How does chapter versioning work?

Versioning allows you to post a new version of the chapter. So, for instance, you can have Chapter 1, v1 and Chapter 1, v2. Both can be active at the same time, or if you want you can deactivate v1. You'll still have access to it if it is deactivated.

It will say v2 on the content and you can add a note letting readers know this is version 2.

I would definitely give the version system a shot. If you have questions using it, let me know.

Sol

It's just like posting a new chapter.

I spent some points testing out versioning. Although it's a good start, the number and order of my chapters changes between drafts. I don't want to take down my old v2 content since I still want feedback as I write v3 of my book. I'm actually writing act 3 of v2 and act 1 of v3 simultaneously. However, my old chapter 6 could be chapter 8 in the new draft, and so on. For this reason, one can't simply read chapters 1, 2, 3 in the new draft and then pick up the story on chapter 4 of the old one. Currently, the drop down list combines all versions of all chapters in one list.

On the nice-to-have list, versioning should have some way of filtering the list to only see one version at a time so as to avoid confusion between substantially different drafts. Also on the nice-to-have list would be the old reading list functionality (I know you're working on it), but with an automatic increment to the next chapter with the same version number. So, if someone is reading chapter 4, version 3, their reading list increments to chapter 5, version 3. Either that, or some easy way to see in the drop-down list which chapters someone has already read, so they know to pick the next one in sequence.

For now, I've got two books, labelled v2 and v3 in the book title, and am keeping the chapters completely separate. I don't plan to add much to v3 until next year, so I can always switch over to the new site's versioning once I'm comfortable with it.

*** Lastly, will I be able to change version numbers on all my existing chapters without incurring cost in points? My old v2 book has all of the chapters labelled v1, which is how they came across from the old site. I'd like to fix those to have the version numbers match the version number of the book.

Thanks
Dirk

A classic version control question.  After you version-control the components, how do you create/manage a unified version for the whole product?  The software world has tried a number of different models.  Some work well, some are clunky, and some seem slick but are fraught with problems, often because the descriptions contradict the user's mental model.

Anyhow, there is a fair amount of prior art, in the working model, in the interface functions, and in the back end.  The back end part is probably less useful because many systems store changes as deltas.  That presumes certain ratios of storage and storage access to computation power.  Unless you are running a truly massive--and effective--RAID system, the cost of storage access--disk transactions and head movement--has gone up relative to the cost of storage and computation.

If you're going to work on it at some point I encourage you to open the dicussion to users and to emphasise walking through scenarios to see whether it works as expected--and provides the benefits expected to the user.

If you're going to take this version control step, you might deepen the hierarchy to multi-volume works and multi-section multi-volume works.  The step from three to four is usually easier than from three to four, and that is much easier than the step from two to three.