Stories, Next Version

[Myr]

As everyone should have realized by now, we are constantly working at improving the Stories system.  Due to the development time, we have moved around the release times of various components.  I've recently completed the specs and authorized the start of the next phase of development.

We have four features we are focusing on with this development:

1. Improved Series.  Basically, the Series feature will become it's own thing like a story.  That is, you will create a Series like you do a story and then add stories to it.    It will have other enhanced features to help promote series stories.
2. A World feature.  Worlds will be another grouping mechanism like a series, but without order. Example from pop culture:  Iron Man 1,2 and 3 are a series.  Dr. Strange is a stand alone.  All 4 movies exist in the World of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Worlds will be created just like the enhanced series described above.  Each Story may have 1 World.  Like series, Worlds will have some features to help promote stories in a World.
3. Unpublish.  This one is geared towards staff and making authors understand the gravity of what they are doing.  Gay Authors Stories Archive is intended to be a place where you post your story and it stays for as long as there is a site.  One of the biggest pain the backsides for staff is when a popular story is unpublished.  People read and reread stories on a constant basis and when they find a story they enjoy missing, they aren't shy about reporting it, complaining about it, cursing us out and everything in between.  I'm frankly sick of it.  This change will put a nice little warning box about what you are about to do and it will require you to select a reason or reasons that you are unpublishing.  Your story will then go offline, but the reason box will remain with a note from the site that you decided to remove the story.  It will also immediately alert the staff.
4. Stats.  Those stats that we have been tracking since the start of the year will be made available for viewing.  General story stats for the public and detailed stats for authors.  The Stats will use the same technology as the filter boxes we deployed with the current update.  This should make sorting through your stats quick and easy.

 

We are hoping that we have this done before October.  Keep your fingers crossed!

[Valkyrie]

Thank you for the update and all your hard work  I'm looking forward to the changes.  

[Brayon]

Thank you, Myr for the update. I'm looking forward to trying these new features. Thanks to the other staff as well, for all of your hard work.

 

Quick question. For existing Series, will they automatically populate into the new format, or do we need to manually do it?

[Myr]

2 minutes ago, BHopper2 said:

For existing Series, will they automatically populate into the new format

They will import, but you'll need to go in and add things.  Like description and world, if you want to tie multiple series together.

[Brayon]

3 minutes ago, Myr said:

They will import, but you'll need to go in and add things.  Like description and world, if you want to tie multiple series together.

Thanks!

[Daddydavek]

Myr is a phenomenon.  Always thinking, planning, writing specs, reviewing stats and still staying one step a head of what must be a real pain in the ass job of running this site.  While I'm sure the help and support he receives is critical and kudos to all that provide it, he provides the direction, comes up with many of the ideas and sees things through to realization.  And he works a real world job too.   Amazing.  

 

 

[Myr]

So...  This is a screenshot of a World in action:

 

We are testing the full range of features here... but as you can see, I'm the creator of the world, but I can add contributors.  This allows for situations where multiple people write in a shared world.  @Comicality comes in mind for stories that take place in his Gone From Daylight space.  This would allow him to add stories to his space to highlight them or make them world canon.  Or in a situation where you write short stories in a shared world space. 

I've add Dkstories Dreams of Humanity to my Psionic World in this case to show that you can also add Series to the world space, as well as demonstrate kind of how this looks. 

 

For Series, you can see the up/down/red x  that control order or inclusion in the series:

 

The good news is that these features are functional on our test server already.  We're working through the bugs, but these should be on target for deploying to GA.

[Myr]

The Add Story/My Stories menus will now be drop downs when we upgrade:

[Brayon]

That's awesome!

[Comicality]

 

Oooh, this sounds like a cool idea! I have to read first, but I might be down for something like that!

 

Oh! And I'm just a few weeks away from adding more to the 'Shelter-Verse' too! Not related, but wanted to throw that out there. Because I'm a Halloween holiday fan!  And a shameless advertiser.

 

 

Anyway, drop me an email. I'd love to try this!