Wishlist Cont. (Page 5 of 9)

I sure hope nobody is screaming at this Janet. I think the new site is pretty dang awesome. It still needs a few tweaks, but nothing that would throw us back to the old way. My 2 issues are 1) Have the text box for inline reviews not cover the content your commenting on and 2) When going to a piece on your reading list, go directly to the last chapter read & reviewed rather than having to do the drop-down box to find the chapter. I still think these group forums should be for discussion of topics with the continuing feedback having its own forum or simply PMing the author.

Sol is addressing my first issue. Again, thanks. As for the second, well, I'm a big girl and can adjust.

Bravo, Linda!

Again, my 2 issues are 1) Have the text box for inline reviews not cover the content your commenting on and 2) When going to a piece on your reading list, go directly to the last chapter read & reviewed rather than having to do the drop-down box to find the chapter. These might not even be issues for others, but they would help me in my reviewing.

I want a pony.

Wait! I got that. Nevermind. I don't need anything.

How about a new saddle or a puppy to keep the pony and/or you company? Everybody needs something, lol. Take care. Vern

Hey dags, we actually agree, so all good!

I was actually referring to sweeping general statements. So by all means if you don't want those buttons I want, just say so. Or agree if that's the case.  This way, Sol will have a much better indication of the ideas that have more support and those that don't. I do admit that my previous comment could've been better worded.

Cheers JR

I'm struggling to get my head around the practicality of using reviews, especially in-reviews, as discussion boards.

Reason for my concern is this:  A novel with 30 chapters, and an average of 5 in-line reviews per chapter, at an average of 10 in-line comments per review = 1500 in-line comments.  I'm not even considering if a writer has more than one novel active.  If only one comment every 2 chapters is discussed in more detail, that's 15 discussions spread over 30 chapters and 1500 in-line comments.  Not mentioning if two reviewers made the same suggestion, yet one group adds their views to review A and another group theirs to review B - and in the process, you now have two of the same conversations that don't follow each other.  From a writer's perspective, especially one that do not incorporate changes as they write on, this would be impossible to manage without going mad or without missing possibly some really good feedback.

So my question is, how would someone manage this?  Email alerts will drive me nuts (but that's just me) - traffic light patterns attached to in-line comments would probably work, but it doesn't negate the navigation require to get to this.  As already mentioned, having a feedback thread in more than one group is already problematic.  And I disagree that it takes the same effort to navigate in-line reviews compared to forums (1500 comments ...) - once you're on the forum page, you're going.  (I think the clicking involved with in-line reviews have been covered, so I'm not mentioning it).  How would this make it easier?

So although this functionality of in-line reviews specifically would be great, is it really what the intent is?  I have seen this many times over where something basic, but really effective morphs into a brilliant system that simply is too complicated and cumbersome to be used for its original purpose.  Fixing this would be even more painful.

KHip's proposal to have a "Facebook" kind of interface for each novel, that isn't part of the forums, seems less complex to me (from a user perspective, not necessarily a programmer's).

So, what am I missing here?  Sol, or is this what you're working on?

From my perspective, any author can start a forum on any piece of work they wish; you don't need anything special to do so. Now if said author can get reviewers to congregate at this forum, then said author could if they wish to do so get reviewers to leave comments on the inline review. They could even appoint their most prolific reviewer as the central review for others to comment on thus creating an inline forum. As far as thirty chapters go, I for one do edits one chapter at a time, so why would  want all those comments in a regular forum mixed up and spread over thirty chapters with no way to know which chapter a given comment was relating to. For instance a reviewer could enter comments on chapter 5 while others are entering comments on chapter 29, etc. I don't really want to wade through god knows how many pages of a forum to find who made what comment on each chapter so would most llikely do it as each chapter was being reviewed anyway if that were my only choice. However, with the inline, it is already divided into chapters so I can edit at my leisure without the ever repeating necessity to fish out those comments from a regular forum.

Now Sol has said he is working on improvements for the inline review process and if one such improvement already mentioned was to be able to scroll through the comments, then that would be wonderful and would diminish even further any need for any additional forum changes. I mean I don't care if forum upgrades are made, I just don't see any need as far as making a special effort for each author's work when they can do that already - I've even suggested that some authors do so for a particular work; still hasn't come about so I'm not sure what the broad appeal would be.

As is, you have a choice to do your own forum or to use the built in forum capability of the inline review (especially with potential upgrades) so I really don't understand the clamor for having a forum for every work posted. Doesn't make sense; the majority appear, get little attention and then are never heard of again, so what would be the purpose in creating all these thousands of feedback forums above what is already available.

But to each their own.  Take care. Vern

Thanks Dirk, that does make it clear to me.
On a slightly differing note I think having the newly published list categorised by groups rather than as by order of submission of any genre is a bit self-defeating, if you want to only read things in your genre you probably would go that group listing and are quite likely to be told of postings anyway due to connections etc As it is now, one has to make a positive decision to go look at other genres rather than your own which makes it less likely for you to review outside that and vice versa thereby lessening the number of potential new reviewers reading one's work

Yes, good idea.  Also couldn't we go back to new work posted of any genre perhaps the latest 10 or 15 and then by genre afterward. Probably get a wider pool of reviewers and review more widly.

One workaround I use, Corra, is to highlight what you want to retain, copy it, and paste it into a 'working' text file on my desktop.  When I have all I want to retain, I print the text file. At the same time I copy the reviewer's entry, I make a reply comment to show I've seen it.  If the text file is full of really good ideas, I save it to the directory where I've stored the copy of the chapter/story so I can work on it off-line.

~Tom

A way to organize--that is a gigantic hit upon the nail head. Giving the UI organization tools would certainly go a long way to solving many of the issues that seem to be cropping up for most of us.

There is a very, very dusty maxim in Computer Science that there is no programming problem that cannot be solved by adding another layer of indirection.  But in this case the point about posting rights intrudes.

My question is: does the indirection appear where the user sees it, so that the user chases the link, or do the forums -appear- with the story, with the link-chasing done in the server tiers or the web machinery?  Both can work.  Which works better?  (I'm assuming that there's no practicably insurmountable obstacle to having a particular forum appear in multiple places.)