# What features do writers want on FA?



## Poetigress (Apr 6, 2010)

Over in the "future of furry writing" thread, panzergulo posted a link to a journal entry with comments by Dragoneer. The actual entry is here, if you want to read the comments in context, but these are Dragoneer's comments, quoted:



> Well, writing has always been a sore spot on FA (I admit it). One of the things we want to do is go with an all text based story system, where you can use anchors for chapters/sections and offer easier to read, universal formatting across all browsers.
> 
> Keywording is always going to be problematic, but... I'd like to improve stories/writing across the board. The site kinda needs it.





> I have a few ideas on how to improve FA's stories (which I'm not happy with), but they'll be done in time. I'd almost love to see "Wiki" style stories, where people can have pre-designated "editors" go in and help spruce up their stuff, then the author can choose to keep/discard edits.
> 
> Editors would be FA appointed. I dunno. Not sure how feasable an idea that is.



So, I know we've had discussions in the past about what FA could use or what we'd like to have, but given that this is a recent discussion I've quoted, it sounds like we've got a good chance right now to give some input on what features would be helpful from the writers' (and readers') perspective, and get all those suggestions in one place (plus possible feedback from admin on what is and isn't feasible).

Personally, besides a gallery folder system to better organize all kinds of submissions, the two changes I'd like to see that are specific to writing are two features that FurRag has:

1) the ability to change the text size (yes, I know I can zoom with my browser, thank you, but it's not the same thing)

2) the ability to easily print a story that's displayed onscreen (again, I know I can download it and/or paste it into Word to print out, the way I do now, but I'd love a simple button/link to click that would bring up a printer-friendly version, automatically including the basic copyright info)

The wiki suggestion above doesn't really interest me, I admit. *shrug* Could be nice for those who would want to collaborate, though.

Other suggestions?


----------



## Duality Jack (Apr 6, 2010)

as a writer seeking to publish work I do not post it on FAF

that being said: the proposed updates and additions to the story system seem nice, but I want to see it in practice before I give a real in depth opinion, as it could go terribly wrong, or fantastically it depends on how buggy or picky the users are

and for format changes; there are some bb codes that work on journals and such and implementing a system where you can directly import your story to the submission in a txt format and apply formatting after the fact


----------



## foozzzball (Apr 6, 2010)

Capacity to upload a .rtf or similar and have it automatically converted into a webpage people can read, retaining italics and indent and all that. (Fancier formatting I can do without, but stuff like italics and first line indent are my huge, huge, huge bugbears.)

I don't want some crazy copy-paste editor, I don't want a fancy thing where I can type the story in and it's like a word processor, I _just_ want to upload the file _and have it display._


----------



## Poetigress (Apr 6, 2010)

Also posted a journal entry asking for feedback:

http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1318254/


----------



## Winter (Apr 6, 2010)

I have a feeling that we lose many (potential) readers when a file has to be downloaded and opened before it can be read. If the site can't be made to open rtf or doc files, then we need some way to easily upload, display and edit text to be read on-site.


----------



## Aeturnus (Apr 6, 2010)

Just having stories easier to read would be a big plus, and maybe if we could use genres? I'm sorry, but I don't want to label my work as just a 'story.' If music can have their own list genres, why can't stories and poetry?


----------



## Xipoid (Apr 6, 2010)

Hmmm... something like

1) Ability to change text size (oh god please)
2) Broader file type support (even if just .rtf or whatever)
3) Indents and formatting optimization, given that it isn't taken care of in 2)
4) A nice way to lump multi-chapter series into one coherent run or group.
5) A way to divide stories by genre and whatnot.


I'm not sure how I feel about the whole "wiki" style stories idea. That would presuppose there is are people who want critique and people to do it. If it is site wide, you would need _quite _a few editors to keep up. If it is not, I question how necessary it is to have such a sweeping change when a little community is already working sort of okay. Then I have to question what qualification these editors will have or even how they will be selected.


----------



## AshleyAshes (Apr 6, 2010)

A system that will automaticlly render my writing into a high end animated series?


----------



## kitreshawn (Apr 6, 2010)

The ability to put in Itallics, bold, and underlines (and all that) without having to use the mark up stuff.  Granted it isn't a HUGE deal to put the markup in there, but it is rather annoying to deal with.

Better formatting for how the writing is displayed.  People on really high resolution displays (me) end up with the text spread out so that a huge long paragraph takes up one or two lines making the story look stringy and sparse.  It may not seem like a huge deal but this has an impact on perception of how good the story is.  There should be a standardized maximum width of the text box that displays the story.  (this will incidentally also make reading easier)

An easy way to link chapters in the same series.  For instance when you post a new 'chapter' you have the option to assign it to one of your existing series.  There would then be a page which people can go to in order to see all the chapters and maybe even some way to easily navigate from chapter 1 to chapter 2 ect.  Possibly even put in the option to reorganize chapter order.  Heck, this is something I think even artists would love (especially the ones who do comics).

I love the idea of broader file type support.  My suggestion would be .rtf, .doc, and .pdf.  I am not sure how ambitious of a goal this is, but the fact is that if people have to actually download the story they are much less likely to read it.

The ability to flag a story as looking for critique (or any picture really).

The ability to give someone else on the site the ability to proof read your work and allow you to see what changes they made (like a DCS does).

An ability to easily link stories between different authors so it is easier to create community type projects (looking at Poe's Thursday Prompt here).

An ability for writers to easily link stories to art (and the other way around), with one story maybe being able to link in to several images which would appear as thumb nails.  Yes this introduces a type of picture book dynamic, but I don't see any hard in letting authors and artists work together at all, or for authors to link to the pictures that may have inspired them.


----------



## sunandshadow (Apr 6, 2010)

Tag Cloud Preprocessing!  What do I mean by this?  I mean, the FA software has a giant list of subject words, grouped by subject.  One group would be something like captive, captured, imprisoned, prisoner, pet, master, slave, owner.  Another group would be all terms associated with, for example, pokemon.  A third would be impregnation, impregnate, pregnant, pregnancy, prego, "knock up", "knocked up".

Anyway when a new story was uploaded, the forum software would count the number of times each word appeared in the story, and use this to automatically assign tags to the story.  There would also need to be a tag cloud page where readers could click on a tag they were interested in, then optionally click a second tag to refine the results.


----------



## Duality Jack (Apr 6, 2010)

AshleyAshes said:


> A system that will automaticlly render my writing into a high end animated series?


that would be raunch,  imagine what porn would appear,

oh and hows capital furs xD


----------



## Leasara (Apr 6, 2010)

Parsing of more file types.  If I can layout my story in rich text, and upload the .rtf to get that layout on the web with all the emphasis and relative margins in, it would make me so happy.

I'll also second the easy-print feature, and easy chaptering, which could also be useful for sequenced art like transformations or comics.

For chaptering, I'd do this: add an optional box in the submission forms for the URL of the previous bit of art.  The inclusion of an URL in that box would set the current submition as the destination for the "Next in Sequence" button for the sequenced navigation thing on that URL's page while setting the included URL as the "Previous in Sequence" button for the sequenced navigation thing on the current submition.  If the URL supplied in the box does not already have a sequenced navigation thing, the flag would be activated to turn it on for the page, and the URL is set to the "Beginning of Sequence" button which can be picked up by the script for all future entries in the series.

Of course, I know the staff has a pretty good handle on design stuff, that was more of a mental exercise for myself that might give them a dumping off point.

The same sort of thing could be used to create a button over the +Add to Favorites so that people can link to the original artist's picture in the artist's own gallery to make it more obvious that the piece uploaded is a commission and to get credit to where it's due.


----------



## sunandshadow (Apr 6, 2010)

Of existing story archive websites, in my opinion fanfiction.net and sofurry.com have the best systems, so that would be two examples the developers could look at for what to imitate.  Does anyone else know of a story archive with great features and functionality?


----------



## darkr3x (Apr 6, 2010)

About the linking to other pages, there is code for it though its a manual b*tch to get fixed up: [prev,first,last], where prev, first, and last are the posting number for the item. Granted it would be neat to use images, like the thumbnail of the linked story, for the nav's or if it could be set up to be done automatically for stories/comics of the same series (though, theres a good chance with a site this big that two people could be writing two completely different stories and be using the same name)

I really do like the cloud idea, though i can see where the current ability to post anything text-y as a story might goof it up bad (RP logs with user names comes to mind)


----------



## AshleyAshes (Apr 6, 2010)

The Drunken Ace said:


> that would be raunch, imagine what porn would appear,


 
Nuts to that, I'm gonna get my own series on Teletoon. Then I'm going to win the academy award for 'Best animated police chase'.

I just need a .doc to .avi converter to achive my goals.


----------



## ScottyDM (Apr 6, 2010)

Poetigress said:


> Over in the "future of furry writing" thread, panzergulo posted a link to a journal entry with comments by Dragoneer. The actual entry is here...
> 
> Personally, besides a gallery folder system to better organize all kinds of submissions, the two changes I'd like to see that are specific to writing are two features that FurRag has:
> 
> ...


First, will Dragoneer see our suggestions here? That's kinda crit.


Assuming he will, then bigger text, please! Yes, the standard argument is that savvy web surfers can change text size in their browsers, but that's easier on some browsers than others. And besides, how many savvy web surfers do you know? Telling a net-random to resize his own text is a bit like putting orange text on a chartreuse background, then telling him to fix it in his own browser.


But not just bigger text, but whole new way of displaying the title and text of stories online.

On my site authors dump their textual story containing a few BBCodes into a web form, and my custom PHP webification code turns that into HTML. Each person seems to have their own quirks about they encode text, such as starting paragraphs with tabs, or strings of spaces, or sticking an extra newline between paragraphs. Also, each class of OS has it's quirks about how to encode the newline (Microsoft = {cr} {lf}, Unix = {cr}, and old-style Mac = {lf}). However, a big plus of using a web form over uploading a file is that the modern browsers seem to be very good about handling UTF-8, or whatever. If your "funny" characters look right in the form, they will be passed to the server just fine. 

So in my first pass my code normalizes all these differences between authors, their browsers, and their OSs. Next it does a search and replace on "funny" characters to get their HTML entities. Then it divides the story into paragraphs, using the normalized newlines, and wraps each paragraph in HTML paragraph tag pairs. And finally it translates the square-bracket codes into HTML tags.

The CSS I use to display the story is a bit different than what I have on the rest of the site. So I wrap the story in <div class="story"> and </div> tags and set the CSS to modify how things like <p> render. For example, relaxed spacing between lines, no extra space between paragraphs, and each paragraph is indented.

Here's a fragment of my CSS file that modifies how the story is rendered:

```
.story p {
  text-indent: 2.0em;
  line-height: 1.8;
  padding-top: 0.0em;
  padding-bottom: 0.0em;
  margin: 0px;
}
```
Since my text is already pretty big, I don't change it here. But for FA to get bigger text, the declaration for ".story p" is the place to do it.

Also, my story <div> fits into a nice neat container, so I don't mess with the width. But for FA, and to get a reasonable line length, declaring a ".story" class in the CSS would be useful. Putting it all together might result in something like:

```
.story {
  min-width: 500px;
  max-width: 800px;
  padding: 0px;
  border:  0px none;
  margin:  0px auto 0px auto;
}
.story p {
  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
  font-size: 14px;
  text-align: left;
  color: #000000;
  text-indent: 2.0em;
  line-height: 1.8;
  padding-top: 0.0em;
  padding-bottom: 0.0em;
  margin: 0px;
}
```
From what I've seen, the ideal line width is between 10 and 20 "standard" words. A standard word is about 5 letters plus a space, so 6 characters. You can go a bit narrower or wider, but if you get too far out there the reader either has to do way too much scrolling, or the line is so wide it's possible to jump lines when the eye scans back to begin a new line. Ideally min/max width should scale with the font size.

Also, the width numbers I used are arbitrary. I didn't measure anything for this post. And yes, the min-width, and max-width attributes really work that way. Additionally, the "auto" in the margin lets the story container float to the horizontal middle.


The rest of the text on the FA website is just fine. It's okay to have tiny text in comments, navigation, etc. because one only has to read a few words or a few sentences. But given a wall of text, easy-to-read is paramount!


Yea, that stuff about genres, chapter controls, etc. would be insanely great too.

The wiki idea for allowing editors to mess with a story, without actually messing with a story, is an interesting idea. But it'd be insane to let FA admins do that job. I suspect they are busy enough as it is. Elfwood has a whole staff of volunteers who read and accept or reject story submissions. It takes about two weeks to get through their submission system. And they don't edit.

S~


----------



## panzergulo (Apr 7, 2010)

ScottyDM said:


> First, will Dragoneer see our suggestions here? That's kinda crit.



He'll see it. Shout at him in the main site, PM him on the main site, PM him on the forums, heck, copy-paste each post here into one huge post into the "suggestions" section... I am fairly sure at least somebody in the administration is going to see this.



About new features... well, I'm rather adaptive little critter and I'm pretty happy how things are now... I would like FA to implement a filtering system that could filter keywords and users and perhaps a communal tagging system, but they have nothing to do with writing, aside who is going to see it and who is going to tag it... so, I dunno? Automatic spellcheck for each story and some kind of feature to categorize stories according how good the writer is in spelling? This would be like shooting myself in the leg, though, 'cause I tend to use non-English in my stories which is automatically misspelled. Some way to make the system more user friendly, because half of the time when new users use .txt the first time they have problems with encoding and get those nifty boxy question mark thingies.

Yeah... I don't crave for new features, really. I'm content about how things are currently.


----------



## Clyde_Dale (Apr 7, 2010)

Improve the formatting ability currently in existence in the .txt parser. Specifically, expand to full PhPbb code, or alternately, allow HTML formatting (possibly more HTML coding, but that can open up to some abuse). 

That rather obviates the need for other document types, by allowing full formatting of text within a .txt file, and would likely be far easier to implement than being able to 'read' the other document types.


----------



## yak (Apr 7, 2010)

Swampwulf was kind enough to write a journal response to the similar question asked by me at some point.

I am collecting all these suggestions in an already pretty sizeable list that I will get to as soon as the current batch of problems are dealt with. Unfortunately that batch is resource and time demanding, and involves fixing architecture issues that prevent FA from moving forward - so it takes a while.


----------



## Alexis (Apr 7, 2010)

All the sugguestions above sound awesome. All I'd like to see is:

- Support for formatting in uploading stories, however its achieved. At least .rtf, maybe .doc, definitely .pdf and .odt sometime.

- Grouping of stories would be cool, maybe in the subfolder format that some sites support, maybe in a cooler way than that.

- The auto-tagging system does sound cool, would decrease the ammount of tag abuse I suppose


----------



## Penelope Dairas (Apr 11, 2010)

> Anyway when a new story was uploaded, the forum software would count the number of times each word appeared in the story



You forgot about one thing: synonyms. Some of them just will not be caught by software. It is similar to the web-searching problem about ten years ago, when searching engines were counting how many times a keyword was appearing on a page, so you could simply boost your website with a simple trick like that: viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra. And that does not solve the problem at all.


----------



## TiberiusRay (Apr 11, 2010)

I agree with most of the suggestions here, but there's one thing i don't think anyone has mentioned; a rating system. one of the problems I've noticed is that if you don't write stories that fit into some fetish, then it's hard to get noticed, and then you rarely get feedback. with a rating system you could get notice by how high your stories are rated. 
such a system would be subject to abuse, but so would any system. I think the benefits would out way the problems.


----------



## sunandshadow (Apr 12, 2010)

Penelope Dairas said:


> You forgot about one thing: synonyms. Some of them just will not be caught by software. It is similar to the web-searching problem about ten years ago, when searching engines were counting how many times a keyword was appearing on a page, so you could simply boost your website with a simple trick like that: viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra viagra. And that does not solve the problem at all.


Actually, the point of my examples above was to show how each category should have a whole group of words associated with it, including whatever synonyms the list-maker could think of.  But, the number wouldn't really matter because search hits wouldn't be sorted by number of times the word occurred.  Instead it's a binary thing - if the word occurs more than a threshold number of times (maybe 5?) the story is automatically tagged with the appropriate category keyword.  And the author of the story would then be able to edit the tags to remove an incorrect one or add one the software didn't catch.


----------



## Scarborough (Apr 12, 2010)

I think in another thread MLR suggested book-sized previews instead of little 100 x 100 boxes. Perhaps images the size of Amazon.com's search results?

In definite agreement with genres, by the way. Even something as simple as sci-fi, fantasy, mainstream, children's, erotica, fetish, other would be nice.

I think the ability to put author's notes before and after the work would be nice as well.


----------



## kitreshawn (Apr 12, 2010)

Recently had another thought, though this is purely cosmetic:

Would it be possible to break up the text into 'pages' that could be quickly and easily 'flipped' through?  It can be rather intimidating to see a huge column of text that just stretches on and on and on.  This also makes it much easier to lose your place.

By having things automatically displayed in broken up pages of text it would be less overwhelming to readers and also easier to keep track of your place if something comes up to distract you.


----------



## Toonces (Apr 13, 2010)

I'd like for a story's first hundred words or so appear in a preview window when a person hovers over the story avatar. I'd like to see the number of spots on the front page dedicated to stories expanded to eight.


----------



## anthroguy101 (Apr 13, 2010)

We need full HTML code recognition as well as full recognition for .doc, .docx, .odt and .rtf as well as a text editor that allows for the saving of drafts.


----------



## Toonces (Apr 13, 2010)

i want a rocketship


----------



## Chase (Apr 14, 2010)

Check this thread out!

http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=68759

Also, to make sure all of your discussions here have not gone unappreciated or unnoticed, I will be taking the time to incorporate them into my original post as well as any other ideas you may have in a list format. That way everything that was suggested here and is suggested there will be presented at the very top and will prevent possible idea overlapping. :3


----------



## anthroguy101 (Apr 14, 2010)

I'll clarify what I said in the previous post:
We need full HTML and/or BBCode recognition (with the exception of hyperlinks) as well as full recognition for .doc, .docx, .odt, .txt, .html and .rtf. We also need a text editor similar to the one on SoFurry, Blogger and Wordpress that allows for writing on-the-spot as well as the saving of drafts. It's also downright annoying how the software glitches display apostrophes and quotes as some sort of stupid question-mark diamond thing.

I like how images can be added to the story. Seriously people, if you want more views for your work then make it look attractive by giving it a cover.


----------



## reian (Apr 19, 2010)

I agree with the genre system.  I would also really like a better effort to not feel so blacklisted from the site because a writers art isn't 'visual' but that won't happen


----------



## Poetigress (Apr 19, 2010)

So that we can keep everything in one place, I'd like to request that this thread be locked, and anyone else with suggestions should go to the official thread here to make new posts:

http://forums.furaffinity.net/showthread.php?t=68759

*Before you post there, though, please read the first post of that thread,* to make sure that what you're suggesting hasn't already been mentioned.

Thanks.


----------



## M. LeRenard (Apr 19, 2010)

Done and done.


----------

