a thousand words: Alpha, Beta

“a thousand words” has now reached a stage where every feature that I give a damn about is implemented. Thus, we’re opening it up to a limited beta test to iron out the wrinkles and get a list of any features potential users would like to see us launch with. If you’re bored or simply have a love of breaking other people’s shit, head along to http://athousandwords.org.uk and see what hell you can raise. As the Big Red Box Text warns you, really don’t submit any work of fiction you care about, just in case some kind soul finds an SQL injection vulnerability and trashes the database.

Since last time I bored the hell out of you all, voting and commenting has been implemented, registration has been fixed, filtering HTML tags from submissions has been added, as has a word count and the picture selector on story submission. There’s been a bunch of behind-the-scenes tweaks to improve security too.

The one feature that Eric definitely wants is a way to mark stories according to their content. We could do this in several ways – I would prefer, if anything, to just have a “not for kids” option on each post and a Date of Birth field associated with user accounts, so we can hide stories as required. Other options include a range of ratings (U, PG, 12, 15, 18…) or tags for certain content (violence, sex, language) so people can avoid whatever they’re picky about.

This probably ought to come with a Report button so that users can report incorrectly rated stories, and I would add a similar feature to report pictures. (Picture submissions are moderated, so Goatse isn’t going to make it through anyway, but the mod team might miss subtler things like licencing terms and copyright infringement.)

At that point, all that’s left on my list is the admin interface and anything that users suggest during this beta. Hopefully we’ll be ready to launch by the time I depart for sandier shores at the end of the week!