Some suggestions for features - maybe somehow useful…
multiple Autor Storys
Some story’s are written by multiple Autors or commissioned by someone or corrected/Translated. At the moment it is a text. Maybe some box like the tag select where you could add some alternative Autors and optional their role to this story ( coautor, reviewer, lector, main Autor, translator, whatever
crosslink a story to an story universe (pollination or the guardsman story’s with some background )
crosslink the story to a forum threat (pollination or such)
maybe a possibility of ads for a story idea . (So I gave a story pitch and the people marked as Autors could make offers writing the rest out or review grammar and writing
this story needs some community Autors to work with and some love feature (standard und Paid Premium Version)
maybe a " tip the Autor(s) " urls on the bottom of the story ?
timebased story publishing.
story writing category for the Autor in his editor view to manage storys ( pitch, draft, need review, etc)
That’s some ideas after I published some of my bought storys
I think a lot of this is at least partially implemented in the “Community Series” side of things. I think we have pretty good edit/versioning control right now for the most part - and Martin rightly tells us to keep backups of our work elsewhere in case of browser timeouts and stuff like that. I don’t think the GSS story editor can or should compete with services like Grammarly or the like; it’s already really fully-featured to do what it does, and it does it well.
The only think I’d endorse here is being able to reference other authors or list them as co-authors or something; I know that a few people have just asked Martin to have dual-listing of some sort for collabs. Maybe the option to list users and define certain roles (co-author, proofreader, editor, inspiration, kudos, dedication, etc) as part of the publication?
And while I think it’s nice to be able to reference other stories or place them in the same “universe” it might be a hard thing to work in. I did it by making references in the comments or story text and adding links to both The Dread Wolf and the follow-on War Dogs series in a way that didn’t disrupt flow for anyone, but I can see that it might be a lot to manage and might distract from other site needs.
One thin that might be nice is a “pitch” or “hooks” repository where people can leave ideas for others to work on or suggest further additions to a story, but since the main impact would be reducing comments on storries and I fucking live for the affirmation I get from those comments, I think we’re well handled already in that space.
Yes the editor is great. So is the site
The suggestions are only my thoughts of improving this and giving credits to others. (Like when I am not the Autor, only the guy payed for the story… ).
The comment section is ok-ish and I love the feedback. But the request for help feature and maybe the “I am willing to pay for help” feature is to prevent a "publish and get destroyed over bad english " thing. Happens so many times even if the story is great.
If Martin improves his site, is his thing. But he can’t improve without Feedback so… There is my thoughts…
thank you so much for all your suggestions! It means a lot to me, when people actively think about how to improve GSS and let me know their thoughts.
Actually, it’s already possible that a story has multiple “owners”. In a Communitry Series, all chapters are owned by the series creator AND the actual author of that chapter for example. I can also assign any additional author to a story, you just have to ask me. Right now, owners can see the stats and edit a story
But you’re right in that they are currently not displayed correctly, and that’s more of a layout problem in the lists, than anything else. That’s why I kept the feature (which was taken from the GSS’ original implementation), that allows you to type any arbitrary text for the author name, there you have the chance to indicate any kind of collaboration.
Not ideal I’m aware of that, and one point I have to find a way to improve.
For any kind of crosslinking: For things like that I’d rather suggest adding a (markdown) link to your story or the summary manually (yes, links are supported in the summary, too!). That’s way more flexible than any mechanism I could build.
The feature “Community Story” (not series!) was actually created with something like this in mind. You write a premise and asks other to flesh it out. That’s why Community Stories have a way lower word requirement for example. Unfortunately, nobody used it that way and if they did, nobody picked up the thread to make something out of it.
A “Tip for the author” link you just manually add to your story is fine in my book, you can just manually add it. Whether it’s Ko-Fi, Patreon or even a direct PayPal link - I don’t mind. As long as it’s not a scam but just an honest request for some appreciation.
With “time based publishing”, you mean that you can set a predefined date at which the story is published? I wonder how many people would ever use that feature. It’s certainly doable, I just wonder if it would get any use. You can submit stories freely, as you probably know, and just have to click “Publish” at the time you want to see it published.
You mean you want to flag the current unpublished stories? Again: I see the use case, however I wonder if it would see much use. I actually do that already, but I use the summary field to flag my own unpublished stories with a prefix, like “needs more work:”. As you can list all your unpublished stories, that’s enough for me, and it’s also more flexible than any fixed mechanism I can build.
So what I’ll put on my list is that I have to improve the multiple author management somehow. As for the rest, I’d like to open it up for discussion with other users, and for clarification on what you have in mind exactly, @Lexorius.
Thank you and @Dace as well for your constructive thoughts on this!
First: as i read your answer @Corin i realized, the most suggestions are from my personal preferences to have a structured form, where i could enter data instead of having a freetext field with to much posibilities so i understand your thought about the most points… (and you are right, it is possible to do it. even i dont like it, lol)
Autor : it seems to me a bit inconvinient to write the "master of the GSS Universe " for stuff like that
Crossling: ok, my argument points for the " The Universe crosslink " feature is: how do i search for Storys that are in the same universe ? let me take the example of pollination (there are 16 results in search, 21 in the series and more than 25 on the site completly. ) and i dont know how many unknown…
Community Story:ok, again : personal point of view and my own expierence. if i write a story (even in my native toung) i have problems with correct writing (legastenie) and in non native languages there are gramar problems on top however i know my personal problems and before i post something i would like to have it checked for understanding and againsed the “gramar and spelling nazis” (and yes, there are here also in english lol) and also i feel better not having the “you should work on your spelling and Writing skills” in the Comment section. this prevent me from posting storys i had no possibility to countercheck. I havn’t someone check my spelling on storys with explicit content… so some preflight check system on the site where helpful. (in my thoughts some steps like: entering the story on the editor mode into the site, setting it to “rework wantend” so only registered autors (and/or users with the flag “reviewer”) could see it and it could reworked. when that is ready (with or without payment via external service, accorded to user not to the site) than it could be published to the site. And yes, i understand the point some native speakers have when there are misspellings in storys. they didnt know my language background and the fact i speak couple other language beside the one i write my fantasies with
Tip the Autor : Again my “i love organized form and no freetext” - Fetish
the TBP Feature (time based publishing) - I came up with because i had a multiple part story and i planed to post it as a christmas “gift” to the community. Part 1 : 24.12, Part 2 25.12 and part 3 26.12 . the storys are ready, and if i posted all at once, some wouldnt get enough attention. I could imagin some of the pollination storyline are the same deal. Every Friday there was a new chapter of the story published. Additionaly, there is the aproval process for the story, making the planed publishing of storys somekind of difficult. yes it is mostly within 12 h but some suggestions is, to publish it, let it run throu the aproval process and don’t show it on the site until the date (and time) the autor have selected.
categorizing/flag unpublished stories: you did a greate job with the editor. my thought was: give autors a place to drop and sort theire projects into and give them a place to organize them. even the slightes pitch of a story or some ideas, never getting to a published story - i understand the flexibility and i hold agans it: yes the user should have the posibility to add some tags. but also should have a fixed preselection to see, what tags he given so far. i know at least from my chaotic brain, where i could mess up tags in very brilliant ways by not knowing it only 5 seconds later (while i looked it up 5 seconds ago)
first of all, Greeting back to Germany from Germany (In case you didn’t know that I’m German as well).
I understand most of your points, but as usual, I have to weigh implementation efforts against the usefulness of the general userbase. And for most of your points, this isn’t leaning in favour of an elaborate implementation that would be flexible enough to be of real use.
I’ll consider some of your suggestions, like the time based publishing. I see it’s usefulness and it’s easy enough to implement.
About the editing your unpublished story: You are aware that you can share both the “secret” View and Edit link to your unpublished story with as many people as you like? You can put them on Discord or here in the forum, if you want to have a selected group of people reading, commenting and even editing your story. That’s actually the whole idea behind the revision system: Many people can make edits but only YOU as the author has the final word over what gets published in the end.
Just to give you an idea about the future plans: I still have to revise the code to support various different base themes, so I can create “sister-sites” to GSS which share the same story database, but allow for completely different kinks and themes, which would presented on separate home pages (so GSS will remain the mind-control kink site it always was, while making it possible to cover a bigger variety of kinks).
I haven’t been able to implement much recently, due to my professional situation (and lack of motivation, too). But I’ll get around to it eventually.
And for the rest. I am happy to get something like that out of my brain by suggesting it to others. So I haven’t to think about it (and sadly my brain thinks such things over and over again). With this Technik my brain knows, I have given the idea and stop thinking about it beside when I have to use it. But then I could stop thinking about it because I know I have suggested it. And so no thinkcycle begins. I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone else then me and my brain ;)))
And I am happy if some suggested features appear sometimes in the future. Regardless if it’s tomorrow or in 5 years…
I’m not too happy with the editor, tbh, there are some differences between how the editor renders Markdown and how the actual site renders it (it’s a completely different library).
And I want to add more features to the markdown Interpreter, like improved managing of images and so on.
But all of that is loads of work, because unfortunately, the whole world only goes into the direction of client-side coding (Angular) while GSS is still coded traditionally with pure JacaScript. So everything is really a lot of work to implement and I can’t rely on all those nifty libraries.
So, yes, I see your points but I can’t make any promises.
but something i found. If you search at the main site for story series - you found a way to lot “single” storys witch are technicaly not a series. but you havn’t a overview for real series. (when someone filled out the tag, but havn’t posted a second part)
Maybe the search for series could only show series where the storycount (published and unpublished) is greater then one (not equaly one).
Or maybe it appear if you check the “community story” checkbox with the tag, so someone could add his own story to the series.
additionaly unpublished drafts are not tagged as series until they are published. maybe somehow unpractical…
There is no such thing as “too much” when it’s about GSS and sex in general
Somehow I don’t get your suggestion. You want to find series as opposed to one-shot stories even if only one chapter was posted yet?
There is no explicit search for series. The only difference is whether you want to get a list where each series (and one-shot story) shows up just once, i.e. the series list, or the individual story list, where each story listed separately, even if it’s part of a series.
The latter one is just the linear list of the stories that have been submitted to the site.
You know that there’s a separate list of community stories available in the “Stories” menu?`
Yes, I know. But as no one can see them but you (as the author) that’s ok in my eyes. The reason is, that a story only becomes really accounted for a series once it’s published, otherwise all mechanics would go haywire. I have to account for the usual case that there is a series with many chapters already published, while one or more new chapters aren’t published yet. And that has to work properly.
There is a mark for stories you’ve already rated. That’s what I use as a “mark as read” flag:
The system can’t tell whether you’ve actually read a story or just looked at it. That’s why there’s no “mark as read” flag. But as soon as you’ve rated a story, you can see that in all lists:
(That blue checkmark)
The only issue is that on series you can’t see that, you have to look at the individual list of all chapters of that series.
/edit: I just thought more about your suggestion and I’ll add the actual rating (as a number) to that checkmark, to make it obvious how much you liked the story yourself.
I’d rather not use the bookmark feature, as that effectively defeats the list of bookmarked stories feature.
I don’t see why the rated mark is not sufficient. It would at least be an incentive to rate more consistently which is still something that’s not happening nearly as often as I’d like.
We usually have hits in the 1000s for one story and usually < 100 ratings.
A feature I would really like to see would be a way to search through your “favorites” or “bookmarks” list by tag and keyword, same way as the search screen. I like to use my favorites list as a way of making it easier to find stories I’ve read before and liked, but it’s starting to get so long that it’s starting to get very ineffective for that. I’ve tried to start using the “rated stories” tab for ones that I like but aren’t my super favorite, but that still leaves the issue of not really being able to search for specific stories. Same with bookmarks: the feature is great at what it’s designed for I just wish I had a better way of navigating through them.
Also, a pinned thread for feature suggestions would be pretty cool nudge nudge wink wink
Also a suggestion: a multi select option box on story edit for themes (not Tags) the story matches. As preparation for some new sites like “gay furry story’s” or “gay rubber story’s” or “gay soldier story” or “gay lycra story’s” or “gay leather stories” websites of your gss empire ;))
I could add a check button to normal search dialog to limit the search scope to one’s favorites and/or rated stories. Would that help?
@Lexorius: The concept of “themes” will be added as soon as I get around adding that to the data model. I was planning to do this for months, but private matter had to take precedence, so I had to postpone that.
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