Site updates

Isn’t it curious that part 11 of your “Web of Trust” got very few ratings while part 12 is getting an enormous amount of ratings?

Unfortunately, the site doesn’t count unique views (only by logged on users, and only a very small percentage of our users use an account and log on to it). The “Total View Count” takes every click on the story into account.

And if anyone can say that he’s doing good, then it’s you. Your latest story does phenomenally well.

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Oh, I hadn’t really clued into that (despite the fact that it says “logged in” right in the description). That explains why there’s such a discrepancy between that number and the total views. While I’d seen the ratings, I hadn’t really noticed that the number of ratings had risen high enough that it was getting nifty icons now. This makes me happy! :smiley:

As for part 11, if I had to guess, I’d say that a lot of people didn’t quite know what to make of it, cuz it goes backwards from what you’d usually expect in a hypno story, taking the two of them from fully dominated to pretty much undominated. (Is that a word? Is now!)

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Oh, off-topic, I just noticed that there’s a typo in the hover-text for the new icons. The gold-outlined ones are missing the “d” in “outstandingly”.

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2019-01-13

  • “Dockerized” the whole site.
  • ElasticSearch is now running in a separate process
  • Moved the site to another bigger server

This update was a lot of work, but didn’t make much difference for the users. Searching is much faster and the downtime when updating the site should be quite a bit shorter. Otherwise, the primary reason was to reduce the costs by circumventing AWS load balancer, which is quite expensive.

I hope everything is back working just fine! If you find a problem, please let me know!

The link back to the story site dissapeared on my screen. Just wasnted to mention.

Yeah, I know. I removed it this afternoon, because on mobile devices, it was blocking the forum’s menu altogether. I think this is actually caused by an update of the forum software, not by the move to the new server, it’s just a coincidence.

If I find the time, I’ll try to find a solution. I miss it, too…

As a note the mini update on images in stories look really good.

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Hey Martin, for a few days you had a convenient link at the top of this community portal that led back to the main GSS site. It’s now disappeared. Has it gone somewhere else? I found it very useful since often find myself going back and forth between the GSS site and this community site.

There was a problem with the latest forum update, that’s why I had to remove that link.

But it’s back now :slight_smile:

This update, among many other smaller fixes, brings the requested option to filter out a number of tags for topics you really don’t want to see at all.

2019-01-20

  • Added new tag filter. Allows to filter up to three tags, all stories which is tagged with one of these will be filtered out from the main site and the story list.
  • Improved display on mobile devices and added button to access the forum.
  • Various smaller fixes here and there
  • Switched to a larger database server to cope with the increased load. Should fix the recent numerous outages
  • The forum has now large icons to return to the main site and to the comments (desktop only)
  • Fixed images embedded in stories (already live for a couple of days)

So random question. In most websites when you start typing the first letter of a sentence auto capitalizes. On this side it does not, at least in the story comment section. So I was wondering why that is and if there was anything that could be done about it. I’m not asking for you to do millions of hours of labor or anything like that, but maybe it’s just a simple option that you need to check. Anyway I figured there’s no harm in asking.

I guess the capitalizing is actually done on your system. By your browser/mobile phone or whatever you’re using.

One thing I’ve realized is that the way the “Extended Editor”, which I implemented for the comments and stories, works, can sometimes somehow cause some comfort functions offered by your device to stop working. Like on iOS, where you’ll lose the auto-complete while you’re typing.

That’s why I’ve added the check-button to disable the extended editor. If your sentences get capitalized again, we know that this was the issue. It would have to be fixed by the OS developers, I’m afraid.

Yep. Thanks. I unchecked the advanced editor and autocaps came back. :slight_smile:

The interplay between site and phone is quite interesting.

2019-01-28

  • Completely reworked mechanics for submitting, approving and updating stories
  • Stories are now saved into a preview, can be edited as often as you want, before explicitly releasing them to be published
  • Added experimental Community Stories feature

This update is mostly interesting for authors. They can now save a story on the site before it’s made public. Then they can ask other proofreaders to read and edit their story before they’re asking it to be published.

One think that might be interesting is a new “Community Story” feature. The idea is a story which is co-written by the whole community. One author starts a story and anyone can add to it.

2 Likes

2019-02-03

  • Added option for authors to rename their series and change their summaries
  • Revised Community Stories
  • Smaller fixes everywhere

As several people pointed out that there’s no way to change a series’s summary, which is quite true, I’ve added a new feature to allow authors to edit their own series. Open a series (where all parts of the series are listed) and click the tool button on top:

Oh, and the series summary is now also displayed on that screen.

1 Like

2019-02-13

  • Added “Community Series” feature
  • Reworked the whole system how stories are submitted and managed internally. Errors when submitting are now better processed and shown to the user.
  • Improved the display of story revisions. Added a hotkey to switch highlighting of changes (Ctrl-Return)
  • The curator of Community Stories can now merge all revisions back to the base version
  • Improved the Category selector and added verbal descriptions to them (thanks to RobinHood70 for his help!)
  • Improved Search dialog according to user input.

The most notable change is the new “Community Series” feature (not to be confused with “Community Stories” which were also introduced recently!).

They work a bit like CYOC.net (“Choose your own Change”). When starting a new series (with the first story), an author can now check the new “New chapters can be added to this series by other people (Community Series)” checkbutton on the story’s edit screen.

After that, any person can add new chapters to the series. Each chapter still has to be reviewed and approved by the original author (curator) before it’s published!

It’s up to the author to create a flow for branches and he might even add options how to continue the story.

I realize that the latest Community Story feature was not really what people were looking for, so I hope this is more fitting.

Of course, any existing series can also be turned into a community series (there’s a new option in the series overview for that purpose).

3 Likes

2019-02-18

  • Added option to edit own comments (Anon users can edit comments they’ve just added)
  • Redesigned comment display slightly
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2019-02-19

  • Old stories, that were taken over from the NCMC are now displayed much better. They can also be edited properly now.
  • Fixed some bugs (with tag handling and other stuff).

Please notify me, if you see any story which doesn’t display in a readable way, like a wall of text or complete format fuck up (smaller problems here and there are unavoidable, I’m afraid).

Also, if you happen to be an author of an old story and want to claim ownership of it (to be able to edit it or to be able to see its access and rating stats and so on) please just write an email to me (admin@gayspiralstories.com)

Just noticed the weird formatting here:

While His Girlfriend’s Away (ncmc wiki 2005-08-12)

Thanks for letting me know. It’s fixed. And I’m going to look for other stories with the same issue.