I just suddenly had this flash of insight a few seconds ago: what if the owners of stories could put a 'freeze' on adding new chapters, not to the whole story, but just to specific chapters? Say the author has one of those very open-ended stories that you can branch a lot of content off the top page, but it's getting crowded, so they create a new page marked 'more ideas' or some such thing? Now, whenever someone adds a new thread to the top page instead of the 'more ideas' page they have to either reject it and probably alienate that adder or let it go through, thus negating the point of the 'More Ideas' chapter. If we could just disable the ability to add to chapters one at a time they would find they couldn't add, and either give up (not much of an author in that case,) or, knowing this chapter is locked, go looking for the right place to add onto and find the 'More Ideas' Chapter....
https://chyoa.com/chapter/Lock-Adding-To-Individual-Chapters-by-Nemo-of-Utopia.370909 Related to this idea. https://chyoa.com/chapter/Add-the-ability-to-end-threads.366941
Yes, but not quite the same thing: locking the front page as an 'ending' implies that the story is only one page long: whereas locking it after there are too many submissions just says: "this page is overcrowded..."
But "Add the ability to end threads" would fully cover the described functionality. The behavior could also be mimicked if we would have a feature to move chapters. Though, I don't see quite a benefit. The chapters in "More Options" would probably less likely noticed. I would rather prefer adding "categories" chapters after the introduction chapter, though this would also need a move chapter feature. Alternatively, you could create links to the chapter answers within the first chapter to reduce the space between the answers.
I created this suggestion because, as I recall, Friedman has said that the 'moving chapters' feature would be nigh impossible to implement without a total site overhaul. I do agree that the ability to move chapters around would serve most of the same functions, but it doesn't answer the issue, (which I admit is minor,) of wanting to simply call a halt to a thread entirely. With respect to that aspect, the other suggestion is almost superior, but could, ideally be implemented as a subset of this feature: with multiple threads locking reasons available. Potential Examples: "This Chapter is an Ending.", "This Chapter has too many branches.", "This Chapter is a Character Sheet.", "This Chapter is a Setting Reference Resource.", "This Chapter covers expanded Submissions Guidelines.": all of which could be searched for... Savvy?
I didn't follow on your first post, but now I get what you are saying. Thank you for developing the idea. I hope it works out one day.
An end isn't necessarily an end. Maybe this information could be used to search for "complete" stories/branches though it would be quite useless if it is also used to lock chapters which are dead ends early in a story. (btw what about using a tag "end" to mark completed stories?) I guess when it comes to chapters from collaborators, there is no "too many". Who would seriously write an answer chapter for that? Especially without the expectation that it will get declined? Another reason could be "I just want to make sure I'm the first one to add a follow-up chapter."
Any tool can be used well or badly: still, I think it would be more of an asset than a detriment. That's your opinion: naturally, as the person who suggested this feature: I disagree. An Excellent Suggestion!
