Per this thread, I (and no doubt at least some other authors) would like to have a way to move existing chapters from one point in the story tree to another, keeping any chapters underneath them intact. Authors contributing to a moderated story should only be able to do this to chapters they wrote themselves; editors and owners could do it for anything. I also think it would be handy to be able to change the order of the child chapters under a given parent chapter. As before, editors and owners should have full control, but authors in a moderated story should probably only be able to change the order when they own both the chapter being changed and the parent chapter it's under. Most of the people here are cool, but there's probably one or two egotistical jerks who would always put their chapter at the very top if they could, and that's not fair to the original author of a story branch. That said, I'm interested to hear anyone's thoughts about the rules governing who can change what; those were just off-the-cuff suggestions and it's possible I overlooked some obvious negative consequence they would lead to. The general idea that authors should be able to move their own chapters around is sound, I think.
Maybe something like the link system where you can permanent link to a page or move to page. Though only editors should be able to do so.
I like the idea in general (move and rearrange), though I wouldn't allow authors to move chapters at all. Deciding if it is possible could be complicated and the story owner may not want that the chapters get moved to another position. If really necessary, the author could ask the story owner/an editor to move the chapter.
If that's a concern, then how about this: authors can submit chapter moves and reorderings for their own chapters, but the changes have to be approved by an editor or owner before they take effect, the same way that brand new chapters have to be approved before they're posted.
That could work, though I assume, that this won't be necessary very often. I would still prefer communication between the author and the story owner/editor. (This could also avoid/reduce requests of moving chapters upwards) Depending on the implementation, an approval process could make things complicated.
However it could also increase the incidents of moving other users chapters for seemingly innocent but actually nefarious reasons: I noticed one story where it would have made more sense to have one specific chapter further down the list under another chapter, but that would have been detrimental to the previously submitted chapter. I think only being able to petition to move your own chapters directly will reduce the risk of Author's swaying the story owner to move other people's chapters for their own advantage.
I Wholeheartedly support having the possibility to change the orders of chapters and would have added it as a suggestion if it wasn't there already. I would set it so only owner can do it. Or if willing to go deeper in complexity add a check box option on creating a story to allow editors to do it too. There can be multiple editors that can also write chapters, too many people with such a power can become messy really quick. I would say it is one of the most important things to add to the site. We won't kid ourselves, most people follow the first answer each time and only crawl back when A They hit a dead end B They like what they read. IF your first storyline on a story that has many of them isn't your best or goes into kinks and fetishes that are not very popular you can lose readers that would love the other 80% of it. I have to force myself at time to leave blank draft chapters before writing just so that the *main* storyline isn't so obvious(but if I forgot to do it I'm screwed)
Ultimately, I think story owners should have the ability to make any and all changes to the structure of the story they want. Once that's possible, then if an author wants to message them and ask for something to be moved, they certainly can do so, and the owner can decide yes or no on whatever basis they like. Just that by itself would be an improvement over the current situation where we have to message Friedman, who (although very gracious and helpful in my experience) necessarily has a finite amount of time to spend on administering the entire website. But I also think it makes a certain amount of sense to allow individual authors to do basic modifications to their own chapters, the same way we can make minor edits to a chapter after it's already been published. If approval is necessary at all, a built-in mechanism to submit a request for "I want to move this chapter to this position" would mean less work for the editor or owner who has to approve it than having to read a bunch of messages; all they have to do is look over the request and hit "approve" or "deny". (Or whatever the current chapter approval interface looks like.) Taking my example from the first post in this thread as a use case, I wanted to add a new chapter and then move an existing branch underneath it. If I were a story's editor, I would find it a lot easier to see "jun1337 wants to add chapter X" followed by "jun1337 wants to move chapter Y to chapter X" and be able to see exactly what's being proposed, and then just hit "ok" for both of them if it looks reasonable. If someone tries abusing the privilege, or harasses the editors, it's not hard to ignore or block them, but honestly I expect that to be pretty uncommon in practice.
Hello! Jumping in to bump this thread again, because I was gonna make this suggestion myself and checked to see if it existed. I definitely would like to see this implemented! It'd make Game Mode stories much cleaner, without the need to add a bunch of blank draft chapters to edit and publish later, so that the "exit" option from a hub stays at the bottom. I think limiting it to story owners is probably a good idea though, like gene.sis said, since otherwise all sorts of story politics n stuff might crop up.
I’d figure, just as story creators have full jurisdiction over what’s put in their stories, they should be able to reorganize the order in which chapters are created; a feature that I firmly find relevant to keeping a story well-maintained in appearance. I’m not a “new writer,” but am new to the forums. This is a problem I’ve been working with for at least a couple years now and hope to get resolved.
