3,676

(13 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

Can't find the old 'Future Wishlist', so I'll write here.

Minor but irritating thing that could be improved:  When I go to publish, I get a 'Warning: Are you sure you want to do this' on the point cost.  'Warning: are you sure you want to do this' I associate with file deletion and such.  Perhaps you could make this particular message a little more like a bank transfer or phone payment: 'Confirm: 3.25 points will be deducted from your account to pay for this transaction' or similar words.  It would be just as effective and less jarring.  I don't know if there are other places where this could apply.

When it comes time to get the email notifications working, I suggest multi-level options on the creation or publishing of work.

  1. An alert on an author.

  2. An alert on an entire group.

  3. An alert on an author IN a group, thus Mrs. Plum, but only for posts in Medieval Fantasy and Magic, but not for postings in Literary Fiction (unless it's also in the other group)

And then a further distinction:

  1. Creating/first publishing of a work by the author/group, as above

  2. Updates/publishing a chapter in said work

  3. Updates/publishing a chapter of a =selected= work

so that I'm notified when Mrs. Plum has a new work, but I have chosen not to get subsequent chapter updates on her work--unless I mark that specific work for chapter updates.  (And I should be able to mark such any work that I can read, even if I'm not following the authors or groups.)

Yeah, a few more columns in the database, but I suspect that many of us writers here will want these capabilities sooner or later.

=Postscript=: Attempting to do this list with bullets instead of numbers didn't work.  I'm going to play with the posting a bit and see if I can get some clues.

Okay.  The BBCode document says that (open-square-bracket)list(close-square-bracket) is the correct syntax, but when I go back in to edit it's been changed to (open-square-bracket)list=*(close-square-bracket).  In any case, the HTML is <ul> <li>...</ul>  ......  with no indication of what the bulleting character is.  I don't have my HTML references with me so I can't check them at the momement.

As an aside, can someone tell me, as the BBCode article does not, how to escape square brackets when I mean to use them to indicate the BBCode itself?
Let me know if you can use the screencap.

3,677

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

I'm having problems--frustrations--with the content editing window.  I have copy-pasted a file whose formatting came through badly.  I'm not going to rail about that just yet because I'm not quite sure of the difficulties your up against.  (But note that a control-enter is a hard line break, not a paragraph break, and isn't a solution for single-spacing paragraphs because a paragraph formatting change above it will affect below and vice versa.)

Now, as to the real problem.  Since I'm fixing formatting, I need the formatting bar.  I adjust the main window scroll so it's at the top of the window and I start editing the content from the top down.  When I reach the bottom of what's visible on the window, instead of the editing canvas scrolling up, the whole ferstunk window content scrolls up, moving the editing controls off the visible window.

=Postscript:=  It's actually a bit worse than it seems.  When you get to the end of the document, you =can't= scroll down further in the edit canvas.  The only way to bring the end of your document close enough to the top of the canvas to have that text AND the formatting controls in your window at the same time is to add some text (eg. blank lines) at the end of the document, which you must remember to remove later.

I don't know quite all of what's going on here, but I suspect that the problem could be fixed by making the visible part of the editing canvas short enough, top-to--bottom, to fit in the window.  Even letting it fit in a window that is say, 80% of full screen would probably do for most of us (though it's not ideal).

Which is why some threads belong to stories.  Ideally, reviews would flow right into the story's thread.  (Or one of the story's threads.)

There's a story, supposedly true, about an architect who designed part of a  campus without paving paths between buildings.  He waited until the students wore paths, then paved where they walked.

3,679

(3 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

What I tell you three times is true!

3,680

(3 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

This may be related to a problem I had.  I did some investigating into the generated HTML and sent a screencap to Sol.  There's a definite bug--at least one--in the code that turns review text into HMTL.  In my case, the angle brackets were left untranslated and the browser is left to try to interpret their content as an HTML tag.  If you know how to use the 'developer tools' on your brower, you might take a look to see if that's the problem.  If not, more detail would probably help the developers investigate.  Or PM me the work and chapter and I'll take a look.  (Use the connection request for the info; I'll decline the connections afterwards.)

You might add to your report the work/chapter you were reviewing.

For now you might use double parens instead of brokets to quote things.

3,681

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

Two things, not bugs exactly, but ways in which something is not providing what it was apparently meant to.

First, on page for a group, in the Visit My Group sidebar, the list of groups and forums with messages goes out of date when you read them and does not update on the page, even with reloads, for a considerable time.  I haven't actually timed it, so I don't know.

Second, on the My Groups, by default it shows you ALL groups, including Premium and Free.  That means it shows you EVERYTHING--all new works.  Or you can select an individual group, but then you have to look again for each group you are in (except Premium and Free, which between them represent EVERYTHING, or EVERYTHING that is not in a private group.  There is no way to select mutiple groups, or ALL-BUT-PREMIUM-AND-FREE, which are, in a sense, the 'base' groups, the two parts of the universal set.

More grist for my thinking on groups, but for now adding 'chosen groups EXCLUDING Premium and Free' would probably come closer to what most users would hope to find.

IMO.

I don't know if this would be the simplest thing to provide, but maybe the simplest to use would be a way to view the entire sequence of comments, with the in-line comments each as a box with the highlighted text at the top and perhaps an indication of where the snipped occurs (adjacent words if it's less than four or five words, and a percentage for how far down it is).

I've asked my reviewers not to use in-line reviews.

I'm asking my reviewers not to use inline reviews on my work.  I just put this in the story top notes for The Sorcerer's Progress:

Reviewers, PLEASE, don't commit your wisdom to inline reviews that I cannot print out and study at length, to which I cannot reply except in the most fragmentary way, and which are as ephemeral as the pixels on the screen.  Your wisdom deserves better and I deserve its full benefit.

Your mileage may vary, your experience may differ, but mine is that no matter how good an inline review, the format makes it impossible for me to study it as a whole or at length.  These problems could be mitigated (but not alleviated) by additions to the website.  They could be largely fixed by making the 'inline' mechanism a way to --enter-- the text of a single-body review that could be read and responded to as a whole.

3,684

(33 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

Could we skip the BasicInfo/Cover/Content/Publish dance when we are just updating chapters?  When I go to edit a chapter, I get put into the process to create the whole work.  This might be hard if your data model and matching code aren't just right, so I won't hold my breath.  But when my mind is on the chapter, I don't need to have something demanding that I think about the cover and lose what I'm holding in my mind.

A different kind of enhancement: a 'notebook' that can have multiple 'pages' with titles.  Each page can hold text, images, and most important of all, links, links to forum posts, links to specific chapters of works (these might not be a simple HTML link format, or if they are, they might be formatted for special interpretation), links to things internal and external.

It the 'pages' could further be organized into titled entries, and if an entire entry could be PM'd to another user, it could be especially helpful.  Likewise if a PM received could be routed directly into a notebook entry.

Being able to move entries from page to page would allow the writer to move things not currently needed off into a page for later reference.  Of course, this could be elaborated on indefinitely, but this much would add a nice capability.

Searching on titles and content would flesh the whole thing out.

You've got a lot on your plate now, but I wonder how many other people would find this useful in the long run.

At the moment, I see it as a way to clutter other people's home pages with big, distracting images.  Since I don't want the clutter on my pages, I won't do it to anyone else.

But that risks the Electric Blanket dilemma: with a two-sided electric blanket, the controls get mixed up.  She's freezing, even though she has HER control cranked; he's baking even though he has his side off.

I'm going to be thinking out loud about the groups, business, maybe starting today, maybe not.  I'm afraid I'll get a little Aristotelean in the beginning, laying out ground-floor thoughts on then nature of the problem.

3,687

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

I wonder now whether the version number change shouldn't either automaticly repost or provide an option to repost.  The copy-paste operation is less reliable than changing the number and editing and I think I'm not the only one to get caught on this, choosing to move forward with edits on the existing base.  The version control systems I've known for software always assumed that you declared new versions on edits rather than starting with a clean sheet of paper for each.

The option-to-repost suggestion moves this from bugs to potential future enhancements.

3,688

(14 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic &amp; Sci-Fi)

Hmm.  I guess elves don't always get along with animals.  If Horse survives, Kha could have a little character growth.

3,689

(14 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic &amp; Sci-Fi)

Erndog wrote:

Hey, I found my way back-Thanks Amy. I'll have Chapter one done by the end of the week, I hope.  I have no title yet except "Book." pretty original, huh? Not rushing into publishing is smart...ducks in a row, and all that. My ducks are a lot like herding cats right now.

ET

Yeah.  Amy has a horse named Horse.

John Dickson Carr titled one story The Eight of Swords.

How about The Trey of Chamber Pots?

A well-trained Border Collie can herd ducks nicely.  I've seen the demo.

3,690

(14 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic &amp; Sci-Fi)

Look at Sol's reply to me over on (I think) the site bugs thread.  I'll try his instructions a bit later.

3,691

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

Thanks.  Will give it a try.

3,692

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

But how do I give it the same chapter number?  I want this to -replace- the old chapter.

As an aside, did you get the HTML/CSS that seems to show why italics aren't showing up here?

3,693

(33 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

On the messages page(s) there's a button marked 'sort'.  You have to push it to find that it reverses the sort order.  Could we change it please so that experimentation is not necessary, perhaps by having it read either 'Sort Newest First' or 'Sort Oldest First' according to what it's ready to do?

3,694

(1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic &amp; Sci-Fi)

The Ch 2 revision is up, though you have to go look for it until we find why it's not showing up.  I'll let you know about future work, but right now I have to do some larger-scale work at the same time, both Book 1 and Book 2, and I do have another project.   And reviews to catch up on.

I like the idea of idling neglected groups.  There are questions of how to do it, and whether the group should be scrapped or just mothballed.

I also like the idea that Premium and Free--the membership groups--have a different status.

I'm going to think out loud about groups over the next week or two.

3,696

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

SolN wrote:

Sol,
I posted a story yesterday, and just followed the instructions. everything went well, and I thought I posted it in Fantasy and Science fiction.  But I can't find it anywhere, except on my home page. How does this posting work? After I post, do I have to invite folks to review it?  I thought when I selected the groups to post it to, it would should up in those groups  it's "Beyond the Event Horizon." What did I miss? where did I go wrong?
Thanks.
Ernie

It looks like you didn't post it into the group. After you select the group, make sure you save the selection by pressing the red Update Publish Settings button. Just checking the group box will not automatically save it. To fix this, do the following:

1. Go to portfolio
2. Find the title and under Actions click Publish Setup
3. Find the group(s) you want to publish to and select.
4. Press the red Update Publish Settings button.

That should do it.

Let me know if you have other questions.
Sol

I've done those things.  My update/revision 2 of chapter 2 of The Sorcerer's Progress Book 1 is not appearing anywhere.  I was wondering if it's because I have to change my billing info (unexepected change in c-card info) but since you won't let me see that now I don't think that's it.

Is there a problem if I revise ch2 on the site w/out having done anything with ch1?

You're certainly right that we don't know how to use groups.  We've got duplication or semiduplication with two different fantasy groups.  Was each too specialized?  I don't know.

We also have connections.  They do  several different things, hooking up announcements, putting stuff in each other's home pages, and enabling private messaging.  These things don't seem to me to be quite congruent, so I'm at a loss to guess what the are meant for.

I'm not going to try a full analysis here, but I do think that at some point, when the less fuzzy things are fixed, you should take a look at how people are and are not using these things.

3,698

(33 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

When you are displaying a multi-chapter work for reading/review, the chapter scroll bar at the top is full width.  The one below is flanked by Previous and Next buttons.  Could we make the top bar like the bottom bar?  I suppose this might count as simplification, too, but I chose to put the request here.

jack the knife wrote:

Aw, c'mon, njc. Building walls? That's not what we're about. The purpose of groups is to gather like-minded writers together to share ideas, discuss issues related to the particular genres. At least that was my motivation for starting a group. Most of the time, though, the group just serves as the place to post a story appropriate for the genre. A place for those who like that kind of story to go to and find a story to their liking. How can it be clique-ish if anyone can join a specific group if they think it suits them? And join more than one group? We're a family of writers, each member trying to achieve a success that meets the individual's definition of it.  So have some fun and take advantage of the wealth of talent available here - in whatever group(s) meets your fancy. The paranoia you expressed is misplaced, in my view.

If building walls were not an express purpose of groups, why is it possible to create a private or invite-only group?  Those capabilities are wall-builders.

What this suggests to me that -both- capabilties are present in the design.  The problems that we are having figuring out how to use the things might or might not come from having both openness and closedness as part of group function, but it's a question this sometime software designer feels should be asked.

It's only paranoia in the sense that having a system test team to hammer on the product before it ships is paranoia.  You =always= expect bugs, in requirements, analysis, several levels of design, coding, integration, configuration, and in packaging the product to ship or go into service.  It's best if the designers and programmers expect the bugs, and design/code them out before they happen.  But that's a discussion for another place and time.

3,700

(217 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)

When I copy-paste story text, text decorations--specifically italics--don't make it through.  This happens whether I paste directly or or use the "from Windows" form.  It doesn't matter whether the italicized section at the beginning or end of the line or in the middle.  I'm copying from Open Office Writer.

BBcode italicization isn't working for me in the forums, either. This should be italicized.

Okay, I've just looked into the page with the DOM Explorer.  The section marked for italics has <em> ... </em> set.  Evidently, somewhere <em> is not defined to produce italics.

Okay, the computed-styles display suggests that enhanced-mode and italicization have been cancelled by something.  I have another screencap.  I'll be sending a bunch soon.