Young Writers Society

YWS has been more or less in a static state for a few years now with only a few improvements. I'm hoping to change that, so with that in mind, what area of the site would you like to see improved? Please be detailed!

Note that there's one thing I definitely cannot do, which is to make YWS more mobile friendly. It's something I would really like to do, but it'd require a complete overhaul of the theme. However, forums and private messages are both easily accessible with the Tapatalk app (YWS: Now with TapaTalk! (almost, but not quite, a YWS app)).

I would really love to see a return to Novel pages, like we had in... New YWS that wasn't Apollo. I think that that was somewhere that sites like Inkpop and Figment did really get ahead of us - wouldn't it be amazing to be able to go onto a novel page, and subscribe there, and maybe even leave comments?! I don't know if that's feasible, but it's something I would love to see.

I've always really wanted some kind of 'next chapter/previous chapter' button. When I'm following a long piece of work and reading lots of chapters on the trot, I often find myself clicking on the wrong link. And if I'm reviewing something and I want to quickly go back to check something that happened in the previous chapter, it's not always fun to scroll way down to find the right number. I don't know how easy it would be to implement buttons like that, but it would be cool to have them!

What Stella said! In addition/or, I'd love to see if linking things a la A03 is possible? So you could have series/chapters already linked and then subscribe to things that way, vs. the times someone does a wall post and tags everyone who's been reading. I'll go dig up an example as soon as I find one that doesn't give away my username there ^^

I would love to see a revamp of the "Clubs" Tab. They are active, but oh-so clunky whenever I use then, and especially when I'm an admin on them. I see a lot of clubs being used as glorified forum topics, so I would love to see something that separates clubs from forums. I don't know what exactly that would be, which doesn't help much, but yeah, Clubs

I mentioned this to you in chat the other day, but I'd absolutely love to see some sort of way to bookmark/save a work and go to a page called "My Bookmarks" or something where we can see them all. It'd make it a lot easier to keep track of what we're planning to read/review, and we could also just find works we really liked again easily.

(Being able to do it for threads would be cool too, but not as much of a priority because we can already subscribe to threads.)

Similar to what some others have said, I would love an easier way to follow novels. Maybe a follow button so you'd get a notification when the author posts the next segment. I like the previous chapter, next chapter suggestion to make it easier to remember and find what chapter you're on. It would also be nice to have a way to make it so novels don't get lumped in with other things in a portfolio. A lot of people know how to separate different novels and works in their portfolio so it's easier to see which chapters go together, but not everyone does this and it would be cool if that could somehow be automatic.

And I like mea's suggestion about bookmarks. I keep a list in MS OneNote of things I'm reading or want to read to keep track and it would be cool if there was a way to organize all of that within YWS.

I think the main thing YWS lacks is a dark cyan color scheme, rather than this ordinary blue we've had.

Being able to bookmark works or have a visible "reading list" kind of like Mea said would also be awesome!

This is great. Thanks everyone, and please keep 'em coming.

What I'm gathering from all this is that people are unhappy with how novels are handled YWS, and that's absolutely a fair criticism. What I'll try to do is make it such that you can subscribe to folders, and that way you get alerted anytime someone adds a new work to their folder. Sounds like it'd be a good idea too to create folder index pages that can be customized and you can leave comments on.

@alliyah ->> This may not resolve the color issue, but you can change the background color of the whole site by going to Settings ->> Board Preferences ->> Edit global settings: ucp.php?i=174

Of course, another thing I'd like to do is really streamline the settings area so that things don't get buried under so many options.

Something that just came to my mind (something something Storybook thoughts) is perhaps showing what forum/subforum the posts on "New Posts" and "Hot Topics" are from alongside who made them.

@Omnom ->> Done! Thanks for making an easy request

I was wondering if it'd be possible to give points to members for posts in Resources? If they respond to a post giving advice/research, then wouldn't it be fair to give points in proportion to how many characters they wrote out? It might increase incentive to post in the Resources area too.

I agree with @DarkPandemonium . A next chapter button would be sick!

Evander wrote:I was wondering if it'd be possible to give points to members for posts in Resources? If they respond to a post giving advice/research, then wouldn't it be fair to give points in proportion to how many characters they wrote out? It might increase incentive to post in the Resources area too.

I second this idea! Posting in Resources takes a lot of effort, and I feel like it's only fair to reward members for that effort. Even if it's a set point amount like 25 or 50 points per thread (like how the Welcome Mat caps at 5 points per thread), all the better to have an incentive for our members to get involved in others' projects! Resources is where the barebones and behind-the-scenes work happens, and feedback on that is just as valuable as feedback on the first draft or finished product, because that helps build the rest of the story.

Love the idea of points for posting in resources! There are some extremely well thought-out and well-researched answers to questions that take just as much (if not more) time to craft than a well thought out review. There should definitely be a reward of sorts for that.