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[Foxeye]

The newer version of the forum gallery software has added support for uploading written documents to the gallery. That means that you would be able to upload fan fiction in a format you prefer (.txt, .doc, .rtf, etc), and people would be able to download and read it. It would provide an easy way for you to have comments and yet still be able to make additions/updates to the story (difficult to do in a forum post).

The advantages:
- more control over formatting
- people can comment without those comments interfering with future updates to a story (like happens with forums)

My reservations:
- Documents can be virus hosts.  I'd hate to be a source of any files with viruses, but there's no way for me to sanely police this, so it'd be up to people to scan files they downloaded. How do people feel about that?
- The files can't be read as-is online, have to be downloaded.* There's some talk that they may eventually support interpreting .html directly on the screen, rather than as a download, but it's not implemented yet.

*Note: You do still have a description field to use, like artwork has.  And in the next version, the description field will be easier to read. That means you wanted to post poetry or a short story (the site currently doesn't like long descriptions), you could probably upload an empty .txt file and have the description field as the real "content".  You'd get the advantage of the comments sytem, though your formatting options will be limited to the usual bbc codes.

Would a place where they could uploaded their formatted documents (.doc, .rtf, .txt, etc) interest people, or is everyone content with forum posts at this point?  In short, should I enable this functionality in the next gallery update and code the site so that there is a seperate "latest stories" for the front page?

[Afke]

Hmm, no replies yet? Well, I might be the wrong person to respond, since I don't really write stories (sometimes in dutch, but that's no use here), and I don't really read stories online either, but this sounds like a good idea to me. Gives it more a "gallery feeling" as well, to showcase stories in a better way. Treats it more like an artform as well, and what you said about commenting and updating makes it sounds easier as well.
I have a question though, what's an .rtf?

[dreamweaver]

.rtf stands for - Rich Text Format - it is for Word pad or Windows Word

[Mirr]

Wouldn't .pdf be better though?
Since there can be x versions of MS Word and other, and thus also not certain the file will be seen as it was for the writer. And since the reader is meant to read, not be able to edit the file. But I know some people are not very fond of .pdf files..