chapters button on the right-side of the page.

Once you're all set there, just Select All (CTRL-A) and Copy (CTRL-C). Then, open up a new document (Word, notepad, whatever you like to use) and Paste (CTRL-V).

And you're done!

Well, you should probably double check to make sure that it's all there but, for all intents and purposes, just save the file (CTRL-S) and you're all set.

See, that wasn't too hard!

Backing Up Your Reviews
You don't have to back-up your reviews. Even if the archive does decide to eat them and you have a back-up copy, you can't put them back so, if you do decide to back-up your reviews, understand that it is only for your personal viewing and the joys of posterity. If, however, you do want to back them up so that you might view them later when you're old, feeble and regretting the fact that you became an accountant instead of pursuing your dream of writing fiction, there are a few ways to do it, and neither is perfect.

Copy/Paste
If you aren't very techno savvy and my saying "View Source" means nothing to you, this is the way to go. On your author page, click the reviews link next to your story(s) (if you're using my page as an example, you would want to click the 90 next to Extempore.) From there, you should see a page that looks something like this. Using your mouse, select all of your reviews - or, if you're in a hurry, you can select the entire contents of the page using Select All (CTRL-A) – and copy (CTRL-C) them. Then, just paste (CTRL-V) into a new document and save (CTRL-S).

Depending on the number of reviews you have, you may need to repeat this process on multiple pages.

This method works relatively well, but the resulting text document can be a little messy as all of the site management links (respond - report for abuse, etc) still appear on the page and can make the formatting a little wonky. Nevertheless, it's quick and easy.

View Source
If you want to retain the page formatting, and even view them on the sites current skin, you can do so using the "View Source" feature on your web browser. Follow the steps shown above (visit your author page and click on the reviews for your story) then right click anywhere on the page and select View Source from the context menu. A new window should appear with the page HTML. Simply Save As (CTRL-S). Remember, depending on the number of reviews you have, you may need to do this for multiple pages to get all of your reviews.

The files will be saved as HTML documents and, in the future, when you want to look back on them, clicking the document on your harddrive will open the page up in your web browser. Just remember, while it looks like an internet page, it's not "online" and links will not work, images will disappear, etc

Backing Up Your Favorites
We all love the Favorite Author and Favorite Story functions, right? But if your account is deleted or the system is eaten, your favorites may be lost, so it can be a good idea to have a back-up of your favorite authors and stories.

This is ultra easy to do. Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox users can simply visit the author pages of their Favorite Authors and click CTRL-D to add them to their PC bookmarks. The same can be done with well liked stories.


It isn't exactly quick and it isn't exactly easy, but you spent a lot of time on your stories and no matter how many reads or reviews you've gotten, you should be proud of your work. Protect it against server gremlins and save, save, save!

Man, has it been a crazy few weeks here at HPFF. I don’t know about the rest of the staff but I’ll be glad to finally get rid of all these Death Eaters. Inviting all the Dark Servants to HPFF for a competition has proven to be an interesting experience. First there was my kidnapping and Star Bucky’s murder. This was followed by a most difficult riddle/scavenger hunt challenge in the history of HPFF. Only ten potential Death Eaters survived the first stages of this competition.

For the second stage our ten semi-finalists were forced to duel in live time on a closed HPFF chat area. I sadly didn’t get to witness these duels but I hear they were brutal. When the smoke cleared only three Death Eaters arose from the ashes victorious. The rest were transported directly to Azkaban by the Aurors without question.

This brings me to the point of my current posting. Our finalist, Hermione006, Lynx Silverhawk and TheQuibbler are now in a fight for their lives. To earn the title of “Most Loyal Death Eater” and an amazing autographed picture from the Dark Lord himself, the divine Ralph, Fiennes, they must recruit.

Each finalist has created his or her very own shrine to the Dark Lord. Check them out and then visit our forum to cast your votes. Time is running out, hurry! This competition will end on the stroke of midnight on November 27^th, 2006 (GMT.)

Lynx Silverhawk

Hermione006

The Quibbler

The server that hosts this site will be upgraded to a new higher spec. model on the evening of Friday 24 November. This is in preparation of the new features coming soon to HPFF. As you will be aware, there have been several coding improvements in the last couple of weeks and we are currently working on a HPFF RPG.

The site is currently stable on the existing server, but I envisage more usage and load in the coming months so I am upgrading now rather than after a disastrous server meltdown!

The server outage a few months back was due to the host company physically moving to a new premises. This is an actual upgrade. You should not notice any significant problems on Friday evening, apart from maybe a small amount of downtime, which we will try and keep to a minimum.

In case you haven’t been investigating all areas of the site recently, I thought I’d give you a quick update on what’s going on. Aside from a massive influx of new submissions (keep them coming everyone and we’ll it 50,000 by the end of this year!) we have an RPG in the works for all your role playing fans. The Dark Lord’s Challenge is still going strong with a one of a kind autographed picture of Ralph Fiennes going to the winner. Many of our site members are also participating in NanoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month which requires them to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

If you, by chance, happened to miss anything of these things, remember to take advantage of all areas of the website so you don’t miss out on our next great event…you never know what might be around the corner!