News

Micro-graphic novel This project to caption a short sequence of instructional pictures has already attracted some interesting stories. Perhaps you'd like to try your hand? (posted by Joe Halliwell at 05:05PM on Friday 04 February)

Canongate's Book of Lists There's an interesting entry in Canongate.net's Book of Lists, which may interest those lipogram fiends out there. (posted by Suilean Anderson at 08:24AM on Thursday 06 January)

Christmas at constrained There is a generous seasonal ghost story challenge for you all, if you feel sufficiently Victorian to attempt it... (posted by Suilean Anderson at 12:41AM on Friday 24 December)

IFComp '04 Results This year's Interactive Fiction Competition has now ended and the winners have been declared. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 08:40PM on Wednesday 01 December)

A la mode Not everyone (Hello Mr. Anderson!) was happy with the redesign, so as a special bonus for firefox users you can now revert to the old look. (See View->Page style->Mondo on your menubar.) (posted by Joe Halliwell at 01:23PM on Monday 22 November)

Hitchhiker's Guide Competition There is a contest being run by the BBC as an advert for the release of new episodes. The challenge is to describe earth in exactly 264 words. (posted by Jarred Pickle at 07:06PM on Monday 06 September)

Self-referential questionnaire This is sheer genius. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 05:47PM on Sunday 05 September)

Closed Challenges Hello all. Just because a challenge is closed, doesn't make it dead. Feel free to enter a story in a closed challenge. You might not earn the accolades and cash prizes associated with winning an open challenge but it's still fun. (posted by Jarred Pickle at 10:19AM on Friday 03 September)

Comments on stories? We have some really good stories up on the site, and it would be fab if people posted some comments because I think the poor wee tales are getting a bit lonely. (posted by Suilean Anderson at 10:44AM on Tuesday 03 August)

Constrained.org unplugged Last night our server got unplugged, losing the last couple of days worth of data. Sorry. The silver lining is that I've now implemented daily backups, so this sort of thing will have less effect in future. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 01:32PM on Sunday 13 June)

Interesting litererary exercise This caught my eye: (posted by Joe Halliwell at 02:17PM on Tuesday 04 May)

New challenges Hi everyone. I've posted a few new challenges up, as has Joe. Hope these generate your overflowing enthusiasm :) (posted by Suilean Anderson at 03:14PM on Wednesday 03 March)

Site updates I've just added URL detection to the text styling. Common URLs should now be represented as hyperlinks, see this comment for an example. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 10:28AM on Friday 20 February)

Extensions I've just extended our challenges for a week. I'm not sure this can effectively counter lack of interest, but I'm willing to try ;) (posted by Joe Halliwell at 12:22PM on Saturday 07 February)

Starry night Moderations are now represented by (up to 5) stars. I think this is more intuitive -- let me know what you think. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 05:38AM on Wednesday 04 February)

Account validation I've added an e-mail validation step to the account creation process. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 05:41PM on Tuesday 03 February)

Syndication city I've added an RSS feed for the global story list. I'll probably add challenge-specific feeds in the coming days. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 04:07PM on Tuesday 03 February)

New challenge To get things rolling, I've created a new (week-long) challenge. Thanks to Dan and Steph for the idea. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 06:51AM on Monday 02 February)

New features It's now possible to delete comments. Some lucky users have also been granted administrator status. Finally, I managed to delete Stephen Potter's account. Again. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 05:20AM on Monday 02 February)

Live updates It's now possible to update the server code whilst it's running! This should further reduce the possibility of data loss. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 01:42PM on Friday 30 January)

Gamma release Welcome to the constrained.org gamma release! I've finally finalized the backend, so we shouldn't have any more messy data loss. (posted by Joe Halliwell at 05:49AM on Friday 30 January)