I think it's probably finding a balance between personal tastes and those of others - feedback helps drive me to write, and while I can write for myself, it's a little lonely without someone else to play off of.
There's a lot of other sites for writing that heal a lot of these issues. Fiction.live and Questionable Questing come to mind
I really can't attribute any option to a CHYOA issue. 1, 2, 4 is personal, and a possibility on any writing venture - CHYOA or otherwise, erotic or otherwise. 3, CHYOA is a great format for encouraging others to pick up your ideas. Almost uniquely great. It's not the site's or format's fault if expectations run too high, there, simply because it's *possible* within the format. Authors are frequently disgustingly silly on this front - either outright getting upset if others don't pick up their ideas and plotlines; or expecting jaws to drop at some general idea and expecting others to flesh out their characters and universe for them while they sit smugly on their genius starter. Both attitudes are lazy and overly entitled.
I guess I could have been more specific. "What's the most frustrating thing you encounter on chyoa" might have been better.
As a writer I have few complaints. I do have a few, but I am not sure I'd call them frustrating. This site is just too damn fun! As a reader I find the site endlessly frustrating. Actually finding the good stuff can be rough. For as much as I am on here I hate to admit it but I generally do most of my erotica reading elsewhere.
The most frustrating thing is honestly not having enough time/inspiration to go back and edit the bad threads that are in my stories. I need to do more of it, but there's an urge to move past the old work and just have fun creating. Unfortunately, nobody Edits for fun.
I don't edit for fun, but I do edit because old work no longer meets my quality standards, and that annoys me enough that I can't just leave it festering and robbing me of enjoyment in my newer work.
The text editor is, frankly, garbage and you are best advised to turn it off and type the formatting manually. I have had my fair share of editing to do thanks to my whole text suddenly being boldened. Random links to nowhere appearing in texts. The fact that indents (and with it sensible book style layouts) aren't a thing unless you are into hitting Shift+Enter and then Tab every paragraph. The comment section not having an answer function. Overall the comment function on CHYOA is highly lackluster. I could go on, but let's just say that I love the site for what it has, but there is A LOT of fine-tunning that needs to be done.
Just using literotica as an example. If I am looking for a good "stroker" I look up the category I am interested in, I peruse a couple of potential candidates based on their blurbs and rating and length, and I make my choice. I know the story will have long unbroken stretches of text and I am pretty much guaranteed that there will smut along the way. On Chyoa there are so many dead ends (often right as the smut is just getting started or just getting good), so many super short chapters, and/or so many deviations from the kink that I might be after that it makes it difficult for me to really enjoy the experience. Yes, that would be great. Also it would be nice if there was a short time frame where you could edit comments after making them. Drives me crazy seeing my comment typos set in stone for all of time. LOL
Short chapters are annoying for a couple of reasons, but two in particular chap my ass: 1) I dislike short chapters as part of a long, linear chapter chain with no branches. If you're basically just writing a linear story without many branching points, I prefer fewer, longer chapters. 2) I dislike short chapters which are nothing but branching points; this is more of an issue for some other sites where you can hard-code in options in advance, which then sit there unfulfilled until the end of time. Which is kind of why I've been working Lois Lane's Night Out the way I have been, although pretty soon I'm going to start winnowing down the options, working on extending the popular paths and ending the unpopular ones.
This And This There are too many authors that write little more than an idea and either give up, or expect someone else to do the work for them.
? Shift+Enter then Tab? I think that indenting can be disadvantageous for mobile. In some chapters, I use em-spaces for indent which doesn't get removed like normal spaces. That's useful for showing small notes or mobile conversation. In that cases, I break the line regularly.
If you shift+tab that creates a break without whitespace, tab will move the word one standard measurement to the right, creating an effective indent.
*Checks again* Welp, my bad, tabbing doesn't do that here. Guess you have to Shift+Enter and hit Space 5 times every line instead...way less annoying.
See, I thought so, which is just one aspect of a larger problem. I'm on my phone right now, so there's no tab key to hit. I think you can see the issue beginning to take shape already...
In my browsers, TAB changes the focus to the next element. SHIFT usually inverts the direction of commands, thus SHIFT+TAB changes the focus to the previous element. with ALT+09 I can create a normal TAB character ->" " which isn't shown after saving a chapter. Well, in Wordpad SHIFT+ENTER creates a new line instead of a new paragraph and TAB indents. SHIFT+ENTER creates a visual line break in the browser but after saving there is no line break. Redundant normal spaces get removed, so that doesn't work for me either. So only em spaces work for me.
