CC has just received its 10 millionth visit. This is a fantastic milestone for lil ol' CC.
27. Dec 2009 at 06:09
CC outage CC was offline from 06:30 to 13:00 UTC today.
Yesterday we were cleaning up indices in the SQL server database and it seems to have caused some issues with the server where it started spewing out error logs until the primary controller filled up at which point the SQL server stopped responding.
We apologize for the inconvenience. No data should be lost and we should be a-ok now.
20. Dec 2009 at 03:35
Breaking news!
Grıla has lost her yule lads (again!) and she desperately needs your help if she is to find them in time! For those few out there who don't know who Grıla is she is the fearsome troll mother of the thirteen Icelandic yule lads. Her sons are forever giving her grief, sometimes disappearing for days at a time, especially around christmas when the first of them goes from their mountain home thirteen days before Christmas and then one per day until the first one goes back home on Christmas day and and the last one thirteen days after the 24th. Like any mother, Grıla is beside herself with worry but has narrowed her search somewhat down. She knows that her lads have hidden on CC's pages! Search through the site and discover where her mischievous sons are hiding. They are really scattered, so you'll have to do your very best! You know you have found a yule lad when you spot his red hat on a web page. When you click on it you will see a picture of the lad and one cap of thirteen on the left sidebar will be filled. When you have located all Grıla's sons, please let her know. She will greatly relieved
We can discuss the search and rescue efforts here.
Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas dear members
The CC Team
25. Oct 2009 at 11:12
Monthly premium memberships now possible.
Due to popular demand we've added the possibility of upgrading to Premium membership one month at a time.
29. Jun 2009 at 02:09
CC is now on a new server
Our beloved Critique Circle has moved to a new home (two computer racks to the left to be precise). The new hardware should give us better performance and more database reliability.
The process was amazingly smooth with only around 20 minutes of actual downtime.
10. Jun 2009 at 14:34
1132 Crits!
We received a grand total of 1132 crits in the last period adding a whopping 46 crits to the previous record!
Congratulations everyone!
9. Jun 2009 at 04:00
Are we going to break the record?
It looks as if we might just break the number-of-crits record this week! How many will we get?
2. May 2009 at 07:33
Critique Circle on Facebook Facebook is fast becoming the place to be, digitally speaking at least, and so it is only fitting that Critique Circle makes its presence known there as well.
As of today CC is both a group there and a page. Feel free to join and become fans
As of today, Mrdave has submitted his work to the Public Queues week after week for an entire year. What a huge achievement!
For the 12 month mark, Mrdave holds the title of the Most Productive Critter and Most Productive Overall. In the last year, he's run two full novels through the queues and written over 620 critiques!
Mrdave is a very active member here at CC and has helped many writers become stronger at their craft. Please make sure to congratulate him for reaching this incredible landmark!
5. Apr 2009 at 16:11
1086 Crits!
We received a grand total of 1086 crits in the last period adding 10 crits to the previous record. That means that on average we received just over one crit every 10 minutes throughout the entire week!
In addition we shattered the record for number of new members per week gaining 85 new cc'ers. The week before that the record for number of stories submitted in a single period was set at 267.
Congratulations!
5. Mar 2009 at 15:36
1076 Crits!
We received a grand total of 1076 crits in the last period. This is a number that's been surpassed only once, in January 2007.
Anyone over the age of 18 will be able to join this public queue but no one is subscribed to it by default. If you want to participate in the Queue scroll to the bottom of the Story Queue page and pick the queue from the "Add a Queue Subscription" box.
Only adult members (over the age of 18) will be allowed to subscribe. All stories will be marked as "Adult" by default and you cannot have them unmarked in that queue.
Everyone over the age of 18 has access to the story discussion forum.
Keep in mind that this is being opened up on a trial basis. In order for this queue to become permanent addition to CC we need a) plenty of stories and crits and b) keep things within the boundaries of the rules.
Our newly anointed moderator, Sharonk is moderating the queue and forum for us. Please be gentle.
We will be accepting stories for the next review period (December 31 to January 6) until the end of tomorrow so let's get those stories rolling in pronto!
23. Dec 2008 at 16:27
Breaking news!
Grıla has lost her yuletide lads and she desperately needs your help if she is to find them in time! For those few out there who don't know who Grıla is she is the fearsome troll mother of the thirteen Icelandic yuletide lads. Her sons are forever giving her grief, sometimes disappearing for days at a time, especially around christmas when the first of them goes from their mountain home thirteen days before Christmas and then one per day until the first one goes back home on Christmas day and and the last one thirteen days after the 24th. Like any mother, Grıla is beside herself with worry but has narrowed her search somewhat down. She knows that her lads have hidden on CC's pages! Search through the site and discover where her mischievous sons are hiding. They are really scattered, so you'll have to do your very best! You know you have found a yule lad when you spot his red hat on a web page. When you click on it you will see a picture of the lad and one cap of thirteen on the left sidebar will be filled. When you have located all Grıla's sons, please let her know. She will greatly relieved
We can discuss the search and rescue efforts here.
Merry Christmas dear members
The CC Team
19. Oct 2008 at 03:14
Daylight savings time
Daylight savings time changes are just around the corner for most of the world. However, CC's clock isn't very smart, and it doesn't know what daylight savings time is. If you find that the clock under the CC logo to the left is an hour off go to your settings and change your "Local Time Zone" so that the clock on CC matches your current time. Don't worry about the names of the time zones, just make sure it matches your time.
5. Aug 2008 at 18:23
6.000.000 visits!
We've just received our six millionth visit since Critique Circle opened its doors, five years ago. Congratulations on that milestone everybody
23. Jul 2008 at 02:26
1022 critiques
CC received 1022 critiques last week. Not since January 2007 have we gotten this many crits. Excellent stuff
10. Jul 2008 at 03:20
923 critiques! We received 923 critiques last week which is more than we've gotten for months. Great work everyone!
20. Feb 2008 at 22:15
Record Broken... AGAIN!
66 users were online today here at CC—that's two records smashed in one week. Let's try to break 70! Woot! Thanks again to Eagle-eye Megora for monitoring the users online list.
14. Feb 2008 at 11:14
CC breaks another record!!
A whopping 63users were online together on February 13th! Big thanks to Megora for catching it. Let's keep those records coming, folks!
8. Dec 2007 at 11:29
New Member Record! CC received 148 new members in the last week. That's equates to 21 new members every day!
Don't be shy, new folk. Introduce yourselves on our newbie threads And please tell all your friends about us.
27. Sep 2007 at 15:39
Another record broken! Just moments ago we got 53 people logged on at the same time. 53! Not bad for little ole CC We say, let's toast with milk and cookies! Hip hip hurray!
16. Sep 2007 at 15:54
Highest number of logins in the history of CC!
Last week we saw the highest number of logins ever on CC, over ten thousand in all from around 900 of our members.
11. Sep 2007 at 03:01
Record number of new members!
Last week we saw a record number of new members on CC. A total of 129 people signed up at an average rate of two every three hours.
Let's all make sure the new people feel welcome. Milk and cookies?
6. Sep 2007 at 17:56
Server upgrade complete
We've now moved over to a new server which should be a lot more powerful than the old one. This means that pages should load faster and the performance during peak-hours should not go down to somewhere between a dust-mite and a lazy turtle anymore.
Story Archive
We've also used the opportunity and archived all stories submitted prior to August 2006 except those posted by Premium Gold members.
The story author is able to unarchived a story by using the "Unarchive" option in the story menu bar. If your story was up for review in a private queue and you didn't want it gone just unarchive it and send the mods a message asking it to be returned to "up for review", no problem.
This whole thing went suspiciously smooth so please let us know if something is screwed up.
2. Sep 2007 at 14:18
CC now has ads Okay, now.. How to make this sound like a good thing...
We're adding very non-obtrusive google text ads to the site to the right of the content area and at the bottom of the page.
This is done in order to gain new revenue for CC. Hopefully it'll earn our favorite writing site a few extra bucks
Premium members are able to configure the look of the ads to make them even less visible while Premium Gold members are able to pick which banner to view or turn them off completely. This is done through My Page->Settings.
We do appreciate people visiting these sites from time to time. There are even some interesting sites out there
Since Premium Gold members have been given the power of the ad-smasher we're increasing Premium Gold membership fees to $62.00 for one year and $99.00 for two years (existing Gold subscribers will of course not be charged extra for their current subscription).
If you spot any ads that you know to be scams please report it to the admins and we'll take measures to block them.
We have high hopes for this new revenue stream and have even gone so far as to order a new server machine that is a lot more powerful than the old one (and, wow, so much more expensive). How's that for immediate gains?
We hope you will not think too badly of CC-with-ads. It's still good-ole CC, honest!
26. Aug 2007 at 08:05
Story archive
We will start archiving old stories in the next few days. These stories and crits will be moved to another database on the CC servers but will continue to be accessible on the site. The only difference being that such stories cannot be critiqued any more.
All stories submitted prior to August 1st 2006 will be archived, whether they are old or up for review and whether they are in the public or the private queues.
Again, this should not affect you in any way except that your stories before that time cannot be critted.
CC will now start to remove crits that have been "In Progress" for more than 3 months. If you have any such crits on your list you might want to submit them.
9. Mar 2007 at 07:29
#1 in Pred Ed! Hooray for us! Critique Circle now celebrates its third year as the people's favorite Writing Workshop according to the ever so confusing Pred Ed poll. We also scored no. 2 as favorite Writer's Forum and no. 2 in the favorite Writer's Resource. Not bad! Now, hip hip hooray! hip hip hooray! CC rules!
1. Mar 2007 at 01:48
Records, records, records!
No, we're not talking vinyl. Last week we broke four records: We had record number of crits, record number of stories, record number of forum posts, and finally, record numbers of users online at the same time. Way to go, people!
Here are our numbers for last week: 1178 crits 326 stories 2623 forum posts 64 members online simultaneously
Keep up the good work.
18. Jan 2007 at 16:26
Highest number of logins in the history of CC!
Last week we received 9282 logins! Damn, we're popular
10. Jan 2007 at 14:14
1150!!!
You people are amazing! The last critting period drew in a new record for the Critique Circle of 1150 crits, bumping off the last record which was only 934 crits and had stood for a couple of weeks. This translates to an average of 164 crits/day (remember our 100 crits/day challenge? )
Special thanks go to individuals who participated in various critting challenges hosted on some of your forums, bringing critiques in by the double digits.
Every critique helps—thanks to everyone for their hard work. Who knows. Maybe we'll be posting again soon, with another smashed record!
The stories/period record was also annihilated because 278 stories were posted in the last week, while 237 was the previous record.
You can see the entries/week here, you can compare last period crits/day with the average here, and there are some more fun statistics here.
5. Jan 2007 at 05:44
Clean out your message-box!
This weekend CC will undergo a message-box purge where received and sent messages will be deleted.
Normal members can have no more than 30 messages in their inbox or outbox (60 in all) and messages cannot be older than 30 days. Everything in excess of that will be deleted. Premium members can have 200 messages in either box and their messages do not expire. Premium Gold members have an unlimited message box and do not have to do anything.
If you want to keep your messages you should email them to yourself prior to next Sunday (the 7th).
Best,
Admins
20. Dec 2006 at 11:19
934!!!
We received a grand total of 934 critiques in the last period, shattering the former record from the period before which was 883. This is an average of 133 crits/day or roughly one crit every 10 minutes! Wow, this is way beyond our wildest expectations, congratulations, everyone
Some stats
We love statistics. Here are some
A total of 267 people contributed to critiques this period with 3.7 crits/person on average. Flick was the leader of the pack with 35 crits in all!
Here is the breakdown by day:
Here is the breakdown between queues:
To put the pie chart above into perspective, here is the average number of crits per story for some of the period queues (note that the colours mean different queues than above):
Again, great job, that's the Christmas spirit!
You can see the entries/week here and there are some more fun statistics here.
15. Dec 2006 at 03:03
Records, records, records!
Last period we saw the highest number of critiques ever in the history of CC! 882 critiques in a 7 day period (Click here for details)!! We've come a long way from our 100/day challenge last March
Also, a couple of days ago we reached 50 simultaneous users. That is, 50 people were logged on at the same time. We've never had that many people on the site at the same time before
All in all, a good week. Keep up the good work, gang!
8. Dec 2006 at 15:23
Record number of stories
Last week saw a record number of stories submitted to CC, 238 in all. People sure have been busy writing
19. Nov 2006 at 07:05
New and improved FAQ!
The FAQ has been reorganized and updated. A big thank you to Bookish who volunteered to reorganize the FAQ entries.
28. Oct 2006 at 03:56
Daylight savings time
CC's clock isn't very smart, and it doesn't know what daylight savings time is. If you find that the clock under the CC logo to the left is an hour off go to your settings and change your "Local Time Zone" so that the clock on CC matches your current time. Don't worry about the names of the time zones, just make sure it matches your time.
19. Sep 2006 at 18:25
Is your clock wrong?
CC's clock isn't very smart. It might be inaccurate after our move, and it doesn't know what daylight savings time is. If you find that the clock under the CC logo to the left is off go to your settings and change your "Local Time Zone" so that the clock on CC matches your current time. Don't worry about the names of the time zones, just make sure it matches your time. In the future you will probably have to do this twice a year when the clock changes.
17. Sep 2006 at 02:10
Report ALL errors please!
We're getting a few errors here and there that are difficult to pinpoint without user-input. We're asking everyone to use the report bug feature if you get an error on the site (you'll know it when you see it).
Also, if something else is faulty that wasn't before the move please report it as well. Never assume that we already know about it because chances are that we don't.
Thanks,
Admins
2. Aug 2006 at 06:44
Busy week!
Last week was the busiest week ever on CC. We received a record number of critiques, 874in all (that's an average of about 1 crit every 12 minutes!) as well as the highest number of visits ever, 14843.
Pretty remarkable since summer tends to be slow
23. Jun 2006 at 09:03
The awaited Free Pass It's been a while since we last announced a Star Critter but the wait is finally over!
The system has been completely changed so that now all moderators and administrators vote for the best critter.
A Star Critter will be announced 2 weeks after the crit period is finished.
Enjoy!
7. Jun 2006 at 08:16
Highest number of visits ever!
Last week we received the highest number of visits ever in the history of Critique Circle. 4222 total number of visites in all
Our little CC's certainly moving up in the world!
26. May 2006 at 16:37
Fifty Thousand Critiques!
Yes, we've hit the 50.000 mark! Yesterday, Jessicae sent in the milestone critique, and will receive a CC mug to mark the occasion.
Here's to another fifty thousand!
27. Mar 2006 at 05:52
Daylight savings time
CC's clock isn't very smart, and it doesn't know what daylight savings time is. If you find that the clock under the CC logo to the left is an hour off go to your settings and change your "Local Time Zone" so that the clock on CC matches your current time. Don't worry about the names of the time zones, just make sure it matches your time.
14. Mar 2006 at 05:23
100 crits per day? We're within reach of receiving 700 crits this period which is a 100 per day which is... which is unbelieveable! The switchover is 18 hours from the time when this is written and we need 90 more critiques!
Moderators! We're happy to announce that Angelnorth, Gutbugs and Morpheus1 have become CC's first moderators. They will assist the administrators with the daily tasks needed to ensure that CC runs smoothly. We welcome them to the team and look forward to piling work on them.
Click here to send your condole.. err. congratulations.
8. Mar 2006 at 15:43
Hardware failure A hardware failure occured on CC's servers around 03:00 GMT on the 8th of march. Because of this CC was off-line until around 20:30.
I'm currently working on setting up CC's configuration and you should expect the site to be slow and unresponsive tonight.
Thank you for your patience, guys.
20. Dec 2005 at 09:23
Site was down Monday and Tuesday We're sorry for the inconvenience but apparently a hard disk crashed in the site server and the hosting provider took its jolly ol' time getting it back on-line. We couldn't even post a message about it
We hope this will not happen again any time soon.
17. Nov 2005 at 08:17
Display Settings now stored on server
I used the downtime today to make a change I've been wanting to make for a while...
Display settings such as colors, sidebar theme, frontpage picture and the ordering of the frontpage boxes is now stored as a user-setting in the database instead of just in a client-side cookie so things should now look the same between cookie-cleansing, different computers and browsers.
If you're getting some errors on the page, especially when switching display types (using the brush icon), you should hold down the control key and click F5, and see if that fixes it.
12. Nov 2005 at 16:29
Critique Circle Cleaning up old stories CC will go through a major archival process next thursday (the 17th). We will remove from the site all stories and critiques submitted prior to December 31st 2004.
Click here to get a single .htm file with all the critiques you submitted before that time. You should save this file to your hard disk and keep it in a safe place. After next thursday these critiques will not be available on CC.
29. Jul 2005 at 11:04
New Server
It's that time again We're moving Critique Circle to a new server machine during the weekend. You might encounter some problems because of this but hopefully the disruption will be minimal.
Also, the spell checker and image uploads might be unavailable in the coming week.
23. Jul 2005 at 12:45
CC was down for around 24 hours due to trouble with the server machine. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you encounter any more trouble over the next few days it could be the same thing. Thank you for your patience.
Have you tried hovering your mouse over the x threads have changed message?
You now get a complete list of changed threads you're subscribed to without having to navigate to a page. Go directly to your thread of choice by clicking on each row or dismiss threads with ease by clicking on the checkmark to the left of each thread.
9. Feb 2005 at 15:11
Critique Circle has moved to a new server
The Critique Circle has been moved to a new server, 2-3 meters to the left of the old one. Let's hope we don't encounter a lot of problems with that like we did with the dreaded UK move a few months back.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
- Your humble Admins
8. Feb 2005 at 04:13
New Member Record! CC received 67 new members in the last week. That's almost ten per day.
This is way above anything we've seen before! Word must to be getting out about us.
Don't be shy, new folk. Introduce yourselves on our newbie threads And please tell all your friends about us.
3. Feb 2005 at 11:41
Server changes CC's server is undergoing some upgrades (has nothing to do with CC) and our service is suffering as a result. Please bear with us for the weekend. We should be fine by sunday. *cross your fingers*
- Admins
30. Dec 2004 at 07:12
There were problems with submitting critiques last night and this morning (GMT). The issue has been solved and we appologize of the inconvenience.
I hope no one lost any work because of this (Save should have worked) but if you did then let us know and we will give you the credits you lost.
- Admins
19. Sep 2004 at 13:38
Is your story up for review now? Since we've been having server problems for the last week or so it's only fair that those who have stories up now and feel that they haven't received enough crits can tell us about it and we'll put them back into the Queue free of charge.
Also, those who want to crit stories that have left the current period or the one before can contact us and they'll be granted credits for their crits.
Contact us through the message box (administrator) if you want to take advantage of this.
9. Sep 2004 at 14:52
New Server
The Critique Circle has moved to a U.K. based server.
The benefits of this transition are that this server is a lot faster than the old one, able to handle requests at up to twice the speed as before (page loads much faster), the uptime should also be much better.
A changed credit system. The credit system has undergone major changes and we hope this will shorten the time until a story is critiqued. Instead of a fixed cost of 3 credits when submitting a story, the cost now rises 3 credits for each concurrent submission. So the first story you submit costs 3 credits. If you already have one story in the Queue (or up for review) a submission will cost 6 credits and so on. Submitting a story over 5.000 words in length also costs extra. We hope that this system will allow for more critiques and a shorter Queue.
At the same time, prolific critiquers will be rewarded. After each period in the queue the most prolific critiquer will be rewarded by a free-pass. The critiquer can use this pass whenever he/she chooses to bump up his/her story to the top of the queue.
The changes only apply to the public queues.
Premium Membership grand opening!
The Premium Membership opens today. We hope you will find the new system to your liking, we have strived to make it a very alluring choice with the personal queues at its core. The Premium system has a number of other exciting features, such as the Buddy System, personal forums and a plethora of other features.
The cost of Premium Membership per year will be USD 24 but in February we are offering it for USD 20.
By becoming a Premium Member you are giving us invaluable support and it is much appreciated
We have added a new queue for those writing for children and teens. This means more stories are up each week and we hope for a corresponding increase in critiques! This also cuts down on the waiting time both in the General queue and the SF/F/H queue, so we hope it's a success.
All children's and YA stories have been moved to the new "Children's/YA" queue. If someone objects to their story being moved, please contact the adminstrators.
9. Jan 2004 at 04:29
Donate!
We've just added a donation button using PayPal. We're not much for begging but...
Your contribution is important so we can keep the Critique Circle on-line.
As a further incentive we're going to let all named donations go towards a subscription fee in the Premium system once it's active (feb 1st). For example, if you donate $24 you'll receive a full year's membership.
Thank you all.
The Admins
1. Jan 2004 at 09:40
Forum changes
We've made slight changes to the forums, mainly by combining the genre forums and other areas with little traffic. All the posts and threads are still somewhere on the forums — if they are hard to find, perhaps the search function can help!
16. Dec 2003 at 17:53
Technical problems Due to technical difficulties the site has been down part of the day. We're very sorry about the inconvenience.
14. Dec 2003 at 06:42
Romance! Due to the number of submissions of romance stories during the last few weeks we've decided to resurrect the Romance Queue. Each period will feature three stories while the General queue will have four and the scifi/fantasy/horror five.
Each period will therefore include a total of twelve stories for our critting pleasure
We hope this change will sit well with our critters.
63 users
And please tell all your friends about us. 
)
