Greetings fellow Writers,

A few quick updates for you this afternoon. We apologize for the extended delay in addressing some bugs and feedback pointed out to us. But at long last, we've finally surfaced to address some nasty little splinters.

Bug Fixes

- Challenge entries in challenges that are part of a portal will now be displayed in the proper portal. This has been fixed retroactively as well - any such posts are now displayed in the appropriate portal.

- There was a bug that prevented tagged users in comments from being notified if they were tagged alongside a non-existent user (for instance if a username was misspelled). Valid users will now receive comment tag notifications regardless of who they are tagged alongside.

- Profile pictures and profile banners can now be properly updated. YIKES.

- Issues with our newsletter email system have been resolved. As such, regularly scheduled Challenges of the Week and Challenges of the Month will resume.

We apologize once again for the delay in addressing some of these issues and are eternally grateful for your patience and your words.

If there are any features, bugs, or suggestions you have, please let us know in the comments below!

Happy Writing.

Happy Saturday, Writers!

We have already received many fantastic submissions to The Prose Press. There are a limited number of spots to join The Prose Press publishing journey, so submit as soon as possible.

Our open call closes on March 15.

Check out the submission page for more information about the program and how to submit.

https://theprose.com/p/press

Have any lingering questions? Please email info@theprose.com.

Cheers,

Prose.

Dearest Writers:

Over the past 12 months, members of our community have expressed their desire to publish a book but lack of traction with agents or publishers. Our mission is to see members of our community succeed and fulfill their dreams of becoming published authors.

Enter, The Prose Press:

https://theprose.com/p/press

In collaboration with one of the fastest-growing educational companies, we started The Prose Press to give up-and-coming authors the platform to successfully write and publish their work.

Over the next few months, we will be inviting aspiring authors to submit their work and start their publishing journey with The Prose Press and share key pieces of their journey with you – their learnings, conversations, milestones, and excerpts.

If you are interested in turning your working manuscript into a real book, reach out to us.

Thank you to our supporters and community members for making this possible.

https://theprose.com/p/press

Cheers,

Prose.

Hi everyone,

It's been a minute or two. Hard to believe that 2021 is about to be over!

We have a brand-new, in-house newsletter system that Z has been working on, in addition to a handful of new features. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we are revamping our Challenge of the Week. Looking forward to reading what ensues:

You're a female mercenary paid to go back in time as a decoy to be Ted Bundy's first victim. Your job is to remove him, and return with his brain for study.

https://theprose.com/challenge/12776

Love,

Prose.

Greetings fellow Prosers,

A long awaited update on the beta site has finally arrived. It'll look familiar to those of you who've tried out the beta, but with a few highly-requested features.

Search

We added the search function to the beta. You can find it at the bottom-left side of the navigation sidebar.

Book Editing

You can now edit and re-arrange chapters of your books. When editing a book, select "Chapters." Then you can click and drag to re-order them, or use the "Add Existing Post" or "Write a new Chapter" buttons to add other posts to your books.

Twitter Login

Login with Twitter is now functioning properly on the beta.

Email Notifications

Email notifications were disabled, then enabled, then disabled. They should be in working-order on the beta. We had to do a lot of work to prepare for our new newsletter system. The newsletters will resume regularly upon the full release of the beta.

Under the Hood

We completed the final slew of updates and changes needed in order to update the site, and... eventually... the app. These changes may result in some pages not being laid out correctly. We've done our best to manually test everything but if you encounter a bug, please don't hesitate to email us!

The update will be coming very soon to a Prose near you. We have no immediate plans to retire the old site, which will remain accessible at https://old.theprose.com. If there's anything else you'd like to see in the update, or any old functions that aren't supported or aren't working properly on the new site, please let us know. We want the update to be strictly an upgrade - i.e. there's nothing on the old site that can't be achieved or is in any way degraded on the new site.

If you haven't had a chance to check out the beta, please do so! You'll find the future at https://beta.theprose.com. Comment on this post or email us with any feedback, concerns, or suggestions.

Why, hello there. It's been a minute or two.

We are making this announcement via Prose, versus the newsletter, due to a pending change in software. Hang tight for now. In the interim, and cutting to the chase, you may recall that last month's premium challenge prompted you to write an alliteration. The longest alliteration's author wins $50. Drumroll. Here are the editor's picks:

a day in the life, by CatLady1:

https://theprose.com/post/427767/a-day-in-the-life

(MAG)PIE, by Mnezz:

https://theprose.com/post/424476/mag-pie

An Acrostically Alliterative Abomination., by EstherFlowers1:

https://theprose.com/post/426293/an-acrostically-alliterative-abomination

swan songs, by WhiteWolfe32:

https://theprose.com/post/424050/swan-songs

and

Samson, by rlove327:

https://theprose.com/post/424020/samson

And the winner is...

...wait for it...

The Thalassic Thaumaturge: The Task To Trap Them., by CompassCreates:

https://theprose.com/post/427877/the-thalassic-thaumaturge-the-task-to-trap-them

We are about to message you requesting PayPal info to send your earnings.

In the meantime, this month, enjoy a $500 prize times existentialism:

https://theprose.com/challenge/12275

Let's keep it a glorious week, everyone. Until next time,

Prose.

Another midnight beta update for you all. It's probably a mistake releasing code this fresh off the press, but we love you so we'll do it anyway.

Bug Fix: Email Notifications

Email notifications weren't working properly. You should now be receiving emails in response to comments, likes, messages, etc, as well as new sign up and password reset emails.

Bug Fix: Instant Notifications

There was a bug with Prose's instant functionality. You should have been receiving alerts in response to comments, likes, messages, and direct messages without having to refresh the page. But you weren't; because it was fucked. You should now receive instant alerts as intended.

Bug Fix: Spell Check

Apparently spell check wasn't working on the post editor. Yikes. Now it is; but if you're using Safari you may have to contend with the dreaded autocorrect. Godspeed.

New Feature: Comment Replies

Lengthy comment threads are difficult to keep track of, especially when there are multiple conversations happening in the same thread all at once. We added comment replies to remedy that issue. You can use the little reply icon next to the comment time indicator to reply to a comment. As a bonus, we also added insant commenting. There should be no need to refresh the page to see new incoming comments on a post that you're currently viewing.

Next up, we'll be addressing issues with Books. In particular, adding/editing chapters, which is not in a pretty place on the beta. It'll get a lot better soon.

Let us know what you think of these updates by commenting on this post or emailing us at info@theprose.com. We hope you like 'em. If you haven't had a chance to try the beta and you're wondering what all the fuss is about, join us at beta.theprose.com.

A quick midnight update has just landed! Here are the highlights.

Bug Fix: Messages

The messages page was showing some deleted/undeleted conversations, which was throwing things out of whack. This should now be fixed.

Delete Conversations

You should now be able to delete conversations on the messages page by hovering over the conversation you want to delete in your inbox.

Bug Fix: Challenge Submissions

The bug preventing new challenge submissions from being made has been fixed. Additionally, you should see proper error messages when trying to publish new posts.

A few other bugs were squashed as well, though they were more rare. Next up we'll be looking at book editing and adding/removing/reordering chapters of books.

If there's something you'd like to see on the beta site, be sure to let us know. And if you haven't had a chance to check it out, you'll find it at beta.theprose.com.

Good afternoon Prosers,

Thank you all so much for helping us test out the new Prose Beta! If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, you’ll find it at beta.theprose.com.

Here are some updates we’ve made, based on your feedback.

Bug Fix: Blocked Users

Some folks noticed content appearing from users they had blocked/had blocked them. There was indeed a bug that has since been reconciled. You should no longer see any messages, notifications, or anything else from users you’ve blocked.

Navigation: Writing Desk

We received a number of questions about how to find your list of posts/challenges/books, including unpublished posts and books. The writing desk is still available on the new site, but it’s been condensed to a single page. That page is now accessible from the primary sidebar nav. We’re still iterating on the design of the writing desk, which is intended to be a one-stop-shop for editing and managing all the content you’ve created.

Design: Challenge Prompts

You can now hover over the challenge icon on a post to see the prompt.

Design: Sidebar

We’ve received feedback that the new navigation sidebar is too bold/distracting. We agree! We’re still iterating on the navigation design. One of our objectives with the redesign is to provide consistency of navigation across the site. The idea of the new sidebar navigation is to surface all the commonly explored areas of Prose in one place, which is only one or two clicks away, and have sorting take place in another. Currently, that means navigation on the left, sorting on the top. The current (old) site uses a topbar nav, which drastically limits the number of navigation items it can easily surface. For a site like Prose, which allows you to explore posts, challenges, books, portals, and authors, this is a tough constraint. If we were to return to a topbar nav, we’d either have to place all the commonly visited surfaces of Prose inside of a “hamburger” menu, or we’d have to surface all those areas via a single “Explore” page. For the time being, we’ve reduced the font size slightly and reduced its overall width.

Bug Fix: iPhone Zoom

iPhones were zooming inputs (like comment fields) when those inputs were in focus. This zoom caused other UI elements of the site to be zoomed as well. We’ve bumped up the default font size by 1px to avoid this zoom.

Bug Fix: Collapsing Comment Tags

Comment tags weren’t being properly collapsed to read ”@Me @You and X others”.

That’s what we’ve done so far, with much more to come. We are actively listening to your feedback, and want to incorporate as much of it as possible. Please continue to comment and share your feedback here. Don’t hesitate to email us at info@theprose.com. We read all our emails, but we can’t guarantee reading each and every post/comment made here on Prose.

Here are some of the things you’ve asked for.

Deleting Conversations

Currently, there’s no way to delete direct message conversations on the beta site. We know, it’ll be added soon.

Search

Search is missing on the new beta! Fear not, it’s coming.

Challenges Page

Challenges page is “unrelentingly white”. We agree, we’ll figure out how to add a splash of color.

Bug: Can’t Enter Challenges

We’ve heard challenges can’t be entered on the beta. We’ll investigate that ASAP.

See Yourself

Some folks want to be able to see themselves when browsing the popular authors page. We here you, we all have a bit of narcissist in us.

Dark Mode

We LOVE dark mode. It’ll make its way to Prose, eventually.

Too Twittery!

We’d be lying if we said we didn’t take any inspiration from Twitter, especially for the sidebar navigation. We’re constantly looking at other sites to see how they solve some of the same challenges we face. We definitely want Prose to retain its character and charm. As such, we’ll definitely be iterating on the design (especially the navigation) in the weeks to come. However, we believe the heart and soul of Prose is not its design, but rather, its authors. It’s all of you who breathe life onto our pages.

Timing and the Old Site

Just so we’re all on the same page, we’ll leave the new site in beta (accessible at its own url) for as long as it takes to iron out all the bugs and address your concerns/feedback. We estimate that’ll take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of months. After that, we’ll make the new site the default site. But the old site will remain accessible at old.theprose.com for the foreseeable future. We can’t remove the old site until we’ve updated the iOS app as well. Spoiler alert: a new iOS app is on the horizon, as is a native Android app - hoorah!

We hope this provides some transparency as to what we’re currently working on, and plan to be working on. Please keep the feedback coming!

Happy writing.

Greetings fellow readers and writers. It’s been some time since we last updated Prose. Today we’re excited to provide a peek behind the curtains and give you a glimpse of what we’ve been working on. 

Over the years, as we’ve added features and functionality to Prose, the app and its codebase have become increasingly unwieldy. As such, we decided to reimagine and rebuild Prose from the ground up. It’s still the same site you know and love, insofar as a Toyota Camry is just as much a car as a Porsche 911. 

We’ll have more exciting announcements in the weeks to come; but for now we hope you’ll give the new site a test drive and let us know what you think. You will find the next chapter at beta.theprose.com and we encourage you to share your thoughts at info@theprose.com.