News

Today, we have for you, a small but rather delayed update to the Fanfiction section. There are a variety of excuses for the slow pace of the updates, nearly all of them involving zombies of some sort.

First up in Final Fantasy IV's fanfic section, we have the first submission to CoN by wyvern14. "Twin Moons" is a story following Edge and Rydia towards the end of the game, and their relationship. We hope there's more where this came from.

Moving on and moving the I in the roman numeral to the other end to get the Final Fantasy VI section, the latest addition is a second story from MeaPortia, "A Night at the Opera", which as the title implies, chronicles the events at the Opera house in all the chaotic detail.

Finally, in the Final Fantasy Tactics section, we have two more great submissions by L. Cully. "Vigil" follows Delita as he ponders more than the honour he has been given, with some non-explicit allusions to adult themes. "The Prodigal One" meanwhile sees Meliadoul reflect on her past and ponder her future.

That concludes our update for today, so please, read them, and comment here or in their original threads if you wish. Maybe you wish to encourage a faster update in future after reading them, and there's one very simple way to do this: Submit your own fanfiction work at the site submissions section of the forums. Who knows, maybe next time I'll upload them without breaking every fanfic section I add something to?

1up.com published today a feature detailing the storied history of video game fansites, and among the sites discussed is our very own CoN. 1up interviewed Rangers51 for the article, which also includes discussion of and interviews with other major fansites of the past and present, including The GIA and The Mushroom Kingdom. While we're buried a bit at the back of the article, we're proud to be mentioned among these influential sites, and we'll be more than content to outlive them all and then see who is laughing and then the people who are laughing will be us ahahahahah.

Ahem. In any event, please have a look at the article over at 1up, and be sure to share it with your friends via Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, for those who might be interested in the full text of the interview beyond the abridged version, you can find the complete version right here on CoN. Thanks to 1up for talking with us, and thanks to all of you for keeping us large and relevant enough to be a part of this feature!

In years past, CoN has played many a practical joke on its users. They were all hilarious, and everyone enjoyed a good laugh, mostly at the expense of those fooled. However, this year, starved of inspiration and a decent amount of time, we decided to do something a little different. A treasure hunt, if you will. Easter's coming up, and who doesn't like searching around for the Easter Eggs hidden in every nook and cranny of a house? Or, in this case, a website.

Today, we have initiated a small change to every page on CoN. It's subtle enough that we're breaking tradition to tell you about it, but we've decided to challenge you to find the pieces of our puzzle, and put it all together. Of course, no competitiveness is without rewards for success. At the very least, you can win a special CoN award, and possibly more. Throughout the day, we will update this thread (But not this specific post) with any members who have fully and successfully solved the puzzle. And believe us, we WILL know. We're special like that.

We have no current intention of giving away clues either. That goes for in the forums, in a PM, or in chat. You're on your own, folks - but if you choose to band together as one mighty force, then more power to you. However you tackle it, we masterminds wish you the best of luck.

Ready... set.......... GO.

You might have noticed over the last few hours that some new content has appeared in the posts made by many of your fellow CoN members. It's all part of the new awards system we've added to the forums today, in which we're giving awards, much like gaming achievements, to all of our members who have been a part of making CoN great.

The awards right now fall into a few major categories:

• Winners of CoNtests and competitions on the site;
• Winners of CoN competitions, such as our yearly sporting competitions;
• People who have contributed significantly to the content of the site, either from working on a game section, or posting lots of fanart or news;
• Or just people who have been around forever...

You've probably seen systems like these before at other sites. The difference? Well, ours are much prettier! (And we're willing to take suggestions on new awards all the time.) So, if you got one or more awards and want to show them off, talk about the award system right here, right now. And if you don't have any awards yet, well, don't worry - we'll be giving more out all the time.

As I mentioned last night, the contest that was running for CoN Quizzes closed on New Year's Eve. If you can't remember all the way back to August to think of the terms, allow me to recap:

"And, hey, since we like giving away AmaCoN money, here's the new CoNtest for the rest of this year: whoever ends this calendar year (as of 23:59:59 GMT on 31 December 2009) on top of the Top Scorers page for all quizzes (with at least ten quizzes taken) will take home $25 in AmaCoN dollars or their local equivalent."

I checked the records on New Year's Day, and we had eleven people who took enough quizzes to qualify, from members among our very first to folks who have even yet to post at the forums. It's one of the latter who takes home the prize—congratulations to Tiael, who will soon have a PM in his inbox with information on how to collect. For everyone else, please talk Tiael into posting and becoming more of a part of the CoN community by congratulating him here!

The new quizzes for January/February 2010 are available now, so just because you can't win money now doesn't mean you should allow Tiael to remain at the top of the heap. Go now and take the new quizzes!

We've been doing some behind-the-scenes work over the last couple weeks or so that you might have seen as you peruse the site; while we're not quite done with everything, I wanted to give you guys the heads-up both so you can enjoy the new stuff and also keep an eye out and report anything you see that looks funny while we continue to work.

The main thing that I've been working on recently is some updates to the way our still-new news section works. I've updated the main site RSS feed to now link directly to news articles, making it easier for you to read and comment without having to get all the way into the forums from the RSS feed. Note that if you subscribed to the old RSS feed, you can continue to use it, but you should really consider upgrading to the new one, as it will give you full stories and cleaner links to read and comment.

An added benefit to the new feed system is that we've also made RSS feeds for all of our news categories, too. If you have a particular interest in just one part of our news, such as News from Japan, you can RSS it directly and filter news via individual feeds.

I've also added a feature where you can share CoN news via Facebook, simply by clicking a couple links, so your friends can be as knowledgeable about the news we cover as you are. I'll be refining this feature in the near future, as well as possibly adding more functionality, such as the ability to tweet our news via your Twitter account as well.

Meanwhile, Tiddles and I, with some early help from footbigmike, Dragon_Fire, Hanyou, Del S and Olly, have done some tweaking to the forums. You probably won't notice most of the changes, as they're very specific to the server-side operation and security of the forums, but they do lay the groundwork for some other server upgrades that we're hoping to do quite soon indeed that will allow us to improve overall site security and possibly add other new features down the road.

So, please keep using the site just as you always have, and if you have any problems, let us know right away in the Errors and Troubleshooting forum. Thanks!