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Writing Tips & Advice is probably the group/forum to use for Writing 101 type of information. I believe that's how the old site used that forum. Sol is working on bringing back the old forums, although he and I are debating how best to implement it in the Premium group. Feel free too join us there and give your feedback.

Regards,
Dirk

I was actually referring to whether my forum posts should be posted to Premium, Free, or both. If non-paying members can't see what's in Premium, then they won't know what they're missing. A lot of my recent posts in Premium and elsewhere have been to try to help the new site get off the ground. I want to include free members in that too. If they can't see Premium, then I need to post in both.

Dirk

Or post it to the Writing Tips & Advice group that's already here on the site.

Dirk

I was wondering the same in a post earlier today. Things have seemed quiet since joining the new site, either because of the holidays or because people are still figuring out how best to use the system.

Some of the old forums have been created on this site as groups. The best way to get easy access to the group forums is to join the corresponding groups. That way the groups show up on the right hand side of your home page, with a forum link under each one. All you have to do, is click that link. Also, if you join a group you can also post to its forum.

The other way to get to the forums is a little more cumbersome, but doesn't require you to join. Go to the menu at the top of the screen called Groups, click on it and select All Groups to see a list of all groups (there are four pages worth so far). Find a group you might be interested in, click on it, and click the Forums tab to take you where you want to go. I'm afraid you have to repeat this step for each group you're interested in. That's why I find joining groups is the easier workflow. You can, however, read the content of most groups without joining. Some are made explicitly private by the creator/moderator for their own reasons.

I've also read that Sol is going to resurrect some form of the old groups on the new site. I'm not sure how he'll pull that off without further complicating the group forum concept already in place. Will that mean there will be two places to go to post/read? Not sure yet, and it will probably take some time, although he is very responsive.

As a workaround for the old forums, Linda Lee created a group here called Old Forums, with one thread for each of the old forums (e.g., shred thread, strongest start, member announcements, etc.). Unfortunately, with only one discussion thread for each of the old forums, you really can't have multiple separate conversations going on in the same thread (e.g., discussions about two different pieces of work being shredded, or multiple conversations about  writing tips & advice, and so on).

Since we're allowed to be a member of ten groups at a time, joining the groups of interest to you is probably the best bet. Have a look through all of the available groups so far and join those you like, or create new ones. You can announce any new groups you created here in the Premium forum. If there are particular people you want to explicitly invite into a group, make a connection with them and then send them a private message.

Hope that helps.
Dirk

Hi Pamela. Many things have changed, most for the better, I think. Start by clicking on the The Next Big Writer logo on the upper left of your screen. That will take you to your home page, which has lots of useful information as you begin to use the site regularly. On the upper right of the home page is an orange button labelled Conversion Assistance. That should answer many of your questions.

At the very top of the screen are icons for searching (the magnifying glass), reading content, reading group forums, and a menu button with your userid on it. That menu is important, as it gives you access to many of the features you would most want about the site. The Portfolio menu item is where you'll find your own work (books, poems, etc.). Click on the various items in the menu to see where they take you and explore a bit. It isn't too hard to get used to.

A couple of new concepts to be aware of inline reviews and groups. Most people love the inline reviews. You can select a piece of text in someone's story and drop a comment right there. No more constant scrolling up and down to copy/comment on specific items in someone else's story. Your inline reviews can be saved if you can't finish in one session, or submitted to make them visible to everyone else, including the author. Note that your feedback and the author's replies are now visible to everyone. Previously, the author's reply was private to just the reviewer.

Note that there are two kinds of reviews: regular and inline. You can leave either type of review for someone. Regular reviews are just like those on the old site. Inline reviews are as described above.

Groups are a new concept on the new site. As the name implies, they are for grouping related information together. For example, there is a Sci-fi group where you can publish and/or discuss science fiction work. There are also groups for fantasy, detective/crime, young adult, etc. You've already found your way to the Old Forums group, so you know how to navigate to groups. From a group's main page, you can get to the forum for that group, see content posted to that group, and see members of the group. Joining a group is easy. There's a button for it on each group's page. Most groups are wide open, and anyone can join by simply clicking on the button. Other groups are restricted, so I assume a moderator will have to approve your request to join. As far as I can tell, you can see the content of each group, including the forums, but you need to be a member to post. You can join up to 10 groups, which seems to be enough for everyone at present.

The TNBW Premium and TNBW Free groups are important. Everyone should probably join both groups. I'm not sure if non-paying users can join TNBW Premium. Premium is where we do most of our communicating with Sol and each other about the new site (bugs, enhancement requests, etc.). I don't use the Free group, so I'm not quite sure how it differs. I know that there are both free and paying members on the site, but I'm not sure how those two groups differ and how best to use them. I use Premium and Science Fiction exclusively. However, when you publish chapters, you can choose which groups to publish to (Premium, Free, YA, etc.). If you publish to the Free group, non-paying members can read your work if they so choose. I believe there's also a way to publish chapters/your work to be accessible to the whole the Internet. I don't use that, since I prefer not to expose my work for someone to copy/steal.

There is currently no place on the site like the old forums on the old site, where you could go into a specific forum and start a discussion about a particular topic. Each forum could have multiple different discussions going on at the same time. In order to do the equivalent here, you go to the group you think is best for your discussion, join the group so you can post to the group-specific forum, and post/read. Right now the site is rather quiet, hopefully just due to the holidays or people finding their way around. There is some overlap among groups, so you may have to join several to cover all your bases (e.g., several variations of young adult material, a separate fantasy group from science fiction, etc.). Like I said above, you can join ten groups, which seems to be enough for most.

I've read that Sol is going to bring back the old style forums to this new site, but that'll probably take time. In the meantime, Linda Lee created this group, Old Forums, to which you posted. It's a limited workaround. Read some of the other posts to this group to see what the limitations are. Although I'm a member of this group just to keep up to date on what people are posting, I don't use it for discussion threads. This group will probably go away once Sol implements the real old-style forums.

Some people have taken to creating groups for their specific pieces of work (e.g., a group for a specific book so they can get additional feedback). That's probably not a great idea, since we can only join ten groups each. One group per book would probably make the site a mess. The old site had a forum called Additional Feedback and there is a corresponding group in the new site for that that anyone can use for further discussions of someone's work. You can also get additional feedback about your work in the groups to which you post it. For example, if you post your work to the Science Fiction group, the forum there can be used to discuss your work (beyond the basic regular/inline reviews). In that group, you would get posts from people especially interested in science fiction.

There is also a Writing Tips & Advice group that I created intended to replicate the similarly named forum on the old site. Not much activity there yet. In that group you can find a how-to-write tutorial from Sol, and my discussion thread related to it.

I'm sure I've forgotten some things, so feel free to ask.

Happy New Year!
Dirk

After playing with the new versioning system, I found it works best if you're posting changes to the same chapter as before, and want reviews of the new version, while keeping reviews of the previous version of the same chapter in the system for your own reference. So you repost the same chapter with a newer version number and hide the old. If you keep both versions visible, you could ask for reviews of both to tell you if your new chapter is really much better than the old.

If, on the other hand, your chapter numbers begin to change (e.g., you add or delete chapters in the new version), the TNBW versioning doesn't really address that as well. If your reader can't read all of the new v2 chapters and then drop down to v1 and pick up the story from there (e.g., from v2 of ch. 2 down to v1 of ch. 3, they would become confused).

In my case, v3 of my book will soon be substantially different than v2 since I'll be adding/deleting chapters in v3 as I get further along. It will be increasingly difficult to read the first few chapters of v3 and then pick up the story in v2 without continuity problems. My v2 is meant to be read sequentially from ch. 1 onward, and my v3 is also meant to be read sequentially from ch. 1 onward, but you're not meant to read the early part of v3 and then continue with the rest of v2. For this reason, I created two separate books, Into the Mind of God v2 and Into the Mind of God v3.

To further minimize confusion between my v2 and v3, I explicitly set all of the chapters in my v2 to TNBW v2, and all of the chapters in my v3 to TNBW v3. This is because, by default, TNBW labels all of my chapters as v1 unless I choose otherwise. I don't want a reader to be in v2 or v3 of my book seeing TNBW v1 on every chapter they read.

I hope that makes sense. Hopefully, Sol can add to this if I've made some incorrect assumptions.

Regards,
Dirk

Sol, thanks for automatically expanding Chapter Notes and making them available on the inline review page. Both very helpful.

Regards,
Dirk

I have areas like that too (conference briefings, team exercises, etc.). They're my slowest chapters, especially since they run back-to-back. I've been trying to improve them. I added background rioting (nothing actually shown) in my fictional galaxy as a way to punch up the urgency of the peace conference and what they were supposed to accomplish (people sick of a galactic cold war that leaves them in constant poverty, so they riot). Other things I did were a drunken fight between the two opposing main characters, one of whom may be recalled because his behavior was all recorded. Another way to consider it is if the chapters are actually needed to tell the overall story. I try to use humor as a break as well, although I do it within the context of character building that is needed to set the stage for something bigger later, or sometimes just to develop realistic human beings.

Dirk