It's been nearly a month since our last update, so we've decided to release a few features we have been working on lately.

First off, dating back to the old site, we've had many requests for a feature that would allow authors to post a brief summary of thoughts at the beginning of their article. Well, authors now have the ability to do just that with the new Commentary feature. Authors can add a commentary upon article submission and change it at any time they would like. This will come in handy for people who would like to address many readers about a certain issue with the article, or to give users a link to external assets of an article, such as the audio of a song a writer has posted. The possibilities are endless!

Authors can modify the commentary as well as the tagline and icon of their articles in the new Article Modification page, which can be accessed from the Article section of the Options page by clicking the "View / Modify Info" link under an individual article.

We've also made some modifications to the Collection page, adding a new section for article reviews. This will increase accessibility to the hundreds of reviews submitted every month, and hopefully give more attention to the reviews that have very few votes.

In addition to these modifications, we've also made the following changes:
- Revised the Frequently Asked Questions page with many more in-depth questions.
- Review limit is now 12 reviews per day for ALL levels.
- New voting icons have been added.

We're currently working on more new features and plan to roll them out within the next few weeks. We apologize for the lack of updates lately; the lives of the staff members have been busy the past few weeks but they are finally starting to settle down, so look forward to more frequent updates in the future!

We are finally finished with category sorting on the article page. You can now sort through articles by different category areas, such as "type", "writing style", and "genre". This should help bridge the gap between readers and writers and help people connect with their audiences better than ever before.

I just thought I'd also mention that we have fixed a recent error on the article page that was preventing some users from submitting articles. If you find any more bugs, please contact us and we will address the issue as soon as possible.

After receiving many suggestions regarding the behavior of voting on the site, we have finally been able to make some of them into a reality. First off is an idea that was brought up near the beginning of Papertank called the "null vote". For some users, there are articles that don't quite make the grade of being good OR bad. The null vote allows readers to tell the author "The pros were equal to the cons" and refrain from having an influence in the article's score.

Secondly, we've made a few modifications to the reviewing system. One change allows users to specify a value to give an article when reviewing. Along with this, all votes that are not accompanied by reviews now have a value of 2, no matter what your rank is. You may also notice a slight change in your review ranks; this is because we've changed up the required number of reviews for each rank to allow for a more balanced system. If you previously wrote a review and would like to change the score you gave the article, please send me a private message within the next week and I will change it for you.

You may be wondering what the new "honor" section in your profile is all about. Well, we've recently added a system that gives users honors based on certain accomplishments on the site. Currently, we have a very limited library of honors, but as the site expands and more features are created, we will add more of them.

Other changes worth mentioning include a timezone option located in your account options, and additional review stats in your review page.

We are currently working on a new system that will separate finished articles from "works in progress", as well as a collection page with category support. This week, I plan on adding a lot more to the about section, so look forward to changes in that area as well.

We're currently looking for suggestions on what you would like to see in the upcoming portfolio page; if you have any, be sure to post them here!