Post suggestions here!

Totally agree. Before I was actively writing I clicked on a few of them thinking it was a best of the best as far as stories. I was greatly disappointed.

 

On that same note, are there currently any other awards that can be earned? If not, how about an award for starting your first story, reaching 100 likes in a single story, receiving 100 followers for a single story, one hundred thousand views, one million views, having a featured story, having a story make the top ten list, etc?

At the moment, having the "Notable Writers" area really doesn't do anything unless there is a way to reward writers to put them on that list.

Just my two cents on the subject.

 

I would like to ask about the dead stories. I wonder how should they be handled. Some stories, which have a lot of potential but have no one touch them makes me a little sad. Should they be marked abandoned if, for example, no writers touch it for more than 5-7 years and then clean them or contact original authors in order to move them out to "public" mode?
I know that some stories are actually finished, thus were not touched, but since we have no flags to indicate a complete stories, It is hard to tell.

If my question offend some authors here, I apologize. I just don't like playing stories with very good setup only to find that they are forever unfinished.

For the award ideas:
- Achievements for writers with 100/250/1000 likes in all stories
- Achievements for writers with 100 likes for his/her story (no mater who post it, since the person create a good setup) in a single story.
- Achievements for writers with 100 likes in his/her story, for his/her contributions.
- Achievements for writers with 100/1000 chapters posted. (I know that it might lead to post spam. We may need to enforce some quality standard for this one).

 

Nevermind, I just notice that I've never read some thread groups. Sorry for my ignorance.

 

First of all, thank you for implementing the conditions and variables, this will be amazing for many stories. And of course I immediately have some suggestions

Wouldn't it be nicer to define all variables at the start (in the story info where you define user-strings like name etc)? With that, you could easily rename them later and not have to change all references, and they would always just already appear as the right type under each chapter (right now I can have a variable "wat" as a boolean and have the same variable "wat" be a number in the next chapter).

 

I like the possibility to add variables at every thread. It allows co-authors to add variables and/or flags.


It would be nice to have a third option for score changes (plus, minus and set) for numerical and percentage variables. (If someone steals all your money, you can set the variable for money to 0)

 

Hi everybody.



I’m an old member but a new author within the site. For the most part, what I am going to say will reiterate points which have already been made, but since this is the place for feedback on site features, I’m going to state my desires regardless of whether or not they have been previously mentioned. Forgive the repetition.



The single biggest missing feature to me is a way to create a node within a story. A “goto” scene function if you will. As things stand now, if I want to create a simple loop within a story, where scene ‘a’ goes to scenes ‘b’ and ‘c’, but both scenes ‘b’ and ‘c’ links to scene ‘d’, I have to write scene ‘d’ twice, and copy and paste it at the end of scenes ‘b’ and ‘c’. This doubles all output downstream and increases room for error.



I should be able to label each scene and then link scenes together by there labels. I can then plan events in such a way that a character has options, but can end up in the same place regardless of which options he chooses. (By the way, all my characters suffer in a Kafkaesque world where nothing they choose matters, in the end their tyrannical author has his way with them.) This brings up my second feature, variables.



I know that CHYOA has variables, but I hate the tools CHYOA gives me as a writer. I know I can use java style scripting to control my scenes, to add variables that I reuses, and to do a number of useful things that I want. I just don’t want to have to do or think about scripting during the writing process. I don’t want to think about scripting at all. I want to have a GUI that lets me add variables and tags to a scene. I want some sort of a system that tracks the labels and variables that I have used. I would not mind a drag and drop feature for such labels. I would like to be able to write easy “if” statements. If the reader has his variable ‘x’ show paragraph ‘y’. I’d like to be able to do all of these things within one document. I’d like to be able to write a scene in which I could have paragraphs for the reader if he went down path ‘a’ or path ‘b’ but still have new content regardless of where the reader had been and to not have to rewrite the scenes for each branch of the tree. I’d like to do all that with a fancy graphical interface that helps track it all so there is almost no scripting involved. I’m hard to please, I’m sorry.



I also want better tools for how my text is displayed. I’d like to insert page breaks without adding “depth” to my story tree. I like my readers. I’d rather not give them 10,000 words at a time, but I also would like to write a scene that is 10-20k words in length with no choices. I want to be able to display that with different texts sizes or even fonts, and most importantly, page breaks without adding chapter depth. I’d like a lot of control over the typography of the work, but I understand that these features maybe difficult.



These are the thoughts and features that seem most unintuitive or lacking when writing with CHYOA



Sorry that some of these are listed elsewhere, and thank you for reading.

 

This is currently possible by linking chapters.

with the very recent update "conditional branches", it is possible to use variables.

you could use a horizontal line to imitate a line break.

 

This would be very interesting for conditional branches.
You could create a thread, where you ask for the hair color. The answers create a variable "color" with value 1 for "blonde", 2 for "brunette", 3 for "redhead", ...
Later in the story it could be integrated by "IF" or maybe "CASE". Sth. like this:

 

A "Linking On/Off" switch for writers and editors (default: "Off").
If the switch is set on "On", Links should forward to the destination page.
If the switch is set on "Off", the linking thread "This chapter is linked with ..." should be displayed.

 

Thanks again to gen.sis for her response to my post before.

I think the best approach right now is for me to explain what I want to do, and ask the site experts how to do it.

I am making a story, and I want the prologue of that story to function as a mini choose your own adventure. In this prologue, a character makes a number of choices, but regardless of what they choose, an event happens. I would like to set this up by making a scene for the event, linking all the paths that the character can go through to the event, and then have paragraphs of texts appear based on which path the reader has chosen.


An example:

page 1: Bob opens the closet. CHOOSE pick up broom or the iron

page 2: Bob picks up the object

page 3: Event: Bob opens the door and finds Lisa. IFBROOMPRINT [TEXT] IFIRONPRINT [TEXT]


It feels like I should be able to do this all with the conditionals and with the link function, but i’ve been concentrating on the writing and not the site features. Does anyone know how to do this?


On the reader side of the site, I feel oppressed by the Top Stories and the Last Modified stories. I wish there were a quick link to the completed stories, so i can sort by what has all paths complete and which are still being written. I would love some sort of Story Scamble that generates a page of stories with descriptions of each, but those stories were grabbed out at random. I wish, as a reader, for some sort of a word count or something. Not all chapters are equal and chapter depth is not always indicative of the depth of the story.

I'll try and post more thoughts as they come to me.
Hope this is helpful instead of a reiteration of other forum thoughts and topics
Thank you all for your help and feedback

 

As far as I know, variables can't be used inside threads yet.

Here an example, what you currently can do:
Page 1:
Change variables
- "Broom" +0
- "Iron" +0

Page 2 (A):
Change variable
- "Broom" +1

Answers:
- continue (Page 3)

Page 2 (B):
Change variable
- "Iron" +1

Answers:
- continue (Page 3)

Page 3

Answers:
- continue (Page 4 (A))
- continue (Page 4 (B))

Page 4 (A)
Conditions to view Chapter:
- "Broom">0

Page 4 (B)
Conditions to view Chapter:
- "Iron">0

I don't think, it is that easy. Which story can be complete, if there is at least one question, which could be answered with another option?

 

Thanks again gen.sis
super helpful.

 

Can stories with the condition branches enabled AND USED be marked as such in some way?

 

my suggestion has to do with the main page,i think it would be nice to be able to see which of your friends might be online at that particular moment,so u wouldnt have to wait hours to send them a message when u and your friend are online at the same time,rather than it just being guesswork

 

I guess this would be a site suggestion. Could we get someone to assign the appropriate languages to the stories in the "Non-English (Dated)" section, or at least, keep them from showing up when we use the <English> language filter?

 

Can we exclude introduction chapters from the list of the best chapters? First chapters get many likes because this is the main only way to like the whole story

 

Is it possible that when I introduced a variable A as "true" to have some possibility to just get back to "nonexistent" instead of being shown as "false"?

If, at the moment, I give a character a knife and mark it as: "knife: √" and then later take it away with "×", the variable shows up as "knife: ×".

 

+1. It should be possible to fully remove a variable from showing.

 

Is there any chance of the site getting an API?