Post suggestions here!

The richer and fancier the "game" features, the less it will mean to be able to export a story locally. Unless we had "Export as Twine Game".

I'm more keenly feeling the difficulties of searching and navigating my contributed chapters (and others' chapters) than I am missing any advanced features. The site's search and search results and "My Threads" and "My Stories" favor more details and fewer results per page, which is a bad tradeoff for me.

 

The CHYOA guide is linked on several pages and I hadn't problems with the story interface so far.
It also has kind of charm to write about CHYOA on CHYOA.

I don't think so, though it depends, what you want to do with the story locally.

 

Another day, another wish: It would be nice to have, if one could enter the variables / conditions for each chapter in another way.

At the moment one has to do several clicks, enter several values, etc.
This is ok, when one uses the conditions only on occasion. However it gets tiresome really quickly, if one has dozens of chapters with several variables each. And no, don't ask why i would do that ;-)

Now what i could think of would be an alternate interface, like with the Rich Text Editor vs. manually using the markdown syntax.
You could have this current interface for clicky, clicky people. And an interface where one can copy & paste the variables and conditions with the right syntax.

 

Because i did not offer any suggestions the last days, here comes another one. This time even unrelated to variable and conditions ;-)

Is there any chance to improve / build upon the "Story of the week" feature?

According to http://forum.chyoa.com/threads/how-story-of-the-week-is-calculated.163/ a ranking is generated, with the most views received the past week.
Stories get filtered out, which were already "Story of the week" during the last 6 months.

Since it i called the story of the week, i assume that the ranking is generated once a week.

Now my suggestion:
You could provide a link, when clicking on "Story of the week" itself, and create a new overview website. On this page, there could be a brief explanation, how the story of the week is calculated. Additionally, you could provide a ranked list of the top x-number of stories, that did not make first place, as well as a ranked list of the stories that are currently not eligible to be chosen, again sorted by views the last week.



I suggest this, assuming that this shouldn't be too much work, because the necessary calculations should pretty much exist already.

What do you think?

 

Is it worth implementing "variable refactoring"? Basically an automated way to find/replace variables in all chapters in a story without doing it manually.

The idea is that you may want to change {abc} to {xyz}. Then the site could batch process all your stories and replacing all instances of "{abc}" to "{xyz}".
Or you may want to remove a variable. Take {abc} being "John". If I deleted {abc}, then all instances of "{abc}" are replaced with "John" before being removed from the story.

 

I could imagine doing that with download/upload and using text tools on the downloaded source. That leaves refactoring of all sorts open to whoever wants to do it, based on downloaded source. (Yes, bulk download/export is high on my wish list).

 

Allow users the option of being open for collaboration with other users, in the stitches {chapters} that they write.

That option would flag our handle to appear 'green' instead of the default blue. This would passively allow people who read a stitch/chapter a way to know if the author is open to collaboration with other users.

Or maybe add this option with stitch {Chapter/post} creation/editing. That is the screen that pops up after we click the link...

• Add a New Chapter

This option could play out such as say [Chapter 13 by 2p1k3] instead appears as [Chapter 13 by 2p1k3].

Another author chooses to a [chapter 14 ...]; Then 2p1k3, me, or someone else continues with a [Chapter 15 2p1k3/...]; et cetera.

Each stitch {chapter} continuing the story arch of the overall thread.


As for why this is more helpful than as it is? Ever notice how many one or two stitch branches there are in almost every open weave {story}? Telepathy and empathy is currently beyond my skill set. Therefore, knowing if an author is open to 'collaboration' with a stitch will help me decide to contribute to the overall weave {story} or not, at least would be helpful to me, think do I. Given the prevalence of one-to-three stitch branches written by other users, this desire may be shared by more than me. Or maybe there are multiple desires it helps satisfy more harmoniously.

Thank you for sharing your time and Force; May you ask the Goddess to eternally alight your path.

[edit]
After some thought the better option may be to add this as an option on the [* Add a New Chapter] page. The difference allows users the ability to set what specific stitches {chapters/posts} the author has a want to be open for collaboration.
[/edit]

 

one thing i miss the old way the chapters were below eachother in the story map area on mobile it was much easier to find the chapter you were looking for, i heard abotu it was gonna be changed in advanced before it was so i was hoping they would change the pc version to use the same style that the mobile style was at the time isntead they put the pc style in the mobile version =(.

 

Edited my prior post to use the word collaboration instead of corroboration. That is the definition of the thinking of mine.

 

Not sure if anyone brought this up but in the chapters menu for someone's profile, is there a way that you could make it so it shows the story names then have a drop down menu of the threads in that story. I was wanting to see which stories I have added to, but it's hard to see when I have a lot in a two or three stories and they are mostly the only ones that come up.

 

I really miss the brief-format lists from Chyoo 1-2 that show all of your threads and all of the stories you've added to. Chyoa doesn't seem to have any easy way to do this (10 rich-format chapters per result page mean A LOT of paging for a long time author).

I've added some stories to my Favorites because I want to be able to find them again as a *contributor*, even though I'd prefer having a separate list of "stories I'm following" from "stories I want to not lose track of".

 

Perhaps use bookmarks for the former and staring a story for the latter?

 

Hi I'll be honest I didn't read the 14 pages before but I noticed something to suggest.

Maybe it already exist but I don't know where.

It should be nice on an author page (and your own) to have a list of the stories you or he wrote in.
I see the list of series that he created and a list of chapters but once passed a few hundreds just browsing to find a story like that is hard.
I hope it is clear

 

The previous versions of this site (Chyoo 1 / Chyoo 2) had a list of stories which you contributed to. (I don't think you could look at this list for other authors). As a contributor to many stories, I miss having this list.

 

would it be possible to have the site either display a warning or auto-save a draft periodically so that if you accidentally leave the page while writing a new chapter, you wouldn't lose all of your progress?

I may be speaking out of anger, because my cat just jumped up on my desk and hit the button on the side of the mouse which caused me to go back a page and lose all of my progress on a chapter that I was working in. However ,this isn't the first time that I've lost stuff that I've worked on through issues with the browser or accidentally clicking the wrong thing. Admittedly, I'm more susceptible to it because I type straight into the new chapter window and not into notepad or something like it.

Still, I think a warning/confirmation message for leaving the New Chapter page, or it automatically saving your chapter in draft form somehow would be useful.

 

I write my first draft in google docs for this very reason. Until Chyoa makes an auto save feature you may want to do the same.

 

Could it be possible to make the story mode (public, private, moderated) visible when browsing in the search mode and make it an option to search with.

It would make looking for stories you can add to easier.

 

This is concerning Conditional Chapters.

Right now, if you are using a Boolean variable for conditional Chapters you can only use it to check if the value is true or not. The variable must be present or the path is always blocked. Could we make other options where the site checked merely checked for the presence or absence of said variable whether or not it was true or false.

Example:

I have a story where one choice causes a character gets angry at another character. Choosing that chapter causes the reader gets the Angry variable set as true. Any other path the reader takes would not get the Angry variable at all. Later when choices have to be made one choice would not make sense for the character to make because they are pissed at that certain character. So I want to restrict that chapter to readers who have picked up the Angry variable. The thing is I can't without locking out everyone because the Angry variable only exist in one specific path.

 

Then boolean conditions have to be "true or not set", "false or not set", "true and set", and "false and set". The conditions for numerical and progress variables then would need the same conditions.

Currently, you could create the variable "Angry" with value "false" and visibility "hidden" at the beginning of your story or at a point where meeting that character for the first time.
Within the chapter, where the "Angry" variable is set to "true", you could set visibility to "visible" (if desired).


Another slightly more convenient way could be possible with the planned formula parser.
In the chapter before the blocked option, you could recalculate the variable Angry with a formula like IFNOTSET( {Angry} ; 0 )
Please note, that this is not possible at the moment.

 

I'm sure this has been suggested before, but I think it would be nice if there was a "vote up" system for comments. It's hard enough to get feedback, and votes add a little something as far as incentive to comment. I think it would add a little something to the community as well, giving the many lurkers a little reason to write something and participate in the story, even if it's not as a contributor.

I also second the 'warning popup before backing out of a draft page' and having a better organized chapter page, where you can see what stories have been contributed to easier rather than just a grand list of chapters.