Feature Suggestion: <Chapter title> - <Author> when selecting a chapter

[storysmith]

Hi,

I'm fairly new to the site a love it.

When I'm reading a story I like to follow one author's story from start to finish before going back and exploring other branches.

I would find it useful to see the author's name next to each chapter title when selecting the next chapter to read at the bottom of the chapter I've just read.

At the moment I have to click through the list of possible chapters until I find the author's chapter I'm looking for, sometimes it's the top link but not always. Only takes a few seconds but thought I'd suggest it.

At the moment it looks like this:

What happens next?
They go to the farm
They go biking

I imagine it would look like this:

What happens next?
They go to the farm - DKSchrute
They go biking - JamesTrickington84

If I want to read JamesTrickington84's branch I don't have to click through DKSchrute's first.

Does this sound useful to anyone?

 

[insertnamehere]

This would probably be more annoying than helpful on most pages. You can see this information in this exact format in the story map, anyway. On the stories where having author names next to chapter titles is useful, those authors will usually manually enter their names into the titles.

 

[Aman Onfy Mous]

When I'm reading a story I like to follow one author's story from start to finish before going back and exploring other branches.

I would find it useful to see the author's name next to each chapter title when selecting the next chapter to read at the bottom of the chapter I've just read.

At the moment I have to click through the list of possible chapters until I find the author's chapter I'm looking for, sometimes it's the top link but not always. Only takes a few seconds but thought I'd suggest it.

....

Does this sound useful to anyone?

Yes. While, as insertnamehere mentions, this can essentially be done via the story map, it can be really annoying to constantly have to go back to the story map to figure out where you're going, especially for larger stories where the story map is enormous and you have to re-load the page.

If there was a lot of other information stuffed into chapter names already, I might say it wasn't worth the space, but there is currently nothing except the name. There is plenty of room to put author names. Dates might be useful too, so that you find new chapters without having to constantly reference the story map.

 

[TheLowKing]

You could avoid avoids cluttering things up needlessly by only listing the author if it changes.

 

[gene.sis]

Why do you need to know the chapter author anyway?

 

[Dissonant Soundtrack]

Why do you need to know the chapter author anyway?

For some of the massive stories, there can be a huge variance in quality between authors. And once they get too large, story map starts to choke on the size. Fixing one or the other would be a big help imo.

 

[Aman Onfy Mous]

Why do you need to know the chapter author anyway?

It's not needed, but it is quality of life. If it wouldn't be too difficult to implement, it would be a nice feature.

 

[insertnamehere]

For some of the massive stories, there can be a huge variance in quality between authors. And once they get too large, story map starts to choke on the size. Fixing one or the other would be a big help imo.

While it would indeed be useful in these situations, I think it should be implemented by the authors themselves, by writing their names in the chapter title, and possibly enforced by the owner or editor. If applied to every story, it would be more annoying than not, since in most situations, you either already know who the author is or you don't care (usually, in turn, because you haven't heard of them).

If it's not applied to every story, I still don't see any way to automatically determine which stories should have this feature that would not result in excessive false positives or negatives. If it were only on stories with multiple authors, it would result in the same issue as stories with single authors in most cases, since large collaborative stories tend to take the format of a single author "owning" a long branch. It could be applied on a chapter basis, only displayed when different choices are written by different users or when one of those choices is written by someone different to the parent chapter, but this rule would not be very obvious and would probably cause confusion in cases where it's not displayed. Owners and editors might also prefer consistency throughout the whole story.

It might be useful as an optional setting for a story that is disabled by default, so that on stories where it is useful, it doesn't need to be enforced and authors don't need to manually enter their usernames.