I think this site is getting too big for the front page. The Recently Updated section has so many updates that stories stay there for only 1-2 hours, and if you are unlucky on timing you can get minimal visibility even if you upload daily. Make Recently Updated show a random selection of the 24 hour's updates, rather than the most recent ones. If you visit the main page 4 times in 10 minute, you could be exposed to as many as 112 recently updated stories, rather than being presented with the same 28 1-2 hour old stories are shown repeatedly, while 3 hour old stories are shown to no one. I also note that there is a lot of wasted space. A lot of empty, white space. A lot of large formatting and large icons. I suspect this is for mobile (is mobile actually a significant portion of the userbase? curious). Allow users more control over the front page style. Mobile and desktop versions, where desktop versions usually have higher information density, is fairly common. Also, have the standard views that most sites have (icon view, list view, etc.). There should be an option to turn some text into symbols, to save space. See Literotica's list system. Also, just see that generally, their lists fit 20 stories on my screen, with arguably the same or more information, while CHYOA only fits 4-5 stories on the screen. The right side menu bar should be collapsible on command, not just if you zoom in. It takes up a lot of space. Remove the category bar. I don't think I've ever used it, and since stories can only have one category, it's often barely even accurate. Fix the vertical scroll bars in each section. There has never been any actual vertical scrolling, but because the sections are a millimeter too long, it shoves the scroll bars in there anyway.
Part of the issue with empty space is that one story with a long subtitle will push the whole next row down, so the gap is unnecessarily big everywhere else between those rows. This could be fixed by limiting the character counts of titles and subtitles.
That makes sense. I wonder if CHYOA could add a fifth row just by limiting synopsis length to however many characters equates to 2 rows, which should fit correctly next to the story image (which is always the same size), then removing some of the saved space.
A lot of this already happens, automatically, based on how wide your browser window is. This determines whether the sidebar is visible by default, for instance, or whether the buttons at the top are text + symbol or just a symbol. I think that's better than relying on the user to manually set things up correctly. That said, for logged in users, these could possibly be adjustable preferences? I'm not sure how easily that would be to integrate into the site. Possibly not just the category bar, but categories full stop. Tags are superior to categories in every way, for exactly the reason you mention: a story can only be in one category, but can have many tags. (Or rather, chapters can.) Yep, this looks like a (minor) bug. One problem I have with the recently updated list is that a lot of it is the usual suspects, with the same stories showing up on the front page again and again. A rotation mechanism like you suggest would reduce that, but another way of handling the same is by limiting the number of times authors can push a story to the top of the list. I'm not sure how either of those would affect the discoverability of new stories, though, but hopefully it would make it easier to find stories in the site's long tail, and not just the thousand-chapter hundred-tag dozen-author monstrosities. (No offense to the monstrositiy authors. Y'all are cool. <3) Literotica is not exactly the example I would pick for a good front page. There are dozens of links that lead to nonsense. The first link leads to a FAQ about publishing stories. The second is 'contact us', hardly a link you'd want a first-time user to click. Next is a 370 word news post with no fewer than 32 links in it. The sidebar contains 14 more links, some of which are useful (the tag index is number 11!), but most aren't, mostly either ads or link exchanges with other sites. Also, for some reason the whole page is only 530 pixels wide? What is this, a story site for ants? The link that actually leads to something that's a semblance of useful isn't even above the fold! (It's Stories & Pics, 50% ain't bad.) OK, so we click that link and arrive here, which is only marginally better. On a bog standard 1080p screen, over two thirds of the width is taken up by EROTIC STORIES literotica.com EROTIC STORIES literotica.com EROTIC STORIES. It's just that text, mind you, not actual stories. On the one-third of the screen that is actually used, there are 6 categories of content, only the third of which is story categories. Oh, but what's this, a link so close to the top I almost overlooked it? A mobile-friendly site? That sounds promising. Worryingly, the URL says 'beta'. Still, give it a shot. At least the page takes up more space, up to a width of... 1120 pixels! Only 10 years out of date rather than 20! Let's find some stories. "STORIES, CATEGORIES & MORE" right at the top! Alas, that's just text. No links, nothing. Gotta scroll down once more to find the stories: 'new stories', let's go... ...Aaaand we're back to the shitty old site. I'll stop here. (P.S. for a bulletpoint list, you only need the 'list' tag once: one two three )
I was using Literotica as an example of a smaller, denser story card, with symbols, not as an example of a good front page. Their front page is terrible. Literotica (and they even waste a separate line for the username! It could be smaller still!) CHYOA (added black border to show full size on white background)
Tags are a mess. As you can apply thousands of tags, they are meaningless and useless. Applying only one category isn't really helpful either. So IMO multiple categories of different category groups is the way to go. It's a weird one as it has actually been "fixed" once or twice but still appears depending on the circumstances and what browser is used.
I'm sure it's more complicated than this, so sorry in advance for calling this "obvious," but the obvious solution seems to be Separate Story Tags, added by the story owner to the story's control panel page from Chapter Tags, added by individual authors to individual chapters. Story tags would be applied to the whole story, chapter tags would only attach to the specific chapter. Change searching so that if you search by chapter tags, it takes you to the specific chapter, not just dumping you in a 4000 chapter "random fetish per week" story to try and find the ONE chapter that happens to be about monochrome squirrel laser tag sex. Limit Story Tags to [Insert Reasonable Number] and Chapter Tags to [Insert Reasonable Number]
Genesis beat me to it, but yes, tags are useless for their intended purpose. If you open the Science Fiction category, you find stories about science fiction. If you open the Science Fiction tag, you find stories that may have at least one chapter related to science fiction, buried somewhere within the story. This isn't a bad idea. The main issue would be the lack of intuitiveness - I can already see users complaining about how they don't understand the difference between the types of tags, and how there should obviously just be one set of tags that are applied to chapters. This would be exacerbated by the fact that many writers would never have access to story tags, as they only contribute to public stories. Also, point 2 is already implemented, just not the default behaviour.
Something like that is planned. There is a thread Category Suggestions about what the category system might look like. It tries to define the different dimensions and is also meant to provide guidelines for what category might fit a story best. There are still a lot of gaps to fill and flesh out. (As I'm rather short on time since the mess started, I haven't really pushed that issue.)
