Thursday, August 29, 2013

Donation Request

For over ten years HASA has been providing JRRT fanfiction for all genres, characters, ratings & story lengths. We get hundreds of readers a day, making HASA a great place for readers and writers. Have you considered being a subscriber?

HASA is ad-free and fee-free, and we do not sell your contact information to marketers. Our server isn't free, however, so HASA depends on donations from members and readers, both one-time gifts and subscriptions. Our balance now is still negative, which means we need donations to cover most of the summer. The August hosting will be due in the next few days; it would be great if we could get some more donations to help with that.

If only a small percentage of our members and readers donated every year or got a monthly subscription we would be in better shape. If we had more subscribers it would be easier to keep ahead.

Our PayPal account has three ways to donate:
• Monthly subscriptions - set up a monthly recurring donation in amounts from $5 to $25 dollars.
• Yearly subscriptions - set up a recurring annual donation in amounts from $15 to $50 dollars.
• One-off donations of any amount.


If you're a little short on spare change at the moment, donations of time are always appreciated. There's an archive full of stories just waiting for comments, authors who would love an email complimenting them on their work, challenges that need entries, playlists that need to be created, research that needs doing and forums begging for discussions. If you are an author, please consider donating a new story.

Thanks for enjoying HASA!

Saturday, August 17, 2013

HASA How-to August 2013

How do I...

... use favorites, recommendations and comments?

In last month's How-to we looked at the various kinds of stories and how to find a specific story. This month looks at how to work with favorites, how to recommend a story and how to comment.

Favorites and bookmarks

Once you have found a story (see last month's How-to), there are several ways to bookmark it. As a HASA member you can save a story to Favorites. If you do this, you can always find it again when you're logged in.

Members - Save to Favorites

This stores the story in your own Library on HASA. The story is then always available anywhere in the site from the story favorites drop-down menu at the right hand end of the site header. To save to favorites:

  1. Go to the Stories section of HASA
  2. Click on either the overview or any chapter of the story you want to add
  3. In the Reader Toolbox that appears at the top and the foot of these pages, click the button that says "Add Story"
  4. The page refreshes and the story is added to your list.
  5. If you are on the Overview, the first chapter is bookmarked. If you are on a specific chapter, that chapter is bookmarked.
  6. When reading a long story, you can update your bookmark and set it to a new chapter by clicking on the "Set Bookmark" button in the Toolbox.

Members and Public - AddThis Button

On every story list and in every Reader Toolbox, there is a bright orange button with a plus sign on it. This is the AddThis service's button. To use the button:

  1. Hover your mouse over the button
  2. A pop-up window appears, with different commands and social networking sites
  3. You can send the page to the printer, bookmark the page, send the URL to an email address or link it to one of the services, such as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.
  4. Click on the desired button
  5. If you use IE or Firefox, there are browser plug-ins that work directly with the AddThis button.

You can also just bookmark a story in your regular browser Favorites list.

If you have a lot of favorites, they display in the reverse order of when you added them. If you have a lot of stories, you may want to set them in a specific order to help keep track which one you are currently reading.

  1. Mouse over the "Stories" button in the top navigation bar.
  2. In the drop-down menu, select "My Library". (Note, if the menu does not drop down for you, click on the main Stories button. On the Stories home page, click on "Manage My Library" from the My Library menu.)
  3. On the home page of My Library, you will see the list of all your bookmarked favorites.
  4. Use the ordinal number form in the left hand column of the stories table to set a new order.
  5. Click "Reorder List" to update.

How to recommend a story

If you enjoyed a story, you can let others know why you liked it.

  1. Go to the story overview page or a chapter page and click on "Recommend" in the Reader Toolbox.
  2. When you see the recommendation form, choose one or more reasons from the list in the box (hold down the CTRL key to select more than one), then click "Add" below the box.
  3. The reasons you chose will be displayed below the story summary. You name as a recommender will appear and people can click your name to see what other stories you have recommended.

Other ways to recommend a story are:

  • Write a comment. Authors love comments!
  • Create a playlist and explain in detailed introduction just what is so awesome about this story.
  • Post in the author's forum. If the author has a forum, sign up and add a new thread to say what you like about the story. Get a discussion going!

How to post a comment

Authors love comments and they are so easy to do! You must be logged in to post comments. HASA does not permit anonymous commenting.

  • From the story overview page, look in the sidebar navigation for a box that says "Talk to [author's name]". You'll see the comment form in that box. Comments made from the over view page are always tagged as "General Overview" comments.
  • From each story chapter, look in the sidebar navigation for a box that says "Talk to [author's name]". You'll see the comment form in that box. Comments made from a chapter page are always tagged as belonging to that chapter.
  • From the Comments page, the comments box appears at the top of the comments for that story. On the comments page, the comment will be tagged with whatever chapter's comments you are viewing.
  • If a story does not yet have comments, the first comment must be made from the story, not the Comments page.
  • If a chapter does not yet have comments, the first comment must be made from the chapter, not the Comments page.

Have fun reading and exploring!

If there is any topic you'd like to see in the how-to, please let us know!

Thursday, August 1, 2013

HASA news - Birthdays, Challenges, Stories

August Birthdays

Is your birthday in August, and would you like a drabble about your favourite character or topic? You can request it here.

Not sure what the birthday cards are about? Have a look at some previous ones.

Challenges

Just as Challenges come from Prospective Challenges, Prospective Challenges come from Nuzgûl, and Nuzgûl need attention to grow from tiny ideas into big stories. Step into the Nuzgûl hutch. The bunnies don't bite (much). And who knows what ideas you may come out with?

July Stories

All writers love feedback. It is the lembas and miruvor that sustains us as we write our story, and leaving a few words about a story you read is always a nice thing to do, whether the story is new or old.

Every fifteen minutes HASA highlights a story chosen at random from the Reviewed and General stories in the archive. Read the currently featured story on our front page.

Many talented writers are publishing every day. In July:

--- 1 Reviewed Story was published or updated.

--- 24 General Stories were published or updated.

--- 2 Beta Stories were updated.

(Please note, you need to be logged in to view beta stories.)

Thank you for reading at HASA. Enjoy!