I have a suggestion for a new story category called "Test". It's essentially a place where authors can try out the more complex features of CHYOA without having to put them into an actual story. I'm about to start messing about with variables and conditional options, and I'd like to practice a little so that when I put it in my story, it works right the first time. If possible, it would probably be best if the "test" stories were non-searchable, ineligible for points leading to rewards, and set up to be visible only to the original author. Perhaps it could even be made so that they are auto-deleted after 30 days of inactivity.
Suggestions should go to the Suggestions subforum. Well... you can test everything while your story is in draft mode, so you can create a number of draft stories for that purpose. I think that would be enough to mess around with variables as long as you are working alone on a story. If there are others involved, it could be somewhat difficult as writers with user role editor currently aren't able to see draft chapters. There are also some stories for game mode coding examples: - Conditional Branches Showcase (examples) and Conditional Branches Showcase (source code) - Character Creation Showcase by dingsdongs The Conditional Branches Showcase hasn't much content yet, but it's open to contributions. I can also assist with game mode questions.
This thread belongs in the "Sugestions" area, but: I like the idea of the "Test" category, but I'm not in favor of the Auto-Delete aspect of things, because it would be a pain to have to re-create a 'test' story for one of your published stories if you needed it. I also advise that "Test" stories be like the existing category systems, which adds the additional functionality that if you accidentally publish a story prematurely, you don't have to bug Friedman to boot it back to draft mode, you just change its category to 'test' and no one but you and any other Author/Editor/Owner users can see it again...
It would be nice to learn what you can do before writing and see I understand why you don't want it searchable on the site, but it would be nice if it could be accessed by anyone with a link. So the author could see what a user sees or share it with beta readers. One drawback to this is the story could still be found by search engines.
It should be possible to exclude most search engine from crawling specific sites. A more reliable way should be to only allow access if you are logged in and unlocked by the story owner. (Currently, this can be done by keeping the story in draft mode, though the problem is that the other users (beta readers) can't access the story map.)
