Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Marilyn Johnson wrote:

Sorry, I can't help... it's all Greek to me. I tried to leave a review for someone over there, and their chapter was quite long, so I wanted to copy and paste it into a Word document so I could make the type larger (bad vision and old age go together, but since I'm neither...), but the system wouldn't let me copy it.


Use your browser's zoom capability. I just tested zooming on a Booksie chapter and it worked very well. The only thing you might find from time to time is that clicking to open an inline comment box sometimes puts the box a little too far to the right, so the far right of the box appears cut off, but if you type beyond the end of what's visible in the comment box, the (Chrome) browser scrolls to the right, and you'll see the whole text box.


Maybe if they had to write a minimum of 50 words like we do here.


Awesome idea.



Maybe if they ... worked on a point system like we do here...


I thought so too initially, but after thinking about it for a while, I realized it shouldn't be needed.

The inline reviews of people who just want to pat each other on the back are unlikely to improve much by forcing them to leave 5 comments. We've all had reviews over the years where someone was clearly just making 5 (relatively useless) comments to get the points.

The inline reviews of conscientious people will be conscientious regardless of points. I would include under conscientious those new members who are honestly trying but don't have a lot of experience doing actionable reviews. Also folks who are generally great reviewers but can't find anything helpful to say once in a while.

The best inline reviews are those we trade with other experienced writers/reviewers who'll read our stories through to the end. All that's required for that to work is connections (or fans), to establish a network of reciprocal reviewers.

And that eliminates the need to constantly scrounge for points! I'll bet Terry would love that!

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Dirk B. wrote:

Terry, where did you see that stories are exposed to the internet? I couldn't find it under the member agreement or copyright policy. In fact, the member agreement seems to suggest the exact opposite. Book title and other high level details, yes, but not content from the parts of the member agreement I read.

Thanks
Dirk

I can confirm. Opening Firefox as private window, I can browse and read Booksie stories without logging in. These stories are exposed to the internet and surely farmed by AI companies.

I hope that's because those writers have enabled a setting to make their writing open to the public.

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Yikes! I have a note in to Sol about this.

29 Reply by B Douglas Slack (edited by B Douglas Slack 2024-07-05 15:40:21)

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

MJ: Booksie will not let you highlight nor copy any of the postings. It's in place after several works were found out in public sites--mine included.

As for making the type larger, hold down the Ctrl key and roll your mouse. Most browsers will respond by making the page itself larger. CTRL and the "+" and "-" keys will work as well. Ctrl and the number "0" will bring the page back to normal size.

Bill

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Just verified Kdot's info. There are several ways to copy the posts though. I won't mention them here but it requires just a little knowledge of the control codes for a given page and the browser you are using.

Bill

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Yes, I was able to circumvent the copy-block, but I feel spammers won't take the time to do so

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

It's mot the spammers I'm worried about. It's the plagiarizers. Every once in a while I put the first paragraph of any one of my postings into a search engine and see what pops out. Found a lot of them that way.

Bill

33 Reply by dagny (edited by dagny 2024-07-06 13:52:59)

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

I am not worried about the writing skills of the members of Booksie compared to mine, nor am I worried about the method of reviewing over there. I AM worried about my portfolio. It contains at least 200 pieces of work. Are our portfolios going with us? Will it stay here until we transfer it to a thumb drive? And if they are transferred to Booksie, that's a lot of data transfer.
I am worried about my banking information being transferred, too.
Also, I wish Sol would come into the thread to answer our questions and give us some idea of what HE's thinking.

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Hi Dagny. Wow!  200 is impressive.

That kind of information is very helpful. Who knows? Maybe there's something Sol can do to automate a transfer of works like yours. Do you have an offline backup? Please say yes. smile

By the way, Sol's been on vacation, which is probably why he hasn't commented.

Your don't have to worry about banking information. There are too few of us left to make an automated account transfer worth doing. It would take much longer to code and test than it would for the rest of us to simply go to Booksie, open an account, and repost our work. Yours appears to be one of the exceptions because 200 is a lot.

Have you ever been able to back up your poems en masse onto a thumb drive? Just curious.

As noted in my original post, Sol hasn't made a decision as to an end date for TNBW, but he doesn't have the time to keep running both indefinitely. Unfortunately, we're not converting enough (any?) new users to replace the folks who've left, and as a result, the site is at a virtual standstill, at least as far as book chapters is concerned.

Are new poems still being posted in any significant numbers by others besides yourself?

I'll be taking over some of the admin and maintenance tasks from him in the coming weeks, but I have neither the full skills nor time to take care of the whole system. And as you may have noticed, we're not getting bug fixes or minor enhancements, to say nothing of the implementation of new features like those he's built/building for Booksie.

Right now, this is fact gathering mode. Given how similar the two systems are, the obvious place for us to go is Booksie, but there are issues that need to be addressed as discussed in this thread. Hopefully, it's just a matter of getting questions answered re how best to do things on Booksie (eg how to prevent exposure of our work to the internet since that would be a show stopper).

There is a TNBW group on Booksie that we should all join so we can find each other over there (user ids may be different). Sol's most recent post on this site (the reminder about the free year on Booksie) includes a link at the top of the thread to that group on Booksie. Be sure to add yourself as a member, otherwise you'll never find it again (it's private).

The most obvious workflow for us on Booksie is an Advanced Writers group of our own as discussed in this thread. I'm trying to work out the details of how and whether that will work, and a list of issues/questions I can take to Sol.

Please keep your feedback coming.

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

I don't mind staying here until the end... main areas:

a. I prefer points for posting
b. I don't want my work publicly available or harvested by plagiarizers

Thinking also, I have about 20 books here each 10-20 chapters, so that's 400 posts, but I have ways around that as per other thread.
I think (b) might be easily solved as well. The first one might be the biggest pain-point

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Have a look at my post at the top of this page. I really don't think we need points. If we're in a group of advanced (serious) writers, we just trade reviews as we would anyway with a points system. It's not going to change how often I review Jack or MJ or you.

A points system might encourage beginners to do a certain minimum amount of commenting, which could help them learn how to do it well, but they won't be in the Advanced Writers group.

If members of Advanced Writers also want feedback from non-group members (not a bad way to find others to invite into the group, by the way), you can post your work in the main group. Members of Advanced Writers would still find your work as long as you're fans of each other.

That's probably how I'm going to do it because I want to find more readers for Connor v2, especially Catholic/Christian folks, provided I can find some who are conscientious about giving helpful reviews.

Personally, I don't think it'll be too hard to find other reviewers to give or at least try to give helpful reviews. There will be people who aren't interested in doing the extra work, which is fine.

My own past experience on TNBW, though, is that if they're interested in receiving ongoing helpful feedback from me, they'll realize (or I'll simply tell them) I'm looking for reciprocal reviewers who at least "try" to provide helpful reviews similar to those I try to leave for them.

The barter system; no currency (points) required. smile

37 Reply by dagny (edited by dagny 2024-07-07 00:50:33)

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Dirk-
I have been on this site for 13 years and have poems, books and short stories in my portfolio. Over 200 of them, which I will have to back up.
I don't know about anyone else, but I worked fucking hard for the 2000 points I have, reading and reviewing without expecting to be reviewed back. So, I am not happy about losing those points.
Waiting for Sol...

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Booksie doesn't require points to post your writings, Dagny. Yes, we're all going to lose a lot of points if we go elsewhere, but they're not needed if we're able to make the transition to Booksie work, which at this point, seems likely, with a few issues (one of them huge) that I need to speak to Sol about.

Have a look at my last post right above yours (ignore the first sentence). It surprised me at first that Booksie has no points system, but the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that, at least for us, a points system is irrelevant. We trade reviews with one another and would surely continue to do so even if the points system on TNBW disappeared tomorrow. I have a lifetime supply of points, so I don't need to collect them anymore, but the real reason I read the writing of the folks left here is because I know they'll do the same for me and because I've known you all so long and enjoy helping you get your work published.

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Bill, a few more questions for you, if I may: Do you primarily post to the main house on Booksie? Roughly what kind of response do you get in terms of actionable reviews vs fluff? How do you deal with the fluff reviewers? Do they generally expect you to read their stories in return for a "Good job!" from them? I'm curious how you deal with them, and how many you generally encounter for a given piece of posted writing (e.g., a new chapter or new short story). Do the fluff reviews tend to number in the single digits, low double digits, or higher? And have you built up a fan base with whom you regularly trade helpful reviews?

Thanks
Dirk

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

For most of my posts, I put them out there in the general public domain. The responses are usually mixed, but I'd say I get around 15-20% fluff and the rest legitimate reviews. Over the years I've been a member of Booksie, I've built up a good readership that helped me a great deal. I review them as often as they review me.

Lately (the last couple of years) I've not posted anything at all. This was due to several reasons, not the least of which was poor health. Now that I've popped back up on the grid after my quad-bypass, I'll try and get more posts out there.

Points mean mostly nothing to me. I have currently just about 1000 points. If I need them, I can use them, but posting on Booksie dosen't require them, so no big deal.

Bill

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Thanks, Bill. What do you do in response to the fluff reviewers. Do you review their work anyway?

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Most of the time I did, usually adding a gentle reminder what a review should cover and look like. If they returned for the next post, they usually did better. In fact, several of them are now writing very well indeed, now that they knew how to do it right.

Bill

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Hi all,

I've read through the comments above and have a couple of responses and clarifications.

First, no definitive decision has been made to close TheNextBigWriter. It's something Dirk and I discussed as a possibility if Booksie is a suitable home. I'd prefer to have one platform to maintain and upgrade but I also don't want to destroy what has been built here. So, there is no imminent plan to shut this down. That being said, we probably won't do much development on this site moving forward as Booksie is the more modern platform. But that doesn't preclude us from running contests and continuing to market and promote the site. I leave this decision to the community.

In terms of Booksie, in public Houses, the content is publicly displayed on the Internet. In private Houses, the content is only shared with that House, similar to how it is kept private on TNBW. So, content posted to the TheNextBigWriter House on Booksie cannot be accessed by bots or others unless they are a member of the group. Try accessing Terry's Booksie post if you are not logged into Booksie.

https://www.booksie.com/725653-dead-mans-avenue

There are talented writers on Booksie and not just beginners. If you look at the contest winners, you'll read some high quality work.

https://www.booksie.com/contest-winners

If we were to move TNBW over, I'd make the House much more visible and help to promote it across the site. I also have no problem making it for more advanced writers. There are already plenty of beginner writer Houses.

Those are a few clarifications and thoughts.

Sol

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

I should also mention there is a popular House called The Review Chain.

https://www.booksie.com/house-review-chain-150

The Founder hasn't done much with it lately but it's attracted over 1,300 members and was quite lively at one point. There's no reason TNBW can't become like that.

Sol

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Thanks, Sol. As I mentioned in my first post, it was my understanding that you didn't feel you could keep running both sites indefinitely.

Combine that with the fact that the New Books (new chapters) scroll is virtually at a standstill, and that we keep losing long-term members without converting new ones to permanent membership, something has to change. Add in the lack of bug fixes (not many needed), minor enhancements (even fewer needed), and quick turnaround time for user support, and there's no obvious way to hang on to trial users. Contests may help, but to the best of my knowledge, we've kept almost no one who joined following the last one. Naturally the crash cost us users as well, but the trickle out has continued since then. And the more experienced users (among the best reviewers / mentors) we lose, the less value-add we have to offer over bigger sites, including Booksie.

I don't know yet which extra support functions you're going to transition to me, but I hoped we'd find a way to transition user support (or at least make me a first contact for the easy stuff, and I could escalate to you if I don't have the ability to help them).

The rest is out of my control, although I've been discussing with other members what we could change to gain and keep more users. In addition to the things above, it includes policy changes you didn't want to make in the past (e.g., a 30-day trial so people really get to know us and the site before being asked to pay money, 30 points up front so trial users can post roughly 3 chapters and get reviews (to assess the quality of them and compare themselves to those reviewers) before they're forced to do them too (which can be quite intimidating), and making it easier for everyone to gain points or spend fewer points). Those of us who have been around a long time (not many left) have enough points to post War & Peace several times over, so it would most help new/newer users to make it easier to gain points to post.

As we all know, the real way to succeed on this site is to develop and maintain a network of reciprocal reviewers, and you can't do that unless you get to know people here and consistently trade reviews with them (something trial users need to understand going in). To do those things, you don't *really* need points. As a result, they're largely irrelevant, so why not make it easier for everyone who needs them to get them?

EDIT: I just checked the ratio of how much it costs to post a work vs. how much that work pays. It's currently 5:1, and Alan some months ago mentioned that it seemed like it took more effort (points) to post after the crash. Sol once told us in the forums (some years back) that he thought it was 4:1. Since the feed of new work is at a standstill and most people have left, why don't we overcompensate and make it 3:1?

Marilyn and I were just talking about a system yesterday that has a ratio of roughly 3:1 (3 points to post a piece of writing of any size, 1-2 points paid to each reviewer depending on length of review, although, I believe, full points are only paid for a short time (maybe a week?) while the posted piece is in an active queue; after that it pays less. But their "inline" comment system is a joke/painful compared to ours. Still, they claim that 85 users were on the site when I checked (no clue if they count those who are always logged in) and 650 the day before.


Why not lure some of that traffic this way, with a great up front trial, faster support, timely fixes/minor tweaks, a terrific inline comment system, and a points system that is less onerous than others? Add some advertising from Sol and a few contests, and if the site still doesn't pick up, then we can at least say we did everything we could. I'd be very surprised if the above changes didn't have a strong positive impact on permanent membership.

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Hi Dirk,

Thanks to you and everyone else for those suggestions. I'm open to keeping TNBW going in its current form but agree there need to be some changes. I can make all of the changes you suggested. They are all relatively easy to implement. I do wonder if 30 days is too long but let's see. I also wonder if 30 points might be too much for the community to handle. Members will be posting but not receiving as much feedback. Especially if the ration is also decreased. The net effect of this will be to suck reviews out of the system. But maybe we need to get more people posting first and then we can dial back the points.

Let's also plan to launch a contest. If anyone has thoughts, let me know. Maybe a short story contest based on an image? Those have always been popular.

Sol

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

Keep in mind, 10 points yields many fewer reviews for trial users these days than it used to. If, instead, they get to post three chapters or stories, they may get more reviewers overall or the same reviewers multiple times. Either would help.


I think those of us sufficiently motivated to keep the site alive will simply have to do more reviewing of new users, at least until there are many more reviewers to share the load. With a 30-day trial, we can, hopefully, work them into our workloads.


Also, we all should point trial/new users at a forum post entitled "How to Get the Most Reviews of Your Writing" that we put together a couple of years ago about things users can do to increase the number of reviews they receive. I put it back up after the crash (thank goodness for the Way Back Machine!). I made it sticky in both Premium and in Writing Tips & Site Help in case anyone wants to have a look and give me additional feedback.

Dirk

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

I'll scroll back through maintenance and minor enhancement requests and pull out the easy wins for review in this thread before finalizing it for Sol.

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

More competitions would be great. I remember the Strongest Start one from a few years ago was very popular!

Re: Migrating from TNBW to Booksie - closed for now; see inside

I'm closing this thread for the time being in favor of another I posted called Reviving TNBW.