One thing our readers have consistently expressed wanting to see is better ways to look through their "Favorites".
Right now Favorites are displayed in order of most recently published (not even most recently updated!). It would be so great if users could browse through their favorites much like they can browse through regular titles, being able to select characters, ratings, etc and sort by Alphabetical or Most Recent.
A few other things I would like to see in Favorites in my ideal eFiction world:
*Ability to search within your favorites
*As you browse, maybe some kind of indicator on the story (like star or heart type icon?) that the story is already added to your favorites
*Some kind of time stamp? (when you faved it or when you last read it maybe)
*If you're an author, getting a notification when someone favorites your story could be a nice boost.
Just a few thoughts...
Okay, some things were already implemented, others I could add on the fly:
- Visibility (see attached image)
- Ability to add "saved" to the search form (Options: "no", "both", "fav", "bm" - there will be favourites and bookmarks)
- Added timestamp to database, it will be set on creation and updated when you edit the fav/bm
- Notification is a different thing, that requires a trigger. It's something I'll have to do somewhere else, maybe including like a queue to keep people from getting hammered with notifications.
Added: This will include "saved" stories to the regular search form, so you will be able to limit by category, tag, whatnot. At this point, it will not sort by anything, this will come, just not in yet.
Thanks for replying.
VERY excited to see the indicators that the story is already faved/bookmarked, that could be a great selling point for users as AO3 and FFN doesn't really have this.
Intrigued by the bookmarking features, how will it differ from favorites? Is one private and one public? Is one like a tracked list that will send update notifications while one are just stories you like? The Tracker Module is a pretty popular features on our site so it sounds like it's bring some elements from that into the main software.
For notifications, I think it should be like any other notifications where in your user preferences you can select if you want them or not. For busier archives, maybe a daily digest would be good? (and this is likely too much but some kind of notification within the archive could be cool! like you log in and see that x-number of people faved your story, x-number of fave stories are updates, etc. Again, that me in my ideal eFiction world, understandable if it's not feasible)
The search feature also sounds great, I still feel like "date published" is the least intuitive way to sort favorites, especially on large and/or older archives. I'm sure different people will prefer "alphabetical" or "most recent", (I'd lean alphabetical) but either option I still think is better than "date published" if we are only able to view faves in one order.
Thanks for taking part here, all the input I can get 🙂
Bookmark/Favourite: The idea was to give people the option of "remembering" stories they want to read and keeping them seperated from stories they liked. So maybe the title and shortcou sound great, right now you's have to "favourite" it, but then it turns out the story is a waste of bytes and now everybody thinks you are into literal pulp fiction. With bookmarks, this doesn't give the idea you like it, just that you tagged it for whatever reason (and you can even take note of said reason).
Both of them, better say every entry, can be public, private of friends only.
Considering notifications - almost everything can be done, but considering how little progress I am making at this point (due to real life and the daytime job), I decided to give it a feature freeze and make ready what is in it already and replicate eFiction 3 features to the extent possible, and give it a go. Always room for expansion 😉
Well it had to have some sort, and that was in from the "updates" listing, so it stayed that way - for now. See above
