New Site Feedback

I think you're misunderstanding what changed with the Bookmark/Favorites drop-down button and what has since been added back.

Before, clicking Bookmarks showed you a dropdown box listing of all of your Bookmarked/Favorited stories that you could scroll up and down the list of (and see if any had been updated since last visit). With the original site update that launched the other day, that functionality was removed. Instead, you only saw maybe your first 4 Bookmarks/Favorites shown in alphabetical order, and to see any more you needed to visit a different page entirely by clicking the "show all" link at the bottom of that dorpdown box. It was basically a useless feature in that form because of how little it showed; it would have been easier to just make that Bookmarks/Favorites button take you to your bookmark/favorite page since you would have to go there to see anymore than 4 of them anyway. Although that would have been a direct downgrade of how the previous dropdown box worked as well.

The most recent change made it so that, once again, you can see the full list of your Bookmarks/Favorited stories in that dropdown box rather than needing to visit a separate page, and you once again can scroll up and down that list like before. It is much better now (again) than the version the original change to the site had.

Unfortunately, the ability to see which stories have been updated in that dropdown box (maybe via a little star or something next to the story icon?) does not seem to have not been returned, but I hope that it will, too.
 
Report from reddit: There is much appreciation for the changes to the favorites menu and the speed with which you responded. No significant new comments, but with the bookmarks thing handled, comments have shifted toward other of the previously mentioned issues (although there are some people saying the favorites still doesn't show a symbol for stories with new stuff).

Chief comment right now seems to be that people want the top navbar to not scroll off the top so they always have access to the favorites and can see when new stuff, messages, or notifications come in, regardless of how far down the page they have scrolled. Coming in behind that are the horizontal margin and horizontal scrolling on the front page comments.
 
Just giving my few initial thoughts about the new site:

First of all, it looks great! Probably better on a pad or a phone, but still very neat.
Like others have said, the side scrollers are a bit confusing, but again they might work better for other platforms?
I love that you can see comments for the whole story now, rather than being forced to search every single thread for them. Also that you get notifications for just about everything!
Regarding the comments though, they are a bit difficult to navigate if there's no way to see what thread they actually belong to...
And... is there any chance we'll see a variable system of some sort in the future...? : )

Good work! And do consider setting up for patreon or something, if you ever feel like the work on this site is starting take up too much of your time!
 
I don't know about the current version, but in the previous version of CHYOA that sort of thing happened if you approved a thread before approving the preceding thread. Story maps would automatically get fixed every few hours.
 
An email option under notifications might be useful in the future,I like the notifications but not so much having to clear them out of my email. I can read them all very quickly under the notifications tab.
 
I too would prefer if the e-mail aspect of notifications could be set to 'Daily Summary' or 'No e-Mails' instead of for each notification.
 
I view the site on my phone and occasionally my tablet, but I find the new UI far more clunky and less streamlined. The story overview page is -far- harder to use now. The text is so large I cannot actually get an 'overview' of the story anymore. The blockyness is an eyesore and now the chapter title text goes to the next line rather than going to the side if it does not fit on the screen, exacerbating the problem of oversized text. I also miss the way in the previous version, the date a chapter was added/last updated was shown next to the chapter title and author. When viewing the overview it made it much easier to find the newest chapters in stories that I have not read aall branches of for one reason or another.

The new chapter view page is also problematic. The side margins are very large and eat up lots of screen space on my phone, leaving the text confined to a band about half to two-thirds the width of my screen, which makes reading less fluid as I have to scroll far more often to bring new text into view. Additionally, the comment box seems glitchy to me (I know that is likely a bug rather than a design issue). I love that you can now view comments on the story as a whole, but the comment interface itself was much nicer to use before.

I also miss, as it seems many others do, the drop down with all your favorite stories, when they were last updated, and a green dot next to the ones that have been updated since you last viewed them.
 
The linking system could use some work: I like that it is easier to link but not that each link is now an actual page with a link as opposed to a simple redirect to the page linked to: if you could make the link pages redirect like they used to that would make this a major improvement! (Anything which breaks up the 'flow' of the story is not an improvement...)
 
Simon_Silver said:
The linking system could use some work: I like that it is easier to link but not that each link is now an actual page with a link as opposed to a simple redirect to the page linked to: if you could make the link pages redirect like they used to that would make this a major improvement! (Anything which breaks up the 'flow' of the story is not an improvement...)
Click to expand...

You see those pages because you're the owner/editor of the story. Otherwise it redirects immediately. Still bad?
 
Friedman said:
You see those pages because you're the owner/editor of the story. Otherwise it redirects immediately. Still bad?
Click to expand...

I am still trying to figure it out myself. I think it would work best like on the first site if their was a link to option under the add a new chapter, The only problem there was there was no way to unlink a chapter if you linked to the wrong one.
 
Friedman said:
You see those pages because you're the owner/editor of the story. Otherwise it redirects immediately. Still bad?
Click to expand...

Would prefer to be able to turn it off, yes, but I can see the reasoning behind it: it's so you can edit the link if someone messed up making it.
 
Friedman said:
You see those pages because you're the owner/editor of the story. Otherwise it redirects immediately. Still bad?
Click to expand...
The problem with it as is is that when you are reading the story as a reader, not an editor, it gets in the way.
 
What if, since links are marked on the story map, you only see that page when you click on one direct from the story map? That way you can find and edit broken links, but when just reading the story it flows properly?
 
Issues I've seen:
-No way to unlike or undislike a thread. I can switch from one to the other, but not switch to a neutral no-thumb
-When I briefly looked at linking it didn't give a gui-fied way to link. Maybe that changed since the first day, but it seemed you had to type the name of the thread you wanted to link to instead of selecting it from the story-map like chyoo used to do.
-Finding and editing the characteristics of a story (POV, moderated/private, etc) can only be found if you enter the stories page via the notifications tab and then click the three dots. The three dots are not there if you enter via clicking on your name then click story
-Making a user an author or editor of your story can't be done from a page that they wrote, it has to be done via the above characteristics page (Edit Page under the three dots). It might be different for new submissions that haven't yet been approved, but it doesn't make it easy to promote writes from old stories to trusted/author status. Maybe changing a writer's status could be done via the triple dots that show in the Story Map

In spite of the above I like the new site.
 
I have one issue: When linking a chapter, it would be nice to see the ID in the dropdown, not just the name. I have chapters that are named the same. Another option would be to show the path underneath, like a filepath, or even both. E.g.:
Walk the dinosaur
Chapter 4 / 245990
Open the door > Get on the floor > Walk the dinosaur
Click to expand...
Walk the dinosaur
Chapter 4 / 245989
Open the door > Let Faith in > Walk the dinosaur
Click to expand...



Also, a few other minor things:
- I'd suggest the Edit and Report to be buttons without the quick menu, since it's only two choices and Edit is something you have to click quite often
- Is there a reason the "Celebrity" category is gone?
- Chapters of drafts can still show up in "Recent activity" and, in fact, even be read when going to the user page chapter overview.
 
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After I added a new chapter with a prolific author I had a huge slew of Notifications coming in. It made me agree with an earlier poster who said this area could be improved. ie, Click Notifications and it will show
<Story Name> has new activity in the form of:
+Comment
+Rating
+Chapter

Click the plus and the appropriate section expands:
-Comment
-<UserName> added a Comment to <ChapterName>
-<UserName> added a Comment to <ChapterName>

Where there is only one entry it would instead omit the category (Comment, Rating or Chapter) and just show the related notification. Instead of the above it would be

-<UserName> added a Comment to <ChapterName>

In the long-term Notification (ShowAll) you could either use the same format or, to make it so you have some idea what story the Notification is related to (an annoyance to me, since the current method makes you guess) at the very least, add <UserName> added a Comment to <ChapterName> in the Story <StoryName>
 
Tried linking a few threads to one another using the new features today, but couldn't make it work...
The field where you're supposed to type in the ID of the thread you're linking to goes blank as soon as you click anything else on the page. (IE: the "save" button, or just by pressing enter on your keyboard.)

I've not tried the old method yet, but felt like the links that carried over from the old format weren't excellent. Instead of being directed immediately from one thread to the other, I'm sent to a page in between them that tells me "this thread is linked to this thread", with a link that sends me on to the new destination. Felt rather clunky to me, so I opted not to use that.
 
Vain said:
Tried linking a few threads to one another using the new features today, but couldn't make it work...
The field where you're supposed to type in the ID of the thread you're linking to goes blank as soon as you click anything else on the page. (IE: the "save" button, or just by pressing enter on your keyboard.)

I've not tried the old method yet, but felt like the links that carried over from the old format weren't excellent. Instead of being directed immediately from one thread to the other, I'm sent to a page in between them that tells me "this thread is linked to this thread", with a link that sends me on to the new destination. Felt rather clunky to me, so I opted not to use that.
Click to expand...

You don't enter the ID, but the name and it opens a dropdown. And the automatic redirect works for readers, it just shows the redirect page for you which is helpful for editing and organizing.
 
TurinTurambar said:
You don't enter the ID, but the name and it opens a dropdown. And the automatic redirect works for readers, it just shows the redirect page for you which is helpful for editing and organizing.
Click to expand...

Ah, and so I noticed that you don't actually add a link directly from one page to another, but first have to create a new one, which is then used as the link to the one you want to link to!
Canny... And just caused me to accidentally delete one of my pages in thinking I was just creating a link. Newbies mistake, I guess. : /

So... as another question on the topic, is there any way to restore a page to what it looked like a few days ago...?
 
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