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Comments for episode 1031465
Go back to episode

Newer comments will be added to the bottom of the page.

Wed Aug 13 18:11:26 2014

Awesome stuff. I just wish you guys posted on a site with better navigation. Having to hit'previous chapter' for half an hour to find the start of things is super annoying. Can we get a tree view or at least a 'go to start of storyline'?

tuatara
Wed Aug 13 23:31:21 2014

anonymous:

Behold!

http://www.bearchive.com/~addventure/game1/trees/tags/root865050.html

tuatara
Thu Aug 14 00:06:16 2014

Better yet:

http://www.bearchive.com/~addventure/game1/trees/tags/root865251.html

Adama
Thu Aug 14 02:35:53 2014

For future reference -- what you want is the Chain View utility. Go to the Stats and Utilities page and find the "Display An Entire Chain of the Addventure" entry. Type in the most recent episode, such as 1031465, and click on the button, and it will give you the entire set of parent episodes going back to the beginning, all one one handy page.

Unfortunately, the utility will sometimes refuse to run if the server is too busy. But it's the right utility to use.


Thu Aug 14 02:50:14 2014

Ok it's nice that those utilities exist. They should be easy to find and integrated into the GUI, though. Most people, like me, have no idea they exist. See Chyoa.com for an example of what I mean.

Adama
Thu Aug 14 04:30:52 2014

That's why there are helpful links at the top of the Recent Episodes pages, most of the Index pages, and several other pages (including the page you see when you've finished writing an episode).


Thu Aug 14 15:40:53 2014

With everything all tangled together in one giant thread there is next to no discoverability. No one can possibly go down every branch (and even if you could there are multiple glitch points where links broke so not all stories are connected to anything). Anything that isn't being regularly updated is impossible to find, leading to multiple identical stories, people losing there own story and reposting, and a general inability to find anything if you don't already know where it is. The site needs a major overhaul, with the biggest thing being to break all the separate stories out into actual separate stories that are easily searchable and findable. Other things that would be nice would be adding new chapter hooks when the person writes them, instead of or in addition to having to have the author make up hooks for the following chapters.

Adama
Thu Aug 14 17:23:23 2014

Yes, I think the ability to add new links would be nice too, but the last time I suggested it people objected because it would make it too easy to ruin continuity (still not sure I agree...)

Sure, a major revamp may be needed. The software we're using was originally developed in 1995, for one thing. There's one guy who's currently working on a completely new version of the software, though I think he still conceives of it as one lump tangled together.

But who has the time to revamp the current code?

The Story Tags index lets you look up storylines by name, at least, but there's no direct tie between the tags and the recent-episodes pages. If there was, then the main pages could be revamped to split up the "stories" into separate areas -- but look at how many there are! How would you organize a main page that had links to nearly 4,000 stories (so far)?

If you want to continue this discussion, maybe it should be taken to the Plume where everyone can see it...

Thanks for expressing your opinion though, it's important to hear gripes.

tuatara
Thu Aug 14 19:21:10 2014

My personal concern with letting the subsequent author add his/her own option is that I really like that the current approach usually helps directly determine what happens next. I think it’s also actually the more authentically “choose your own adventure” approach, as such books don’t let the readers just pick anything they want in order to proceed. Plus, there actually is an option for that anyway via SE.

Hm. What if SE was made a standard option on all episodes… but contributors could add as many SEs as they wanted and the new SEs would just keep being added to the bottom of the option list, much like the Items of Power list. Does that make sense? Would that be prohibitively difficult?

Adama
Thu Aug 14 19:38:40 2014

The special "Things of Power" episode was a trial-run for the idea that the writer of a new episode could check a box which would allow other people to add new options to his episode. That way only some eps would be able to have new options added. This would be mainly useful for "List" episodes, but could be used anywhere.


Thu Aug 14 21:42:30 2014

This was never meant as a gripe. It was meant as constructive feedback. The difficulty of navigation and discovery on this site is a major problem in my opinion compared to other similar sites.

What does "plume" mean in this context? I am confused.

Adama
Thu Aug 14 22:11:34 2014

I took it as constructive criticism, never fear.

Do you never visit the main Recent Episodes page? There are links to all the important pages at the top.

The Plume is the official discussion forum for writing at the BEA, both for stories and for the Addventure. Unfortunately it doesn't get a lot of traffic, but it is technically where this sort of discussion is meant to take place. I try to encourage people to use it whenever I can. It does require you to pick some sort of user name and register though.


Fri Aug 15 18:07:25 2014

On I see that now. "The plume forum" doesn't mean 'go here to talk about Bea' to me. I figured it was a random link, possibly just left there by accident. Might want to give it a better title on this side.

Adama
Fri Aug 15 18:27:51 2014

Okay, I changed it to "The Forum", is that better? I can't call it something it isn't, and "The section of the BEA forum for discussing writing" is too long. It isn't a link to the BEA forum (which is bigger) or the Addventure forum (the Plume is for stories too).

That's a pretty strange thing for you to assume on a site like this where there are no ads or external links. If I saw a link that said "forum" on a site, the first thing I'd assume was that it was a discussion forum for the site.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2014, 06:43:20 AM by Boogiepop »

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JH_

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #1 on: August 16, 2014, 04:55:49 AM »
Some interesting stuff there.

I'm guessing that the name "The Plume" was chosen for the area of the forum devoted to discussing BE fiction (not just the BEAddventure) because originally pens were made from feathers, aka plumes, and writers traditionally used pens. I agree that it's pretty obscure.

There's a piece of software for creating addventures known as Extend-A-Story that lets people add new options to existing episodes. See: http://www.sir-toby.com/extend-a-story/. In practice, with the main addventure that uses this software people very rarely add additional options to those originally specified, perhaps because if they do so they also have to write the episode that the new option leads into.

Returning to the BEAddventure, the main annoyance with "Something else" options is when somebody uses one to start a new story totally unrelated to the story to date. I don't think that's how most writers intend their "Something else" to be interpreted. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often.

Until recently, there was a Wikipedia called FTF10pedia (FTF standing for Female TransFormation) that included some useful material about the BEAddventure, but unfortunately it seems to be defunct.
JH

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Boogiepop

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2014, 06:39:54 AM »
The issue is that there is no way other than to use the "something else" threads to start a new story. So we get threads that are nothing but "Restart #". It would be nice if we could actually just do new stories as new stories. Having everything in once gigantic chain (and one with missing links at that) makes finding anything super difficult.

I have a whole bookmarks folder that does nothing but point to story roots because if I didn't I would never find anything. Meanwhile I see the same story get started over and over because the new author has no way to find that the story idea has already been done and add to it instead of starting over.

As to adding new thread titles, it wouldn't be so much for the new authors (who would add a tittle if they wanted to write it) as it is for the author of the previous thread, so they can focus on writing that and not have to sit there and try to think up 6 followup questions when they may not have ideas. It also means following authors are not beholden to bad/non-descriptive continuation links when the previous author didn't have any ideas.
« Last Edit: August 16, 2014, 06:43:32 AM by Boogiepop »

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Boogiepop

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #3 on: August 18, 2014, 03:57:28 PM »
Also the site is almost unusable on smaller screens with a touch interface. Nothing but text links simply doesn't work on the newer form factors.

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Adama

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2014, 12:58:22 AM »
Yeah I know, but that's going to require someone with programming skills for mobile devices to volunteer some time.  Not my skill set at the moment...
Adama, Addventure mega-geek

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Grobnar

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2014, 09:31:41 AM »
I view and write most of my entries on a small device and I don't see many issues with the formatting. I like the recent additions like the comments and the experimental add a topic page. The only thing I'd ask for is a view count, just to wee how many are reading. However, I'm fairly happy with what's already there.

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JH_

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2014, 12:57:26 PM »
I view and write most of my entries on a small device and I don't see many issues with the formatting. I like the recent additions like the comments and the experimental add a topic page. The only thing I'd ask for is a view count, just to wee how many are reading. However, I'm fairly happy with what's already there.

I imagine that the problem for a view counter would be to distinguish "real" viewers from all the bots that are trawling the Web nowadays for search engines and so forth.
JH

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Boogiepop

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #7 on: August 20, 2014, 09:22:23 AM »
One really quick thing that would increase usability would be to put a 'go back' link at the top of the page, so you can at least hit back quickly without having to scroll around, witch you have to do for even the smallest threads on mobile devices.

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trainman

Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #8 on: August 21, 2014, 12:01:15 AM »
One really quick thing that would increase usability would be to put a 'go back' link at the top of the page...

Or the bottom of the page, so you can more easily go back after reading the content.  (Or, better yet, both!)

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Chuck

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Re: Constructive critism on the site interface (moved from comments)
« Reply #9 on: August 28, 2014, 04:33:08 PM »
the main annoyance with "Something else" options is when somebody uses one to start a new story totally unrelated to the story to date. I don't think that's how most writers intend their "Something else" to be interpreted. Fortunately it doesn't happen very often.

Very annoying to me, yes.

Until recently, there was a Wikipedia called FTF10pedia (FTF standing for Female TransFormation) that included some useful material about the BEAddventure, but unfortunately it seems to be defunct.

Yes I noticed that as well. Too bad really.