Story Map is a Headache

I just want to talk about how the story map is a pain in my naked ass for anything that has more than mmm 50 chapters with 10 chapters deep.

I dunno if there would be a better way of doing it, but sometimes it also glitches out when you scroll down. I don’t really have feedback here, just want to talk about it and see if people relate lol.

 

If there are a lot of chapters, not every line will load immediately, and the whole scroll-right as chapter depth grows gets annoying...but there's not really a better way to do it. You can at least collapse any branches you're not interested in.

 

That's actually a feature I wish could be made unique for each account. Once you've collapsed a branch, it stays collapsed every time you go back to that story's map unless you uncollapse it again. It saves from your browser having to load every branch, when you're only really after specific branches.

 

For me, it's hard to manage a story with 1000+ chapters (like the video game story) when I have to go into every chapter and if you're on mobile, it's almost impossible to really navigate it. Plus there's not even a way to reorganize the chapters so you end up having to scroll 10" deep to find the chapter you're actually on. Maybe if there was a "collapse all branches but the chapter I'm on" option that'd be great, although I'm not sure how much that would actually work. Honestly, I wish you could set it so that everything except the introduction branch was collapsed instead of having to collapse all of them and then click the little + icon one by one.

 

A lot of that can be solved by bookmarks? You could just put a bookmark on the chapter you want to go back to.

 

That’s true but I like to keep my bookmarks limited tbh. Plus it’s mostly trying to remember what happened during each path by looking at the past chapters, that’s not something bookmarks can help with.

 

Are those two situations not identical? If you press "collapse all" and uncollapse just the Introduction chapter, you will have collapsed everything except the Introduction. And if you mean every first choice from the Introduction chapter up to the end of that branch, then I'm not sure what the benefit would serve because those chapters are guaranteed to be the top chapters on the story map by design.

I like this idea. It could be as simple as a list of chapter IDs tied to each account.

 

Let me try to explain this in the best way possible. When you currently open the story map, it already expands all of the branches automatically no matter which layer you’re on. Because of this if there’s a story with too many chapters and you hit collapse all, it doesn’t actually work the way you would think and it takes a couple of tries to get it so it lists every single top chapter from top to bottom. So what I’m saying is to have an option for it to start already collapsed and then expanding only the ones you want.

The other part is that while it does highlight the chapter you’re on, it doesn’t automatically bring you to it which means scrolling if your chapter is lower down the list. It’s not the end of the world but it is a pain to go through.

Examples of this would be on splotch’s Lauren’s Little Secret or my own A Video Game Humiliation. Because of the format there are at minimum 50 top chapters which you can imagine causes a bit of pain when you want to just quickly locate your branch. Especially if you’re on a browser app but also if you’re on desktop it’s just a mess to look at.

Although, the story map does have its uses. Honestly I don’t know if there really is a way to fix it, and I do think that it is useful for different purposes. But I figured I’d bring it up as a subject matter.

The gist is that while the story map is great for smaller stories, it uh deflates like a beach ball when you reach a certain point. But I guess that’s just life.

 

I see what you mean, but to be fair, that kind of structuring will introduce problems regardless of how it's displayed. There isn't really any type of story that necessitates fifty chapters off the Introduction.

 

That is true. And I HAVE adapted my stories for this reason. BUT the problem really is existing published stories cannot be re-organized. So stuff like A Video Game Humiliation is an absolute trainwreck because I honestly didn’t anticipate what would happen if we ended up with more than 50 characters. I really didn’t think about a giant list of characters and how that would turn out to be on CHYOA. I mean it WAS one of my first published stories so…that’s why NOW I try to figure out at least some kind of organized system BEFORE I publish a story, so like grouping them alphabetically or dividing male and female and so on.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE that people love it and contribute, but… I didn’t realize how many video game characters there are that people like to see naked especially when I opened it up to include males.

 

Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you don't care about likes, there's the brute-force method of copying-and-pasting chapters into a new format - I once misplaced a four-chapter branch and had to go back and move it to the right place by copying-and-pasting and deleting the old chapters - but once you get to as many chapters as you're talking about that gets very unwieldy.

 

Do you have any idea how many chapters there are?! XD

I HAVE thought about it, but it would be SO much work. I mean tbf, there’s a lot that could be scrapped in the process. I did do that with my Anthology but I mean SHEESH 1000+ chapters. Maybe I’ll work on it and see how I feel about it lol

 

Dammit… now it’s in my head. Sheesh copying and pasting over 1000 chapters…

 

Trust me, I know. Think about how many chapters I'd have to rearrange if I was in the same boat - LLNO just hit 5k. My point isn't to suggest you get cracking, it's just pointing out the unfortunate realities of the situation - after a project hits a certain scope, re-arranging the chapters is a sizable undertaking, no matter who does it.

 

To be fair, it is often easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, particularly with liberally-designed public stories such as that mentioned. It is better for the health of the site to make story management easier for authors where reasonable. I think the ideal solution would be allowing story owners (and perhaps editors) to reorganise chapters when they deem it necessary. Some writers might be opposed to giving owners this power over other users' chapters, but given they can already simply delete the entire story whenever they feel like it, it wouldn't be any worse overall.

 

I do know of some that don’t like the idea of Owners having control, but I point out that it’s THEIR story at the end of the day no matter what you contribute. I remember having a discussion with an a user who had come to my VG story pretty much harassing the authors contributing, so I asked them to stop and it escalated, my point in saying this is that they made the point to tell me that since I wasn’t contributing to the branch they were referring to then I couldn’t comment about how an author may or may not feel.

But 1) I am the owner 2) I HAD been contributing to that branch and 3) their argument really made no sense because even if I wasn’t contributing to the story, I still get a say on what happens in my story that I own. And that includes the defense of those who contribute to it for free.

to get back on subject though, being able to reorganize stories in bulk would be definitely useful. I can see one problem would probably be the code and such. I mean readjusting 1000+ chapters probably would break some things. In fact when I was moving chapters over to the new story, it definitely didn’t love it.

the other problem with reuploading all chapters is the fact that it spams everyone’s notifications. The other pain is not being able to mass delete chapters. Because you have to go through each individual chapter and delete them one by one instead of being able to delete a chunk.

 

Friedman has the capability to reorganise stories manually. Allowing users to do this would probably require a rate limit. It would also need to work in a logical manner that minimises side effects - for example, when you move a chapter, all of its children should move with it, staying in the same position relative to the moved chapter.

 

That’s what I figure which is why I don’t really expect it. I think to build a system that would allow a complete reorganization would be unrealistic right now. But then again if it is once in awhile and maybe something limited by rank (aka Really Experienced and above) can do then perhaps it might work. But at the same time with how the story map works and the chapter linking it would still probably snap in half because if even one chapter is left behind, it would break the whole thing.

Honestly being able to just search within a story would probably be better. And more realistic. Because that’s the main problem is it’s difficult to get to the spot you want unless you use bookmarks or manage to navigate the story map. But being able to maybe skip to a chapter would maybe be an interesting feature.

 

Currently, it isn't possible to load the story map in one go as the file would be too big. In the beginning, it was done like that but made it impossible to open the story map of the big stories.

Another problem might be that the story map data is loaded vertically and not horizontally. That means that it takes the first 500 (or 1,000) chapters from the top as you see them. I'm not sure how to easily get all chapters to the depth of n while limiting the number of results.

Starting collapsed might be useful. When I load a very big map to find a certain chapter, I already notice performance problems.

If it is started collapsed, it would be useful to have a search field that allows you to find a certain chapter. I could also imagine a "go to current" button or sth.

Currently, there is no way for the user to reorganize stories.
But there is a suggestion about it in the Suggestions forum and I think it might be implemented in the future.

Story owners can delete their story but the original author of the chapters can still ask to get their chapter content back.

If an author adds to a story, their contribution is not a gift to the story owner.
The chapter authors still have the copyright over the content they've created and are even free to remove it, similar to the right of the story owner to delete their story.

There is a database field that determines the parent chapter of a chapter.
That information is basically enough to completely recalculate the story map.
(I think this is the current way when reorganizing chapters.)

Another, more elegant way might be to modify the "cached" structure.
Basically, every chapter has two numbers.
If you add a child chapter, the first number stays the same and the second gets raised by 2.
The child chapter gets the two numbers in between.
If you add another child chapter to the first one, the same happens to the parent chapter again. The numbers of the first child chapter stay the same and the new child chapter gets the number above the first child chapter.
If you add another child chapter before the first one, the same happens to the parent chapter again. The numbers of the other child chapters get raised by 2.
Reorganizing chapters should work very similar as you basically do the same.
If you want to move the third child chapter to the first position, you subtract twice the number of chapters in between from the numbers of the moved chapter. At the same time, you add twice the number of moved chapters to the first two chapters.

 

One thing that may be useful (and I have no idea how workable this solution is) is a way to show just new chapters (and their parent chapters) in some really big stories like Sexual Privilege or The Rulebook. I use the story-map to work out what chapters have been added based on them being green. So you can spend a heck of a lot of time scrolling to get near the bottom where most new chapters are cropping up.