Question New Readers

That's on my list for the big rebuild. I've got a lot of it mapped out. The newbie version, for example, doesn't have a lot of the quick access panels in the sidebars that the more advanced users do. But some of the difficulty remains that people have phones and mobile devices and those don't navigate web sites the same way that desktops do. and if you really look at how mobile targeted sites work... they basically just scroll forever. That's exactly the opposite of how sites were aesthetically and functionally designed in the past) where you didn't want to have to scroll to find anything.

Thanks, that's communicated many times in discussions ... but not everyone reads conversations in the forums. And the ones not in the announcements just scroll off over time.

One of the 'big picture' plans to solve this involves a timeline/event calendar that will link every canon story with a graphic calendar showing release dates back to Aug 2004. That one will be 'easy'... the second one will be a similar event calendar that does the same with all the timestamps in the stories. A third idea I'm exploring will also visually map all the time/date stamps. Obviously, those ideas will take extra work It could, however, create an interesting new way to read the archives though... for instance, you could sit on location in the Crystal Hall and then read all the scenes in all the stories that take place in the cafeteria, in order of in universe time. Not sure if the payoff is worth the time to make it work.. but we'll see what happens.

*shrugs*

If the author writes them without, there's not much we can do to force it to play nicely with all the other stories. That's fairly rare though.

Now... questions like this make me grumpy. Not because you're "wrong" ... it is extremely nice to be able to start at part one and go through all the parts without dropping out, going to a search page and looking for the next part. Which is why we have a way to do this...

Let's say, for instance, that you would like to read the 13 parts of "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl" again. Now... the Birthday Brawl released over a period of 7 months and Diane was one of our more prolific authors, so this is sort of a worst case search condition... because many other authors and even Diane released other stories in that interval. But if we can do this with Diane over that duration, we can certainly do so with authors who didn't write stories with parts more than five or who have only released 20-30 bits over the years.

How you do this?

1. Go to the Main Menu and select: Read Stories
2. Go to the Side bar (left) Menu and select: Original Timeline
3. This produces the main Original Timeline collection in newest at the top order. Near the top of the table is a text box named "author filter" fill in the author name of the story "Diane Castle" and hit enter.
4. Scan the first page, realize that Birthday Brawl is older than what is currently shown so go to the next page using the pagination options at the bottom of the table.
5. See the 13 sections of Birthday Brawl in the list. Open Part 1 in a new tab from your right click menu when you click on its name.
6. Read the story part. When done, close this tab. Look at the collection page still open on the previous tab, select part 2 and open it in the same way.

Would it be nice if there were next and previous buttons at the foot of each story?

Well, yes. I suppose that would be nice. But here's the thing. When I write a five part story and upload part 1 to the site, the site treats that as a self-contained article. Not a part of a multi part article. If I put next and previous buttons on the bottom, what do they link to? Nothing. There IS no previous or next part. Now, a few days later, I upload part 2. If I have these next and previous buttons at the bottom of pages, in addition to anything else I do, I have to tell the site that hey, this article is associated in some way with that other one. The easy way is to just set the previous button to link to the first part... and then go back and edit the first part to link its next button to part two. The more complicated way is to set things up to create a coded field that forces the association and write the next/previous button plugin to ignore anything not a part of the same super-title.

And that's where the grumpy part comes in. Why do you want me to spend time developing something that you can already accomplish with a modern browser running the site as it already is? I could get it if there was no way to make the site cough up what you were looking for. But... this is work for little gain. I mean... I can turn the next/previous buttons back on. They DO work, but they work based on the order that articles show up in the category list... not some other association.

First... this 'rant' is not helpful. You make a number of statements of fact that are simply untrue. How do I know this? Well, some things are easy to contradict.. like

... that the author filter doesn't actually work."

Well, hate to tell you ... but I use this option quite frequently when prepping stories for release and I don't want to have to log into the admin side of the site to do it. This has nothing to do with your browser or type of hardware. It's a simple text entry box and the php code excludes from the table it builds any author name that does not EXACTLY duplicate what you enter. If you enter Diane Caste, you will get EVERY story that we have attributed to Diane Castle. If certain stories do not show up, it is most likely a data entry issue - in that among the 600 articles/story parts that we loaded into the site, the one that is missing from the list MAY have been listed under the wrong author or a misspelling/typo may have occurred. I fix those when I get reports of them, but I'm the only person with admin side access to handle the problem in our current security structure/set up. Yes, that is not ideal... but it is also something that was done the way it is so that non-canon authors can actually submit stories. Were I only allowing canon authors to submit/post, life would be much simpler and authors would just use the admin side tools to do so and they would have access to fix those things themselves instead of it all bottle-necking at me.

But I wonder then, what it is that you ARE having problems with, if it is not the author filter on the main story lists. Is it that you are simply misspelling the name of the appropriate author? Are you talking about something in the SEARCH engine instead of the story listing on the page I pointed him at? I don't know. If you feel less ranty, maybe we can get that straightened out for you.

Most of the older stories don't have correct tagging

Indeed. That would be because the tagging system in the default Joomla system is not usable from the front end. As I noted above... we either use a reduced option front end and have non-canon authors... or we use canon only authors can work from the admin side of the site. I did later come across a tagging system that works from the front end and we have been adding tags since then, both on new stories as they come out... and on older stories. This, however, takes time. a LOT of time. And again, there's a limit to how many people have access to it... most of those people would rather spend their spare time writing stories and not being data entry putting in tags on old stories.

and there's problems with the listing. The instructor stories are back-to-front in terms of publishing date (was this intentional?

Why yes, this IS intentional. Why would someone who only visits the site to read the newest stories want to page through multiple pages of story listing to get to the LAST stories released? They wouldn't. They'd want the newest releases at the TOP of the list... like is done for movies, for comics, for computer games, and every other release date oriented listing known to man on the internet. And fortunately, for those new folks who want to see the list in oldest to newest order? You just click on the words Published Date, and wooo! it resorts the list to your desired order. Are you honestly bitching about the sort order of a sortable table that lets you list old to new/new to old, alphabetical by author, alphabetical by title, and lets you use a word entry box to narrow down to just one author's content? The flexibility of this list is WHY we haven't prioritized a tag system... you really don't need a tag system unless you're looking for story by internal character or story arc.

stories with multiple parts will move around a lot (I found Insanity prerequisite part 4 in the middle of the Alya and the Mad Scientist listings just yesterday

That story isn't moving around. It's possible that you resorted the page by hits or another option. A sort by date won't come any where close to sorting Insanity Pre, Part 4 in the midst of Ayla and the Mad Scientist... Ayla and the Networks? Yes. But not AatMS, which came two years later. Another Dr B story, AAA does fall amidst AatMS though. Perhaps that is what you saw? Keep in mind that that IS a 23 part Ayla story that took something like 14 months to release all of it. There are LOTS of stories by other authors that will be found on the release listing in there.

the stories that do show up often take their sweet time loading

Since taking the advertisements off the site and moving us to a more powerful VM, the average load time I'm seeing is between .1 and .15 seconds. I'm happy to look into the analytics data and see what the average Australian user is seeing and whether I can resolve that any (given the number of readers in that time zone, I can't really justify a separate machine for more local access)... but if I take the time and see that the problem is all on 'your' connection (which remember, for web sites has little to do with computer processing power and more to do with network bandwidth and reliability)... I'm going to be grumpy. I'm sympathetic about bad connections, but not enough so to take flak for it being our site when its your connection.

multiple HTML issues (formatting showing up in the middle of the text),

There are more than 13 million words in just the canon stories on this site. If you can't narrow it down more than that, how exactly do you expect anyone to fix it? Not that we spend much time doing editing of stories that have been released for years. We know there are errors. Far more ten years ago than we have now... but we've never had a paid editor on the staff, only volunteer editors who are the gods gift to fiction web sites. But even the pros have been known to miss things. and again, we can spend time combing through old content fixing typos or we can work on new material.

arrangement??? It's almost impossible to spot specific story parts amid a sea of stories that were published during the story arc

Yes... but we don't want you to read the stories by 'everything with this title' then 'everything with this other title'... we want you to read them in the order that we release them. Because they aren't separate stories. Even stories that seem to have NO interaction with core plotlines are potentially there for a reason and have information that will eventually impact something somewhere else. WE make a conscious effort not to spoiler each other and we DO make an effort to foreshadow each other or make references that someone following stories will see. And we do these things with an understanding that you have read part one of a story by Elrod in January... and might read story parts by five other authors before you get to part two of Elrod's story. In fact, some story parts are literally a year or more apart. Reading them by publishing order is the author recommended way to read. Why should we make extra effort to create ways for you to read our stories out of the order we designed them for?

the site has enough bugs to cause a newbie programmer like me to hyperventilate with anxiety. Seriously, this is a ridiculously buggy build!!! (No offense- I know you're trying your hardest)

Ya... now... the rest of this was understandable frustration. You can't find things, you don't understand to process/intent involved in the layout and so you think its wrong because it isn't set up the way you would set it up. And I can get that. THIS though. Is an insult. It is NOT a buggy build. Yes, there are some glitches, that happens when you try to make generic software do something that its not really designed to do... but it isn't buggy. And saying you are a newbie programmer and thus know better... well, good, newbie programmer. Write me the Joomla plug-ins and/or modules for the features that you want put in, set them up on Github and I'll look them over and we'll use them.

Don't want to or can't do it? You can send the appropriate groveling apology to my PM box. (Translation: put up, or shut up)

null0trooper wrote: because the three have the same publication date, so the default ordering by title takes over.

mmm... well, even that is fixable, because I can set one to morning, one to afternoon and one to evening... I think clock times are accounted for in sorting. They may not, but the field is date and time.. not just date. So its something I could try. For that matter... I don't think they all released the same day originally.. unless the date that we put in for release is the day they jumped to canon? I'm not sure. If someone has the REAL dates that would put them in order, that info would be welcome and would be corrected fairly quickly.

Someone else want to confirm the failure of Mac to be able to properly browse the site? I test in Firefox, Chrome and Edge, but not owning an Apple system, I am unable to test it.

"Written in Blood" Part 4 has had its time of release changed to 23:00, while leaving Part 3 at 17:00 with both stories on the same day. They now appear to sort in order. Problem solved.

I actually built a chronological order list for my stories in a thread.

If I post it again, can we add a sticky to it somewhere?

We could make a forum section for chronological listings and links to stories for authors or something.

I have a section for lists, in the Read Stories menu (Recommended Reading Orders). Just create articles just like you would any story and I can shift it into the category of lists. That's the good thing about the Joomla CMS... EVERYTHING is just an article. Story, blog post, photo gallery, etc; its all just content generated the same way. Just like all the stuff in the Backstory area.

William.Starfox wrote: In other words, sit down, STFU and don't bother anyone.

Real friendly people here.

Let me help you understand the scope of what you asked.

Describe to me this 'better' navigation system that you want me to implement.

I think if you go back and reread the actual response that I gave YOU, that you'll find that my comment was both polite and helpful... and explained the big picture problems with being more directly navigating. Was it a bit sarcasm laden? Well... yes. Are you completely new here? Sarcasm may not be our stock in trade, but its one of our major exports. Mihn's post is a different story. I DID a point by point breakdown and tore into him a bit because the way he 'appended' complaints on to your suggestion was not really acceptable (and note that there IS a difference there. You DID suggest, he did not... he complained).

And in my more recent response to you, I asked you to describe what sort of navigation would be the 'better' solution that you have in mind... because, let's face it, maybe my dismissal of navigation options is premature... maybe I'm thinking of something I know the software can't do without introducing other problems (or generating more work), but YOU are thinking of something completely different. If you describe your solution, and it is something I can implement... then great. If you are just asking for something better and don't have specifics, then you can maybe come to understand why the open suggestion can be frustrating... after all, just because it is a viable concern, doesn't mean it has a solution that I can implement.