Extremely popular stories are becoming unwieldy

[Murakami]

Some really popular stories are getting so big that it's becoming hard to read them, as well as difficult to manage them for writers/editors. Stories like Sexual Privilege (https://chyoa.com/story/Sexual-Privilege.13397) have so many threads and are so deep in places that it's hard to find anything. The story maps require excessive scrolling to load fully, and some of the longer threads are even off the side needing horizontal scrolling, making navigation difficult.

I don't think anyone anticipated things getting quite so long (either number of threads or number of chapter in a single thread) when the site was originally designed. We have a combination of extremely deep single threads (massive horizontal scrolling needed, and big whitespaces when vertically scrolling), lots of very short threads (2 to less than 10 deep), and bunches of 'hangers' (threads with 1-2 chapters that no one ever continued). For editors, we also can have unpublished drafts in-between live content.

Suggestions for improving navigation (from simplest to more complicated):

• Default to all collapsed instead of all expanded (this would also make loading cleaner, since more loading would only be needed as you go, without loading threads you may not be interested in).
  • Note: there is a bug on live with collapsing threads, which I report in the bugs thread.
• Order threads by deepest chapter count instead of simple chronological (most popular threads at the top, hangers at the bottom).
  • Might be a little annoying since order changes on people, but would be a lot easier to tell which are big threads. Having an icon on the map showing a thread is bookmarked might help.
• Beyond a certain number of chapters, default to collapse instead of full expansion.
  • Prevents one thread from being off to the right and invisible but still requiring tons of vertical scrolling to get past. Show a count and a new marker so people still know about the rest.
  • Alternately, add some kind of folding so that we never have to scroll horizontally.
• Options to favorite threads and have them show as expanded and the rest collapsed, instead of all expanded.
  • Basically an extension of the current bookmarking system
  • Probably best in combo with default collapsed
• For editors, group unpublished at the bottom
  • create a system for poking people to finish unpublished
  • move unpublished stuff to a holding story in the person's account instead of leaving them attached to the story but never published if left for long enough and/or allow editors to finish and publish if abandoned for long enough (might be a copyright issue)
  • option to hide unpublished threads from editors so they aren't in the way

 

[TheLowKing]

Reducing the indentation depth would help too. I have a user script that changes it from 30px per level to 15px, and that feels a lot better to me.

 

[MidbossMan]

I really like all of it except the default deepest branches part, I and a lot of other writers are often intentional in the order branches are presented and that'd muck it up. I would, however, support a setting you can switch to that does that, since I see the use in these big stories you're talking about.

 

[raziel83]

I just avoid stories that have grown past a certain size. Both as a reader and writer it gets too unwieldy.

 

[gene.sis]

create a system for poking people to finish unpublished

You can see the chapters you need to review on the Review page
https://chyoa.com/list/review
though that isn't specific for the story.

I also thought about having a periodic notification to point story owners/editors to approve or decline chapters for review.
(I did that manually a while ago and many chapters got reviewed but that's not practical at all.)

allow editors to finish and publish if abandoned for long enough

That's already possible.
The issue should be that editors don't see the unpublished chapters in the story map. They are only visible in the chapter options of the parent chapter.
Not sure about copyright. If published that way, the original author is still shown as the chapter author and has full control over the content. So the question might be whether saving content as draft already qualifies as intention to publish the content.

option to hide unpublished threads from editors so they aren't in the way

Unpublished chapters shouldn't be visible to editors on the story map.